The fact that Hot Topic was so quick to remove the ripping-off-Vera-Brosgol shirt is apparently less because they want to be a good corporate citizen, and more because they’re getting so damn much practice. This is 15 hours old because I wasn’t checkin’ email or Twitter last night:

Crap. Hot Topic is selling buttons with my art without my permission. http://bit.ly/bQw8Hl http://bit.ly/aHM7PB

You can punch in those links for proof if you want; I’m not linking to Hot Topic any more, except for pages that allow you to contact people in their corporate structure. People like Jim McGinty, primary contact for Investor Relations at Hot Topic. We need to stop asking Hot Topic what they’re going to do about the theft of single pieces of art, and ask what the hell they’re going to do to ensure that they stop stealing art in the first damn place. Seriously, this requires a change in their business practices, and I think we need to keep pestering until they get that message.

Via Vera Brosgol’s twitter:

I heard back from Hot Topic and the shirt is going down by tomorrow and will be pulled from stores. Woohoo!

Well done.

Yeah, so I get to go bust my back and turn my feet into soakers, so this is gonna be short.

• Erika Moen once got an indescribably awesome birthday gift from Vera Brosgol. Hot Topic, who have pulled this shit repeatedly, are selling a t-shirt with artwork blatantly stolen from Moen’s birthday gift. Let’s jump to the punchline, shall we?
  

  Blah blah, independent design shop, blah blah, we didn’t know, blah blah, they’re responsible for not being thieves, blah blah, we promise we won’t do it again.

  In the past, I’ve counseled politeness in communicating with the corporate behemoth, letting them know as gently as possible that they were engaged in the most outrageous thefts, and thanking them when they stopped doing it. Yeah, fuck that.

  Here’s the phone number for Jim McGinty, primary contact for Investor Relations at Hot Topic. That puts him further up the food chain than the blameless 800-number operators, and it’s always awesome when you want something done to pester the people that spend their time sucking up to mutual fund managers on an expense account, not being told that their company is screwing up badly in public. My guess is after the 20th call, some serious hell is going to get raised. Go forth and ask if Hot Topic intends to live up to its Standards of Business Ethics [PDF] sometime this century.

• In happier news, Chris Sims is part of a joint undertaking that brings some new webcomickry to these shores. Why does Sims get special attention on a day of launch, with but one strip in the archive? Because Chris Sims is the sort of funny that can be summed up in two words: haunted vagina (do I really need to say that link is only marginally safe for anything, much less work?). I look forward to Awesome Hospital with great anticipation.

Hey, who wants to see panels that are webcomics-themed at SDCC? Everything on this list either came up with the searchable keyword “webcomics”, or my reading of the description indicated that it would be damn interesting to webcomickers, or it’s just so unrelentingly cool that it deserves a mention on its own. But please be aware that not everything with the “webcomics” tag is likely to be recognizable as what readers of this blog consider webcomicky. For instance, consider this:

Marvel Digital Comics…and Beyond! — Since its groundbreaking November 2007 debut, Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited has been all the Internet rage! It’s the greatest collection of Marvel comics ever assembled online and it’s only getting better. Featuring over 6,000 titles with newly digitized comics added every weekday, the site now features its own line of digital-first exclusive comics. Members of the Marvel Digital Media Group will tell you all about the state of Marvel digital comics, casual games, original streaming video and the future of Marvel’s ever-growing digital endeavors. Room 6DE

… which refers to Marvel scanning old back issues and putting them up behind a subscription wall. Yep, it got tagged as “webcomics”. I’ll be chopping down the descriptions to something less breathless, and if I feel the need to comment further, [I’ll do so in an editor’s note]. Naturally, there are probably omissions and you should feel free to point out other sessions (full listing here) in the comments.

Thursday

Friday

That’s all for now; come back tomorrow for the weekend programming.

So, it all started a bit less than 20 hours ago (as of this writing): Scott Johnson of Extralife noticed a Zazzle store (it’s kind of like CafePress, except they can also print postage stamps) was selling a mug and a mousepad (and possibly other items) that lifted the art from his 2007 print, The 56 Geeks.

Word spread rapidly, as it is wont to do on Twitter. The store in question led to minor information about the proprietor, which led to a MySpace page and eventually a store page with contact info (note that depending on your browser settings, that last page may either immediately roll over to Zazzle, or just close). A sample of that store page, to give you an idea what we’re dealing with:

Here at Poison Art, YOU are what matters. The loyal customer, the one who appreciates the genious [sic] behind the artwork. At Poison Art we are all about supplying you with some of the most random, but most attention grabbing shirts, shoes, accesories, and more. There is no real theme to our products, just COOLNESS, so that you too can be cool. We are fairly new, and still getting ourselves organized, so the products are especially random at this point in time, but please, bear with us! When we get more products out there, it will be easier to sort through and create more understandable categories of merchandise.

