Willingham sends Fables into the public domain

https://billwillingham.substack.com/p/willingham-sends-fables-into-the

by Tomte • 3 years ago

733 268 3 years ago

billwillingham.substack.com

cwkoss2• 3 years ago

This is super cool. Not usually a comic guy, but makes me want to read the series to be able to recognize what derivatives pop up in the future.

fsloth4• 3 years ago

Fables is an excellent work of fiction by any metric, not just as a comic. Some of the protagonists are among the most memorable characters in any fictional work. I warmly recommend it to anyone.

kybernetikos3• 3 years ago

Well this is awkward, because after hearing it's in the public domain and reading all these recommendations, I'm interested in reading it, but also knowing that the author doesn't like DC, I don't want to give them money.

Chilinot• 3 years ago

While I understand he did this in order to not have the hassle of going to court over these issues he brings up. There is not a single doubt in me that DC is not going to try and take this decision to court anyway, no matter how few grounds they actually have for it.

tanepiper3• 3 years ago

In this case, I hope they do - and that people keep making them do it - soon DC will need a legal team just to deal with these cases - or they will learn to give up.

nwoli• 3 years ago

They can afford to not give up while his reserves deplete rapidly unfortunately

nonrandomstring4• 3 years ago

I've decided to take a different approach, and fight them in a different arena, inspired by the principles of asymmetric warfare.

There's nothing so formidable as an enemy who has nothing to lose.

Relevant aside: Few know that not only did we British invent concentration camps, we more or less wrote the playbook on suicide bombing. I've seen rare and disturbing Home Guard training films. It was not all "Dad's Army". One tag-line was "You can always take one with you".

Anyway, the point is not about improvised explosives, and women using prams to walk right into a group of occupying soldiers, but about how a struggle changes once the underdog realises they really have nothing much left to lose.

tialaramex• 3 years ago

"You can always take one with you" is the proposed campaign in the event Sealion (German amphibious invasion of Great Britain) was attempted successfully. Having actually seen Overlord (the exact opposite scenario, "D Day") we know Sealion could not have worked, although of course in 1940 the British couldn't know that and were right to worry about it.

Since Hitler's general staff believed Sealion wouldn't work it was never attempted and so although "You can always take one with you" was considered it was never actually used.

There were guerrilla units established who had more targeted training (ie. To assassinate collaborators in any puppet government) but that wasn't necessarily a suicide mission and it wasn't general, the "you can always take one with you" messaging would have addressed the general population.

RugnirViking• 3 years ago

I have to say i'd love to read about those sorts of things if you have a link. I've long been interested in british warfare, since learning about trench warfare going on in new zealand Māori and east india company battles

ubermonkey• 3 years ago

It's the Paul Atreides model, right? If you can destroy a thing, you control it.

He hasn't destroyed Fable, but he's drastically reduced its value to DC.

ilaksh3• 3 years ago

That's why everyone who has time should be publishing Fables projects this week. Let DC try to sue everyone.

kevinmchugh5• 3 years ago

Yes, but by putting it into the public domain, Willingham just created a large group with an incentive to fund the lawyers working against DC. Public interest groups and other publishers both could join lawsuits.

tanepiper3• 3 years ago

For someone who isn't really into comic book stuff - Good.

Watching from the sidelines it's clear these companies extract every bit of value from the creators, while also making sure they have 100% ownership of their output.

fsloth4• 3 years ago

Don Rosa, who has drawn fantastic Donald Duck stories for Disney is a tragic example of this. The fans identify him with his work, but AFAIK Disney of course does not reward him in any way beyond the original contract terms.

b3lvedere5• 3 years ago

And these huge companies continue to wonder why people don't want to work beyond the things stated in their contracts.

Don Rosa is an awesome artist. I love his style.

LocalH3• 3 years ago

It's the entire entertainment industry, and they've been doing this since the very beginning. Peak corporate entitlement on display.

kikokikokiko• 3 years ago

I'm not an expert on american copyright law at all, but personally I wouldn't touch these ips's. I can only imagine the nightmare of litigation it will bring. Being the "first" on any kind of legal gray area is usually just an enormous waste of time and money. But the decision by this artist to put his work on the public domain, while still under contract with a 3rd party, may create some interesting developments in the future. I just think waiting and seeing is the smarter option.

b3lvedere5• 3 years ago

Luckily American copyright law does not apply to this entire planet.

Willingham also mentions he's 67 years old. Maybe he just doesn't care anymore what will happen to him or his creations.

Interesting though. This is the second time in a few days i read that DC Comics is royally f-ing creators over their rights and property.

rini17• 3 years ago

Luckily American copyright law does not apply to this entire planet.

If you plan to never travel to the US.

RetroTechie• 3 years ago

Being the "first" on any kind of legal gray area is usually just an enormous waste of time and money.

You quoted "first" correctly: this is not. The concept of placing something in the public domain, is well established. So are its implications.

