this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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Comic Strips
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Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
Rules
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😇 Be Nice!
- Treat others with respect and dignity. Friendly banter is okay, as long as it is mutual; keyword: friendly.
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🏘️ Community Standards
- Comics should be a full story, from start to finish, in one post.
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🧬 Keep it Real
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📽️ Credit Where Credit is Due
- Comics should include the original attribution to the artist(s) involved, and be unmodified. Bonus points if you include a link back to their website. When in doubt, use a reverse image search to try to find the original version. Repeat offenders will have their posts removed, be temporarily banned from posting, or if all else fails, be permanently banned from posting.
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📋 Post Formatting
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- When linking to a comic hosted on another site, ensure the link is to the comic itself and not just to the website; e.g.,
✅ Correct: https://xkcd.com/386/
❌ Incorrect: https://xkcd.com/
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📬 Post Frequency/SPAM
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🏴☠️ Internationalization (i18n)
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Sí, por favor [Spanish/Español]
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🍿 Moderation
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Banned Artists
The following artists are banned from the community.
- Jago
- Stonetoss
It should be noted that when you make reports, it is your responsibility to provide rational reasoning why something should be removed. Saying it simply breaks community rules is not always good enough.
Web Accessibility
Note: This is not a rule, but a helpful suggestion.
When posting images, you should strive to add alt-text for screen readers to use to describe the image you're posting:
Another helpful thing to do is to provide a transcription of the text in your images, as well as brief descriptions of what's going on. (example)
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I don't understand what you're suggesting here. How would you reconcile the original work being public domain with still wanting to restrict the use of its characters?
Meaning you can freely reproduce the original work, but you cannot create a new piece of work using the original characters.
Meaning, in the case of Winnie the Pooh, the original books and associated works are free to be used and shared, but you could not create a new book or comic without the permission of the estate of AA milne.
If you restrict reuse of the characters in new work, the original would not be in the public domain. Something is either one's property or it isn't, and something in the public domain is everyone's property. You can't have the original as part of the collective repository of freely-available information and culture while still trying to make bits of it (such as its characters) not part of that.
The public domain period is when the law has agreed that the original authors no longer have exclusive rights to the material they put into the world. Trying to still, after that period has elapsed, declare the characters are still that author's property but only if they turn up in other people's work is a truly bizarre suggestion and I fail to see what would be gained by society in that scenario.
I really don't think this is a difficult concept to grasp, to be honest.
The original work becomes public domain, and can be freely reproduced.
The characters therein are, and remain, the property of the author's estate, and cannot be used in new work without their permission.
We are already seeing this in the real world, where Disney cartoons are public domain, but the characters, having been used in consecutive works, cannot be used by anyone other than them.
This allows a published work to be used for generations to come, but doesn't allow an author's legacy to be tarnished by less than quality adaptations.
This is incorrect. When a Disney cartoon becomes public domain everything in it is also public domain, including the characters as used in that cartoon. The most famous example of this will happen on January 1 when the first Mickey Mouse cartoons go into the public domain, and so will that version of Mickey Mouse. You can read more about what that means for Mickey, and for Disney, in this post by the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law.
Nobody's legacy is "tarnished" or otherwise damaged by things other people create. The original is still there, while new things get to express their take on the characters and/or the rest of the material. Derivative works add to the sum total of culture, they don't subtract from it, and the Public Domain denotes the part of culture we all own together and can develop new works about freely. The freedom to do so is a good thing for everyone including cultural creators (who get to enrich their own work using our shared property) and consumers (who get more stuff they might enjoy, and if they don't the original is still there regardless) and everyone wins. Your scenario would make nothing better for anyone.
There is a set of IP rights known as moral rights. These rarely come up here in the US and aren't discussed much because they are quite limited in the US, but they play a more-meaningful role in France, whose legal tradition attaches certain rights to an artist to restrict use of his work (and who cannot give these rights up, regardless of whether he wants to do so or not, and where these rights never expire, even after death). They tend to aim at this sort of "tarnishing" concern.
That's not to say that I particularly support this class of right, but there are places in the world where it is more-important and is a real thing in law.
I don't know whether, in France, they would extend as far as to the use of characters.
As far as I understand you, you're just against fan fiction. I know some people that also think that whatever is non-canon shouldn't be approached by reasonable people, but even they don't think that it should be forbidden