If you would like to navigate our zazzle site, you can go directly through that link above, or use the quick links below. Hope you enjoy =)

-Poison Art Designer- Kelsey Armstrong

Okay, so Kelsey Armstrong is not so much of a “genious”, not much of a designer, and 18/F according to MySpace. Given that teens with access to the internet aren’t always up on the latest in intellectual property ethos, I sent a quick email (address withheld; no need to abuse the girl):

I followed some links at Zazzle to get this contact address. There appears to be a remarkable similarity between a design that you are selling and a print by webcomic artist Scott Johnson of “Extralife”. Any comment?

No reply as of this writing (about 19 hours), but as of 15 hours ago, the offending designs had been removed from the Zazzle store without comment. Contacted for comment, Johnson replied:

I get so disenchanted with “the system” when stuff like this happens, but then I remember, the system is a great big chaotic freak show, and I am lucky I don’t find that sort of thing every day. :)

What is it exactly that makes people think that because they found content created by someone else online, that they really liked, they have license to use it as if it were their own and sell things based
on it? It seems completely insane to me. For example, it’s one thing to share songs online with other people, it is another thing entirely to sell CD’s, t-shirts using other people’s music.

At this time it’s unknown whether Ms Armstrong actually made any money off of Johnson’s design (and it’s probably safe to assume that the use of Johnson’s work was more from ignorance of how artists rights work than from actual malice aforethought, thus we are unlikely to see her as a repeat offender), but we can at least take some lessons away from this:

• Regardless of law, policy, or common courtesy, it will in all practical respects be up to the owners of IP to hunt down those who would appropriate from them.
• The willingness of people to back their favorite creators and take appropriators to task means that time from discovery to resolution is shrinking. The Great Todd Goldman/Dave Kelly Contretemps Of Aught-Seven took 30 days to shake out (from first report to press release that everything was settled).

  The Great Jess Fink/Hot Topic Unpleasantness of Aught-Eight took 11 days. This one took about five hours from discovery to resolution, and hopefully each time we go through this, the word leaks out a little more — take inspiration, but draw your own goddamned art if you’re going to sell it.

• We desperately need some case law to settle exactly what constitutes “Fair Use”; clearly, any reasonable reading of current US law (those of you in less freedom-loving countries are on your own, and in any event, I Am Not A Lawyer) would say that you can’t just life an image and sell it as if it’s yours. But what of transformations, or visual quoting? I’m thinking here of Jeff Rowland’s Internet design, which got a C&D from the photographer that originally captured the image now known as the ORLY owl.

  Personal opinion, Rowland’s design quoted the owl (and ceiling cat, and the general look and feel of the Ouija board), but in the service of commenting on/parodizing general internet culture, which is Fair Use. Or it’s not. There’s zero case law on third-party parody (c.f.: Penny Arcade and American Greetings) and we need it settled; unfortunately, the way to get case law is to first have a case, which means somebody gots to get sued.

In any event, this situation has resolved itself quickly enough (and about as well as could be possibly expected), so let’s call it done. Barring a repeat from Ms Armstrong, it doesn’t even require the coining of a The Great ____ of Aught-Nine to enshrine it in the annals of webcomics.

Quick addition to yesterday’s item on Xeric winners with award work online — although I didn’t find it, Alexander Danner pointed out that Tymothi Godek‘s “!” was published online in its entirety, and that the thumbnails for “!” may be found online (Blogspot and Livejournal flavors), along with a writeup of what “!” is about. Fleen regrets the omission.

Mike Krahulik, on you don’t really want to know — I should also probably look into the legal ramifications of posting underage pastry porn.

• Speaking of Penny Arcade, I was perusing the Comic Shop News (that free newsletter deal at your friendly local comic shop) holiday gift guide when a particular line jumped out at me:
  

  … there is a whole genre of comic strip that is located online, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t find collections at your local comic shop. … Penny Arcade is another popular book that Image as picked up … [emphasis mine]

  Egregious misuse of the word “genre” aside, this surprised me, as I’d heard nothing about PA moving to Image. In fact, it surprised PA business tycoon Robert Khoo when I wrote to ask him about it, so we safely conclude that CSN got the story wrong, especially given current product announcements.

• Speaking of holidays and Penny Arcade (or at least their annual Child’s Play initiative), the Webcomic Holiday Postcard Fundraiser returns this year with a half-dozen creators and all proceeds to Child’s Play (which has by now all but surely passed $750,000 in a down economy).
• Speaking of big dollar figures, The Great ADSDAQ Purge of Aught-Eight continues apace, with scarce a webcomicker left standing. Reports would now seem to indicate that the phenomenon isn’t limited to webcomics, which maybe just means that ADSDAQ is in a general retrenchment and cutting affiliates based on snap judgements (Comic strip? Gone! Blog — nothing that catches my eye in two seconds? Gone!).

  This does hold out the possibility that once cooler heads prevail, some of the now-dead accounts may be reinstated (Oh, wait, that webcomic actually provided out advertisers with a mountain of click-throughs, we should get them back.), but in the meantime the very clumsy way that it was handled by ADSDAQ has surely left some feeling of having been burned by The Man.

  It also is presumed at this time that ADSDAQ will pay all monies owed for the ads that they did deliver to their now-cancelled accounts. Should we at Fleen hear that webcomickers aren’t getting paid for all their eyeballs up to cancellation, we will be sure to let you know.