If a 3rd party goes out to make a movie or something, what's DC Comics going to do? Assert IP rights they don't own, and never have? Prevent someone from using IP that's in the public domain? Sue for breaching a contract that 3rd party doesn't have with them? Good luck with that, and... Streisand.

For a creator this is kind of a nuclear option. But warranted in this case. Well played, mr. Willingham!

Jeff Ryan wrote: I'd love it if in the future this move was commonplace, and known as "The Willingham."

+1.

ilaksh3• 3 years ago

I think if people have courage then they will stand up for Willingham and publish their own Fables content.

Easier said than done but if some artists can manage it, the theory is that DC can't sue thousands and thousands of people.

That's what would really make this effective in some way regardless of legal outcomes. For the culture in general to de facto start ignoring DC's claims.

Semaphor2• 3 years ago

Crazy, I used to love Fables. But then I also used to love Vertigo (the "more adult" DC imprint that was closed in 2020 after almost a decade of being killed off slowly) where it used to be published.

isitmadeofglass• 3 years ago

In my template for radical reform of those laws I would like it if any IP is owned by its original creator for up to twenty years from the point of first publication

I’ve always said that I find it wrong that someone who dedicated their life to finding a cure for a life threatening desease is told: “You get 20 years to turn a profit, then it’s a free for all” yet if someone draws a cute mouse we say: “You get your lifetime, plus 75 years of exclusivity then it’s a gray zone case of which derivatives you own and what you can sue for” (looking at Winnie the Pooh’s red shirt).

You’d think that drawings and written content would be ranked lower than literally curing life threatening deseases and saving lives, when it comes to how long we give the inventors and creators to monetize their creations.

chmod7752• 3 years ago

someone who dedicated their life to finding a cure

Do you honestly believe that someone who spends their life looking for a cure, does it in the hopes of making lots of cash when they're 60?

If you're that kind of person, there's other professions out there that will let you make bank before you're too old to enjoy it.

ben_w2• 3 years ago

Do you honestly believe that someone who spends their life looking for a cure, does it in the hopes of making lots of cash when they're 60?

It isn't just the creators of the intellectual property, it's the investors.

If you're that kind of person, there's other professions out there that will let you make bank before you're too old to enjoy it.

From what I hear, that applies even more strongly to the arts than to the STEMs.

penteract• 3 years ago

The laws reflect that it's much easier to tell someone "you can't watch a film" than "you can't have life-saving treatment".

nonrandomstring4• 3 years ago

Bill's motivations and ideas here seem broadly sane. "Intellectual property", in all it's manifest forms, no longer serves creators because most corporations and publishers act as if above the law, in such disgracefully unethical ways as to make the bargain worthless. There are honest, small publishers out there, but sadly they're a dwindling pool.

It is also pleasant to read such a mildly written yet firm account of "the straw that broke the camel's back". I am very interested in 'thresholds' as part of system dynamics, for example in flocking, public movements and revolutions. Single actor tipping points such as Rosa Parks taking a "white" seat are fascinating from a technical, cultural and systematic view.

I sense we have moved from a general "anti-capitalism" to some even more powerful latent undercurrents in tech, where disaffection with big-tech and surveillance capitalism is poised... for what exactly I don't know. But somewhere out there is a smart, mischievous hacker who will sow the seminal event. Well done to you Bill Willingham.

raybb3• 3 years ago

I wouldn't call Rosa Parks a single actor.

In shorter words, Miss Rosa Parks's decision to stay in a forward seat was the first move in a planned boycott of the bus company and the city law, a campaign organised long before by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and run by a young, bland, handsome black parson, name of Martin Luther King Jr, who while I was in Montgomery, flew in from Atlanta twice a week to buy little vans for use by the boycotters.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/oct/04/9

raybb3• 3 years ago

On that note, I'll just mention I think that I read a short book called "Mutual Aid" by Dean Spade that really gave me some more ideas for what a world looks like where communities are really taking care of each other and don't have so much emphasis on doing everything yourself.

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL20892439W/Mutual_Aid

nonrandomstring4• 3 years ago

Actually you're quite right. She was married to Mr. Raymond Parks.

https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/rosa-parks

glogla• 3 years ago

Mark Buckingham is free to do his version of Fables (and I dearly hope he does). Steve Leialoha is free to do his version of Fables (which I’d love to see). And so on.

... does anyone have Alan Moore's phone number?

freddie_mercury• 3 years ago

You mean the guy who has been retired from comics since 2017?

'In 2022 he confirmed it, saying "I'm definitely done with comics, I haven't written one for getting on for five years.'

Not sure why he'd be interested.

mst• 3 years ago

Given how DC treated him there's maybe a slight hope he'd do it out of spite as a "one last hurrah."

I doubt it, but I wouldn't blame somebody for trying.

lnxg33k1• 3 years ago

Oh, interesting, on a site note, this just gave me an idea, made me think that maybe one of the reasons why boomers think that millennials are lazy is that they don't know that contemporary managers/directors are piece of shit

b3lvedere5• 3 years ago

Why do anything beyond your part of the contract when the other party is doing everything to outmaneuver their part of the same contract, like paying a decent amount of money for instance?

