Guys I Think I Have A Problem
See that picture up there? My wife watched me put all of this in one place and let loose a spontaneous Holy crap. Fortunately, I now have a solution, as well. And with all that protective space, I am now compelled by by sickness to collect more webcomics stuff. You people are stealing the food from my non-existant childrens’ mouths!
Moving on:
- You may have noticed a posting by Ursula Vernon over LiveJournal regarding a piece of her art. The original is here, a common memetic remixing is here, and the gist of the post is that t-shirts were getting offered of the remix without attribution to (or approval of) Vernon. She reports a reasonably amicable resolution, but a larger issue remains.
This page has in the past come out in favor of artists rights to remix and reinterpret existing work, providing it substantially transforms the original or uses it to comment on aspects of culture. Unfortunately, that’s a grey area of copyright law, as there’s nothing in the US Code (people in the rest of the world, you’re on your own) that either explicitly forbids or allows such use, nor (to the best of my knowledge) has any court case ruled on this gap in the law. Thus, the question of Can Penny Arcade use Strawberry Shortcake, owned by American Greetings, to comment on American McGee? (decent summary here) remains unsettled.
But the situation can be made more clear where creators explicitly make their intentions known up front. Vernon’s gone back and applied some Creative Commons stickers to her work (Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike, in this case), and despite the weaknesses in the Creative Commons model, it’s probably the best available solution at this time. Those of you who create, take note and give this some thought.
- Finally, in case you hadn’t noticed yet, a server farm in Texas suffered an explosion which has taken out some 9000 websites associated with some 6000 clients of the hosting service; as of this writing, most of Blank Label Comics remains down, as do portions of the American Elf archives and Adult Webcomics. If you know of emergency backup pages or alternate addresses for webcomics affected by this ongoing outage, please add ’em to the comments below.
Known backup locations in The Great Webcomics Outage of Aught-Eight:
Schlock Mercenary: stripped-down page at www.schlockmercenary.com
Shortpacked!: www.shortpacked.com working
Real Life: www.reallifecomics.com/ is working, but Greg Dean is apparently taking the day off
Wapsi Square: down www.wapsisquare.com working, but showing last Friday’s strip
Ugly Hill: down www.uglyhill.com working (thanks for the info, Marlowe!)
Melonpool: down
Let’s be honest here — Melonpool has been down a lot longer than that! ;) Actually, it’ll only be a few more weeks before it come back one last time. Good thing I didn’t pick this week to come back, eh?
By Melonpool on 06.02.08 10:19 am
It seems that Ugly Hill is back up and running.
By MarlowePI on 06.02.08 3:55 pm
[…] is not the year for Blank Label. First their server farm got hit by a car/explosion back in June, now it appears that 5/6ths of the collective are down. As of this time, it has not been confirmed […]
By Fleen: Enjoy Our Semi-Abusive Opinion Mongering » Lookee What I Got In The Mail Yesterday on 09.16.08 1:21 pm
[…] Berg’s Craftsmanship In Wood, a freakin’ coffee table to store all this stuff in […]
By Fleen: Enjoy Our Semi-Abusive Opinion Mongering » The Year In Webcomics, 2008 (part two) on 12.30.08 2:59 pm
The above comments are owned by whoever posted them. The staff of Fleen are not responsible for them in any way.