• Finally, speaking of corporations behaving in a less-than-sterling manner, Jess Fink once again can’t catch a break. I am this close to sending you, my loyal minions, to burn down the malls and salt the earth where once they stood so that the likes of Forever 21 never rise up again. In the meantime, you know what to do (remember, it’s Forever 21 that needs feel your wrath this time, not Hot Topic).

Good news, everybody! There’s a happy resolution to the Jess Fink/Hot Topic saga; from the LiveJournal of El Finkensteino:

I FINALLY got an email from Hot Topic.

The person who wrote me back was the lady who originally bought the shirts from the rip off artist/designer “NewBreedGirl” she had some very nice, apologetic words to say and she told me Hot Topic would like to make amends by removing the shirt from their website, and no longer selling it in their stores.

She said:

“I would like to first and foremost, appologize for this situation. It is very important to us to support artists and their ventures and it just makes my stomach turn when something like this happens. We in NO way would have written this artwork if we had known it was someone else’s design. We work with many vendors that sell us “generic” artwork and we put our faith in those vendors to not sell us stolen or immulated artwork.”

On top of this she offered that they would like to buy some of my designs.

I don’t know if I will in fact do the designs for Hot Topic or not yet, but all I really wanted in the first place was for the shirt to not be sold and so I think I am satisfied with how this all turned out, and that I didn’t have to take it to court.

…

MAINLY I just have to say that my frosty fart-filled heart has been warmed by the response from people about it and I don’t think it would have worked out at all if I didn’t have you guys on my side.

Well done, internet! Now, one more thing for you to do. Remember the phone number I posted a while back for the Hot Topic buyers? Here’s where the second part of corporate customer satisfaction ninjitsu comes in: if you called the number before — and even if you didn’t — I want you to call Hot Topic again and thank them. We complained, they did the right thing, and that should be acknowledged.

Believe me, corporations hear honest appreciations so rarely, this positive reinforcement will be as important — maybe more so — for keeping them from buying suspect designs in the future as all the complaining was. So one more call and you can rest … and y’all done good.

From The Dreamcrusher, news that Wizard (no link, because they’re pissing me off) has gone and dropped the entire archive of Brian Warmoth’s Cursory Conversations. A Google search shows portions of four interviews still kicking, but it’s just a matter of time before they get aged out of cache. After that, it’s the Wayback Machine, or pretend that they never existed; for bonus points, guess which approach Wizard is taking. Fleen is conferring with Warmoth to determine if he can legally provide us with copies of the interviews; if so, we will host them.

Following up on the Jess Fink story from last week, Rachel suggests in our comments section that Hot Topic is handling the issue. Fink, however, reports less progress as of last night:

I FINALLY got an email back from Hot Topic but it basically says “we are forwarding this email to someone else, thanks for saying a thing!”
While other people who are not me seem to get more substantial responses.

Make of that what you will.

In short bits:

• Hawk’s talkin’ shit ’bout us old guys
• Funny Farm is building up to a climax of stupendous peakiness, then sliding to an ultimate conclusion this summer, and on to be replaced by a new series. The immeidate buildup starts here.
• Otter recommends to you an article at Wired on the value of giving stuff away for free. Says she, “Seems as though the discussion of Freemium is similar to some webcomic distribution models.”

The question naturally arises, what would be an acceptable resolution to the Jess Fink/Hot Topic situation? As I see it, some of the remedies proposed last year in the Shmorky/Goldman don’t quite apply (given that Hot Topic aren’t selling $5000 versions of lifted artwork, but rather a whole mess o’ t-shirts). Here’s what I came up with as model solutions — feel free to comment.

1. Hot Topic enter into good-faith negotiations with Jess Fink and Threadless to determine an equitable compensation for the theft of the design; this should not be based on the number of shirts they sell, but the number that HT has stocked into their inventory.
2. Hot Topic should feel free to seek compensation from the vendor whose designer felt the need to lift so blatantly.
3. Hot Topic should let us know what they’re going to do to help prevent situations like this recurring regularly, as they have been.

Now, Hot Topic are of course a very large corporation that need not necessarily pay attention to what some artist somewhere is saying; then again, Todd Goldman was widely reputed to be a $90 million/year shirtmonger, and yet attention and behavior changes were forced in that case.

If you wanted to let Hot Topic know your feelings on this matter (and missed the alt text in yesterday’s post), note that Hot Topic has a contact page, complete with email, 800 number, and live chat with customer service reps. A polite inquiry along the lines of, Can you tell me how Hot Topic will be dealing fairly with artist Jess Fink, whose stolen work you are presently selling? that shows up in the call logs a hundred times or so could have a damn near immediate effect. Go make me proud.

Multiple people wrote to me about this, but credit Carly Monardo with getting there first.

Okay, for historical context, read here and work your way forward.

For “Shmorky”, substitute “Jess Fink“. For “Todd Goldman”, substitute “Hot Topic“. For my take on the whole situation, allow me to quote Kris Straub on one of the past iterations of Wikimesses: That’s pretty goddamn weak.

For lawsuit threats, wait a week until after the story has died down, then mail them to the contacts page.