Strange world we live in that the client part of the contract can be more enforced than the company part of the contract, just because everybody is scared to be sued to literal death.

orlandohill2• 3 years ago

There's also a follow-up.

https://billwillingham.substack.com/p/more-about-fables-in-t...

Hearing how DC treats comics creators makes me want to boycott their future publications. Thankfully, there are publishers like Image that operate more fairly.

kmeisthax4• 3 years ago

But here’s the thing: No one will ever know how valuable the asset is that they threw away. Yes, they sell lots of Watchman, but how many sales did they lose from those who would have bought the book, but didn’t, out of respect for Moore? There’s no way to know, and because there’s no way to know, the loss can never show up in their balance books. How many new and wonderful projects might Alan Moore have done with DC, had they been able to keep him happy (and in this case the way to keep him happy was easy and known: simply be fair in their dealings from now on. Quit trying to cheat him)? There’s no way to know how much DC lost over the years due to something that didn’t happen.

Well we could go by antipiracy logic and take everyone who has ever bought an Alan Moore book post-DC and multiply it by what DC was charging for books. If it works for publishers it works for authors, right? /s

thrdbndndn• 3 years ago

Bill: Yes. Probably. DC has to continue paying me royalties on the books they’ve published and keep in publication, so, as long as I work hard to keep them honest each quarter, I still have some potential income from Fables.

How does it work, legally speaking? I meant that now Fables is in public domain, would DC still need to pay royalties to him? I understand that they had/have a contract, but not sure if the contract is tied to copyright implicitly or explicitly.

TylerE3• 3 years ago

I think what's happened is he's placed the characters/concept/design etc into the public domain, but NOT his copywritten work product.

IP vs Concrete Creation using that IP

jdboyd• 3 years ago

They still have to honor their contract with him, and if there's an exit clause, that means he gets to exit it as well, which I believe he would like.

crooked-v2• 3 years ago

A contract like that covers a lot more than just the material itself: there's branding, use of the author's name and likeness, editorial rights of both parties, etc. There's no particular reason to assume it would be tied to the copyright status of the work itself, and plenty of reasons to assume it wouldn't (after all, you don't want to have to pull the author branding just because something entered the public domain over time).

autoexec7• 3 years ago

Image has a ton great titles too. I never gave much thought to them until one day I realized how much space they take up on my shelves. Saga alone takes up a ton of that space, but other series I've enjoyed include The Wicked + The Divine, Monstress, Paper Girls, Skyward, and Injection (although I think that one has been canceled after the author was)

solardev2• 3 years ago

As someone unfamiliar with graphic novels, can you recommend some good ones that have more "adult" themes? I don't mean porn, but like storylines that are more interesting than bam bam pow pow. Maybe more like a typical novel than a comic aimed at younger readers, if that makes sense?

at_a_remove• 3 years ago

Reading this, and hindsight being what it is, it seems like the contracts didn't have penalty clauses for non-compliance. It's horrible to say this when you're theoretically dealing with adults, but it is as if everything needs a big stick or stungun attached to it, and a lot of NO, BAD MONKEY penalties for every "crack" they fell through. That would be hard to build a contract around.

karaterobot• 3 years ago

It's a lesson people have to learn periodically, I suppose. As noted in that FAQ, both Frank Miller and Alan Moore already went through this with them, publicly and loudly. I like his point about not knowing what was lost by poisoning those relationships. They robbed themselves of the fruits of two of the best writer/artists in comics history, at the peak of their creative ability, and robbed us of seeing what they'd have done if they'd stayed.

(Frank Miller at least did more work for DC later, but sadly not at his peak)

a_bonobo• 3 years ago

They just claimed this is how it had to be done.

My previous employer (not even the employer, some HR person) tried to steal my outstanding leave payment with exactly the same sentence; this sentence is now a huge red flag for me. It comes from a position of arrogant laziness, a more accurate translation would be 'this is how I want it to be done because i can't be bothered finding out how it's actually done', which is then reflected in the rest of OP's post: they didn't even read the contract. I did end up getting my outstanding leave payment, too, but it took some threatening.

araes• 3 years ago

DC has released a statement that Fables is NOT in the public domain.

The Fables comic books and graphic novels published by DC, and the storylines, characters, and elements therein, are owned by DC and protected under the copyright laws of the United States and throughout the world in accordance with applicable law and are not in the public domain. DC reserves all rights and will take such action as DC deems necessary or appropriate to protect its intellectual property rights.

From: https://twitter.com/zachrabiroff/status/1702433264458248218

"Three subsequent copyright filings list the copyright holder as Willingham, with DC's copyright transferred by written agreement."

Bill Willingham is listed as: "Authorship: text" DC Comics, employer for hire is listed as: "Authorship: artwork"

DC Comics is also listed as contact for: "Rights and Permissions"

From: https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/9035/ownership-of-wo...

Definition: To qualify as a joint work, each author's individual contribution must be inseparable or interdependent, and the authors must intend to be joint authors (17 U.S.C. s 101, Childress v. Taylor, Erickson v. Trinity Theatre, Inc.).
Rights of use: Joint authors can independently exploit and license a work without consent of other co-authors, but have a duty to account profits to co-authors (House Report No. 94-1476 (1976), Goodman v. Lee, Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid, etc.).

bmacho8• 3 years ago

I don't know Fables, but I'd love to see more things going to public domain. All fictional characters and stories, after 10 years. All software stuff, API/ABI, formats, UI and leaked source code, you should be able to use it, modify it, or even sell it. Everyday products like a washing machine, or a microwave, someone created a reliable and easy to produce microwave, now anyone should be able to mass produce it, and sell it cheaper. Produce and sell an iphone, a compatible, a partially compatible, an improved version, or whatever you want. And so on.

oaiey• 3 years ago

10 is a bit hard to bootstrap R&D and regain the invested money (especially when you build something over multiple years). But 20 years .. should work. Was not the original copyright for books something like 30 years.

Pet_Ant2• 3 years ago

My qualm is that it can take a lifetime of pushing around a script or a novel before it gets made. Publishers and studios would have an incentive to accept every script submitted and purposely ignore it for 20 and then look at them now that they are free… ideally it’d be 20 years after it got big but that’s not enforceable and vague.

abecedarius• 3 years ago

U.S. copyright was 14 years, renewable once.

ipsin• 3 years ago

The Telltale Games serial "Wolf Among Us" is based on Fables. I enjoyed it, definitely.

The world is based on the public domain (fairytale characters) but with many interesting touches, set in the modern world.

pid-1• 3 years ago

That was such a good game. Also RIP Telltale Games.

sokoloff• 3 years ago

someone created a reliable and easy to produce microwave, now anyone should be able to mass produce it, and sell it cheaper.

What part of this is not already the case for microwave ovens?

bmacho8• 3 years ago

You are only allowed to produce and sell an existing product, if the original creator allows you to do. In theory you can message LG that you'd love to sell one of their older models for a fee for every sold piece, but I theorize that it would be a much better world if you wouldn't need their permission for this.

ateng• 3 years ago

Why isn’t there a charity that specialise in “liberating” IPs & patents into public domain?

aleph_minus_one• 3 years ago

Why isn’t there a charity that specialise in “liberating” IPs & patents into public domain?

Google for Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, Z-Library, ... ;-)

kmeisthax4• 3 years ago

Legally speaking this would involve actually purchasing those outright. Sidestepping any questions about copyright assignment and rights reversion, the main problem here would be cost. Most companies that own works anyone of us care about significantly overvalue their ownership in the work, like to the point where ownership is either not for sale or would only be offered for a ludicrous price.

You'd be better off lobbying to weaken copyright protections. There are several charities interested in doing so, but they all have different kinds of baggage: donating to the FSF means Stallman's Way or the Highway, donating to the EFF means supporting Protect The Stack[0]. RPG[1] is run by Louis Rossmann who is fairly chill[2], but they're also the weakest in terms of anticopyright. Nobody wants to purely abolish or reform copyright; they want to do so as a means to achieve some other ends.

Putting that aside, there's also the problem that proposals to reform copyright go absolutely nowhere. Copyright maximalism is pretty uniformly supported by almost the entire US political class[3] and even very mild reforms like right-to-repair face fairly extreme bipartisan opposition. Not even the fascist-lite (DeSantis/Trump) wing of the Republican Party is willing to kick Disney in the copyright balls.

Illegally speaking, the Internet Archive is perfectly willing to publicly archive works they don't own, and they are saints for doing so. But they are also having their balls sued off.

[0] To paraphrase a lot, it means "ISPs should not have abuse desks".

[1] Repair Preservation Group

[2] He does have a right-libertarian bent and an axe to grind against New York's government, though that can be explained by them trying to kill his business

[3] Corporate leadership inclusive. Most corporations should be considered to be a kind of shadow government, not just as private entities.

livrem• 3 years ago

That was basically what happened to Blender, I think? I have been thinking it would be nice if someone was organizing crowdfunding and taking care of all the legal work to buy out old works properly. Thinking mostly of stuff with little value, that ought to be cheap. The rights to records released on small labels a long time ago that never sold very well to begin with. Obscure comicbooks. B horror movies. Low-budget video games. Old boardgames and tabletop-RPG books (illustrations included, ideally). Things that no one is making any money off anyway. Maybe something more high profile now and then.

But on the other hand if that was done on a large scale it might set an expectation that old things are bought out, or even that anyone ought to be paid to release anything free at all, and that sounds very bad.

WorldMaker4• 3 years ago

To some extent I think that was always an early aim of Creative Commons. I don't think Creative Commons ever saw their job as being a charity owner of IP, but they certainly tried their best to provide as many tools as possible to liberate IP and patents to either copyleft or the public domain (CC0) as they could.

I could certainly imagine an alternate future that if CC got enough donations to back a big enough budget they could help pay for lawyers to full time help creators claw back IPs from major corporations with the hopes to CC or CC0 license the rights that they win back. I also imagine that would cost a lot of money and that hypothetical arm of CC would need a huge budget to win the legal fights it would want to take on.

Steuard• 3 years ago

A friend of mine worked for a while as part of the team building http://unglue.it, which IIRC is a pretty close match to what you're envisioning.

TRiG_Ireland2• 3 years ago

All fictional characters and stories, after 10 years.

Girl Genius has been publishing a page of their comic three times a week for twenty years, and the story is not yet done. I think they deserve to hold it for a little longer.

bmacho8• 3 years ago

I think they deserve to hold it for a little longer.

I don't see why. I don't see why should they have the exclusive right to sell it anymore, and sue anyone that creates a derivative work based on their work older than 10 years.

Also Girl Genius still would have a lot of options to make money of it. I just think derivative work should be able to appear, and more than 10 years old stuff should be free as in freedom and as in free beer. And we, as a society could choose this by modifying our laws.

Pet_Ant2• 3 years ago

They would only lose ownership to their earlier strips by now. Also anything else would be fan fiction. It wouldn’t remove the primacy of author created works. I mean if I create a XXX Fables movie no one will consider it authentic or canon.

jzb3• 3 years ago

10 years is nothing. I'm against copyright maximalism and would love to see copyright terms whittled down, but 10 years is a non-starter.

For every Stephen King that has a massive following and would easily earn enough in those 10 years, there's 100 mid-tier and lower-tier creators that need any income they can get from works still earning in some fashion.

Also, think about how a 10 year limit would be used against creators by the Disneys of the world. "Well, damn, we don't need to arrange a movie deal with King... we'll just wait 10 years and a day and then make a movie on this book."

Hey, indie band that still scrapes by on royalties and touring? The minute your best-selling album is 10 years old, it's going to be repackaged and sold without you seeing a dime.

Yes, it's more complicated than that, but... an arbitrary 10 year limit wouldn't fix things or make the world substantially better and might make things worse.

Now - I'd be willing to talk about things like drastically shorting terms for works for hire/copyright owned by corporations and not individuals.

We might also need to think about not having one term for all things. There's no reason the copyright term for software should be the same as that for a song or a movie or a book. Books, songs, paintings, basically art should probably have a copyright term in the 25-50 year range. Certainly no longer than 50 years.

bmacho8• 3 years ago

Hey, indie band that still scrapes by on royalties and touring? The minute your best-selling album is 10 years old, it's going to be repackaged and sold without you seeing a dime.

Yes, indeed. Will it be harder for indie bands? I don't think so. Will it be different? Sure. Will it be better for the society if you could have live concerts or disco parties with great songs? Absolutely.

Also bands play each others songs without asking or paying royalty in practice where I live. I've gone and have paid a band to perform someone elses songs. It is definitely a good thing.

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 3 years ago

Also, think about how a 10 year limit would be used against creators by the Disneys of the world. "Well, damn, we don't need to arrange a movie deal with King... we'll just wait 10 years and a day and then make a movie on this book."

They might say that, but they're just signing their own death warrant. Those who watch, like myself, will just wait out the 10 years and download it. (Well, not really, I will probably download it the next day).

It cuts both ways.

Now - I'd be willing to talk about things like drastically shorting terms for works for hire/copyright owned by corporations and not individuals.

There is no legal distinction here, and there can't be. Even individuals will spin up an LLC which has ownership of that stuff, for tax/bankruptcy/whatever reasons. Do they lose copyright because they were business savvy?

We might also need to think about not having one term for all things. There's no reason the copyright term for software should be the same as that for a song or a movie or a book. Books, songs, paintings, basically art should probably have a copyright term in the 25-50 year range. Certainly no longer than 50 years.

I'd go the other direction. 18 months, no renewals, and no criminal charges for infringement without proof of infringement for commercial sales, and most of all any works with DRM left out in the cold and can never get copyright protection (not even if they later release a version without DRM).

Rygian• 3 years ago

Define it then in terms of "10 years or an X amount of revenue generated, whichever is achieved later" where X is defined in terms of the country's economic performance.

bmacho8• 3 years ago

We might also need to think about not having one term for all things. There's no reason the copyright term for software should be the same as that for a song or a movie or a book. Books, songs, paintings, basically art should probably have a copyright term in the 25-50 year range. Certainly no longer than 50 years.

Of course there is no reason, but 10 years seems about right to me for all of them. You create something, you get revenue for it for 10 years, now that's enough, stop hogging the art, invention, standard, whatever from the society.

I think it is a fair amount of time, I don't get the arguments that they 'deserve' more.

Also please notice, that the current copyright laws are made by the society and not by God, not a law of Nature, not a Human Right or such. We made the laws to support artists and research, but I think it restricts both culture and both the quality of life too much.

Why does Wintel 'deserve' several hundreds of billions of dollars, just because they managed themselves into a rent-seeking position and we must pay them to run any software? Why there is no gold standard of microwave oven or a washing machine that everyone can produce, so a competition could push down the prices, and you could buy replacement parts for it? Why can't I pay very talented writers to write my little pony stories? I want to. Also why is it illegal to live on writing of my little pony stories? Why can't I buy a T-shirt with a custom my little pony image I like? Or why is it illegal to maintain and modify a 10 year old version of photoshop? Sure, then their own 10 year old versions would appear as a competition to Adobe, and that would hurt a lot compared to the current situation, but then it is their job to be better. Etc. How do all of this benefit the society?

Copyright laws were created originally by the society to support artists and research, but they are way too long, mostly are just used for rent-seeking, and they restrict our lives. I don't think creators 'deserve' anything, but I think a hard 10 year period is about okay to the original creators or the publishers to monetize the product, then move on to an another product, or do whatever they want.

pbhjpbhj• 3 years ago

The minute your best-selling album is 10 years old, it's going to be repackaged and sold without you seeing a dime.

The story is that most bands don't make anything on residuals and so have to tour to make money.

But, in any case, one can already get the work for free, people choose not to.

I have an idea on Origin Marks [1] that works here, only one source will be the lead singer, only one source will be the songwriter, buy from them _if_you_want_to_.

[1] the reverse of Trademarks, kinda, they would show not the seller per se, as Trademarks do, but the physical origins - and all historic details would attach to the mark. Change the factory, OM shows it, sell your Trademark, OM shows if it's still made in the same place or not; buying an article, OM shows which of your options are made in the same place. OM would show not just so sold it to you, not where they got it from -- cut out middlemen and optimise supply chains, that's capitalism, right?

In this case, you buy a download, who did they get the TM rights from, ego did they get the cover art rights from, who did they buy the license for the music track from? Seller would be obliged to tell you, and there sellers too ... no money going to the band, don't use that supplier, go elsewhere.

steamer25• 3 years ago

10 years is nothing

It depends on how much was invested up front.

Spend a couple hours recording a joke song on your phone that happens to become a viral hit? Ten years of monopolizing it seems more than fair.

Spend millions of dollars hiring a research team and running gene sequencers for years to develop a state of the art drug? Maybe 10 years isn't enough.

OkayPhysicist• 3 years ago

I've thought about this quite a bit. I think one fair approach would be to have a 2 tiered copyright release, where there's still a pretty long time before a work lapses into the public domain, but before that, a relatively short amount of time after the release of the work (say, 10-15 years) the original owner loses the power to dictate who uses their work. Basically, between that point and the public domain lapse, anyone would have the option to accept a default contract of paying the creator some standardized % royalties. The creator would still have the option to accept explicit contracts with weaker terms, for example waiving the royalties for projects they want to give away.

autoexec7• 3 years ago

14 years was good enough in the 1700s, when it was prohibitively expensive to publish anything and global distribution was effectively impossible. Today, those things are basically free and happen at close to the speed of light. If you can't make money off of something published globally after a decade, you fucked up. 10 years might even be too long.

It's 100% fine if disney wants to wait a decade to make a movie about something. After that 10 years so can everybody else! There's no amount of time disney couldn't hold out for anyway. What matters is that artistic works get into the hands of the public faster, not how much money an author might lose out on in licensing deals. Copyright doesn't exist to protect possible film deals for authors. It exists to promote the creation of new works. If disney waits 10 years and makes their film then without a license fee, mission accomplished. That's a new creative work. They can then compete with every one else making new works based on that property.

brett-jackson• 3 years ago

I wonder if tax policy could be used to encourage placing content in the public domain. This could especially be useful for software, since there probably isn’t much money to be made in selling Windows 3.1 licenses, but a nominal tax credit could encourage Microsoft to put it in the public domain and let the public play around with it, inspire them, etc.

labster• 3 years ago

Copyright should be 30 years for free, then 1 dollar doubling annually thereafter. 40 years of copyright should cost $2047, while 49 years costs a little over a million. So does the 50th year. Pay the public for your monopoly on publishing.

Anarch157a• 3 years ago

Copyrights should be more like trademarks. Use it or lose it.

Put a limit of 10 years if the work is not available for purchase by the general public, so any work that goes out of print becomes public domain 10 years after the last copy was sold.

But... Only for works owned by _corporations_. For works still owned by the original artists, works would enter public domain on the artists death or if the artist had under-age children at the moment of their passing, when the youngest completes 18.

I think this is the best way to ensure that corpos can't sit on works for eternity while allowing artists to have an income for life, with some protection for their children in case of untimely death.

In any case, any law that implements such limitations should mandate a complete removal of any DRM involved, or at least publication of the private keys needed to decrypt any work, once they become public.

melagonster• 3 years ago

Let me recommend Japanese way: it is impossible to sold copyright. so publisher always need to negotiate with authors.

ptman• 3 years ago

original 14 (+14?)

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 3 years ago

As I understand United States copyright law, it is impossible for an author to voluntarily enter something into the public domain. They can license it to whomever they like, of course, on any terms that are legal within a contract (including creative commons licensing), but they can't just say "this is public domain".

It is especially true when they fail to give license terms. People using it as if it were public domain don't have a license, or any proof of having a license, and if the author dies tomorrow, his or her heirs inherit the copyright (which will still last for another 75 or 95 years, I forget which). They now own it, and can go after those who use it for copyright infringement, with all the penalties that go with that. If the heirs were particularly powerful or have political influence, they might even manage to get the DOJ to pursue the matter as criminal.

Thought I've never watched the show, doesn't one of the characters in The Office start talking about how he's "declaring bankruptcy" by saying those words emphatically, where the other characters try to explain how it doesn't work that way? He then goes on to say "I'm not just saying it, but declaring bankruptcy" as if this is somehow a legally important distinction?

That's what this guy is doing.

thedailymail• 3 years ago

Relevant wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Granting_work_into_t...

WorldMaker4• 3 years ago

This is partly why the CC0 license exists, with Creative Commons lawyers putting some thought into how to actually make a legally recognizable declaration of public domain: https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc...

derangedHorse• 3 years ago

It’s one of the best comic series I’ve ever read. I’d recommend reading through them.

michaelbuckbee2• 3 years ago

A meta aspect of this is going unspoken: the stories and characters in the Fables comics are (mostly) pulled from the public domain.

Snow White, The Three Little Pigs, Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, and Peter Piper are all characters walking around and with jobs in the Fable Universe.

I see Bill putting his work back into the public domain as a kind of "thank you" to the original creators.

kybernetikos3• 3 years ago

He explicitly says something like this in his follow up https://billwillingham.substack.com/p/more-about-fables-in-t...

michaelbuckbee2• 3 years ago

Oh cool, hadn't seen the follow up.

SonOfLilit3• 3 years ago

If I were a DC executive, and if he is not badly misinterpreting their contract, I would be very mad at the lawyer that drafted said contract. So I'm confused. What's going on? How did this happen?

Was the DC contract drafted sloppily to allow this because no-one could imagine the edge case of him throwing away money?

Is he creatively interpreting it ("it doesn't say anywhere that dogs can't play basketball" wouldn't really stand in court, and I'm suspicious about "I am not allowed to authorize anyone else to print fanfics of Fables but I am allowed to authorize everyone else to authorize anyone else to print them)?

Is he reneging on an obligation towards them that they can and will sue him for (or maybe the way the contract dealt with this was saying he can't do this and if he does the contract is void and he pays a small fine, and he doesn't care about the small fine or the contract)?

ImAnAmateur2• 3 years ago

You've misunderstood something.

He owns the copyright for Fables. He has released the copyright for Fables into the public domain. He does not have the right to release the official comic series into the public domain because DC Comics has partial ownership of that. His contract with DC Comics is still in effect and has not been broken. He is not creating new Fables comics but is not preventing the official series from being sold.

SonOfLilit3• 3 years ago

Thanks. Edited to replace "copies" with "fanfics".

However, my questions still remain just as strong.

jprete• 3 years ago

I think fundamental to Willingham's action, and his intent, is that there now is no "official" Fables comic series. There's DC's version of Fables, but now anyone can make one with equal legitimacy.

If people treat the DC version as "official", then that has some (not all) of the same effects as claiming that Willingham gave DC the copyrights in the first place. DC can't sue anyone if they aren't the owner, but they can take advantage of fandom's desire for an "official" version to crowd out anyone else writing such a comic, and threaten competitors with lawsuits to get them to stay away (IANAL and don't know exactly how much they could do).

toyg8• 3 years ago

I would be very mad at the lawyer that drafted said contract.

It actually sounds like the standard contract DC use with "author-owned" material at least since Watchmen (and possibly before): creators maintain ownership of the IP, but publication/distribution rights of certain amounts of material are granted exclusively to DC - as long as such material is made available for sale.

This is famously how they locked away Watchmen: they kept reprinting the original run in paperbacks every year, so that the publication clause would never expire and Moore/Gibbons would never be able to take it elsewhere (and never be able to claim full royalties rather than a determined, reduced rate). I think there were lawsuits at some point, but the outcome was just a little more money for authors.

Willingham seems to have decided to take the nuclear option instead, by releasing the IP in the public domain. This means the already-published material will remain the preserve of DC, but anyone is supposedly free to write and publish new stories with the same characters. As others stated, it's unlikely to happen on a large scale, because of the chilling effect of potentially having to go against DC/Warner in court; but it should ensure fanfic and other creative expressions can flourish.

Jiro• 3 years ago

To be fair for Watchmen, the Watchmen deal was made at a time where paperback reprints were rare, and they obviously kept reprinting it because they genuinely wanted to make money from directly selling it, not because they were reprinting 10 copies a year just to keep the contract from expiring.

Spoom• 3 years ago

I would be very surprised if his contract didn't have the word "exclusive" in key places, which this change of ownership will now make incorrect, creating an actionable tort (in my layperson understanding). I like what the author is trying to do here but I expect it to fail when inevitably challenged.

philistine2• 3 years ago

That’s the thing with the public domain; it’s irrevocable. He’s already done it. What he has done cannot be undone. Unless a court decides that because he have an exclusive license to DC he cannot release his rights to the public domain, the worst that can happen is that the copyright is in the public domain and he has broken his contract with DC and thus is liable.

njharman2• 3 years ago

If I were a DC executive

Your reaction is why you are not a DC executive. Shareholders, your board would not stand for your concern for employee/contractor over profit.

SonOfLilit3• 3 years ago

You read my comment wrong. I'm asking "how come the contract allows for this outcome, which is very bad for DC?"

mdtrooper• 3 years ago

I remember other case but may I am writing a big mistake, sorry...the saga gamebooks named Lone Wolf are as something similar to public domain. It is correct?

riffraff• 3 years ago

I don't think so, the author granted Project Aon[0] the license to make them freely available, but they are still his copyright. It's a Free/Libre kind of distinction, IIUC.

[0] https://projectaon.org/en/Main/Home

kybernetikos3• 3 years ago

So apparently I own Fables now. Anyone got a way for me to look at my property?

ImAnAmateur2• 3 years ago

DC Comics retains partial rights to the Fables work that they produced. You can make your own work that uses the Fables intellectual property and sell that now.

ilaksh3• 3 years ago

It's what everyone should be doing in order to support Willingham. DC can't sue everyone.

prmoustache3• 3 years ago

Honestly I don't think it will change anything. I doubt anyone will touch it without a contract with DC.

Public domain is not even recognized in every country which mean that international commercialization of any derivative work would be complicated or even impossible. Even worse, in this case Bill Willingham do not even have contract right to republish Fables. He cannot republish it and add an anti-copyright-notice to it. According to my short research it seems to be a requirement to waive copyright and put something in the public domain according to the Bern Convention. I doubt a blog post is enough, at least internationally.

I won't expect to see any movie of Fables without DC permission.

Feel free to chime in and correct me if you are an international copyright laws expert.

esrauch• 3 years ago

I've been advised that in the US it's not possible to declare something public domain, that the closest thing is CC0 or a similar license.

But surely if he doesn't have the right to give specific licenses to individuals he doesn't have the right to CC0 license it either. Based on what I understand, DC will be able to win this that he can't actually do this.

kibwen3• 3 years ago

The other way around. The US has a public domain, and in many other countries CC0 is the best you can do.

voxic11• 3 years ago

Some countries like Germany and Japan don't recognize public domain dedication. But afaik the United States does. There is one oddity in the US which is that Section 203 of the Copyright Act grants the author of a work the right to cancel "the exclusive or nonexclusive grant of a transfer or license of copyright or of any right under a copyright" up to thirty-five years after the grant or transfer occurred (only applicable to works not created "for hire"). So you could argue under that until 35 years have elapsed the work isn't truly in the public domain because the original author of the work has the statutory right to reclaim its copyright.

That said, could the author here have used Section 203 to revoke DC's license? I see section 203 requires that "Notices of termination may be served no earlier than 25 years after the execution of the grant or, if the grant covers the right of publication, no earlier than 30 years after the execution of the grant or 25 years after publication under the grant (whichever comes first)."

So maybe the author could have waited a few more years and done that?

starkparker• 3 years ago

Since Wikipedia deals quite often with licensing and public-domain works, there's a reasonably relevant summary at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain.

kmeisthax4• 3 years ago

I'm not entirely sure you need to republish a work in order to disclaim copyright on it. The only thing I'm aware of in US law is that you have to make some kind of 'overt act', which just means you have to actually intend to make something public domain. I think posting two Substack posts detailing contractual breaches and bad faith at DC as motivation qualifies.

Germany and Japan don't recognize public domain dedications in the law. However, this isn't a German or Japanese creator we're talking about - Bill Willingham is American. And generally speaking, the Berne Convention is just a promise to treat other countries' copyrights the same as your country would, not an obligation to provide more copyright to foreign works than domestic ones[0]. I doubt Germany is going to ultimately enforce copyright that has already evaporated in America, especially on behalf of DC, a party that doesn't actually own the copyright in question and only has an exclusive license.

What's really going to complicate this is the nature of the agreement between Bill and DC. DC could argue that an exclusive license is equivalent to copyright transfer. Copyright is corporate Calvinball, so we could see American courts trying to roll back the public domain dedication purely for the sake of submission to monied interests. I could see all sorts of stupid arguments being adopted by judges that want to see DC win and artists lose:

- Well actually, he was trying to revert rights from DC by making his work public domain, but he didn't follow the notice period requirements, so the dedication is null and void

- Well actually, the publishing agreement constitutes an effective copyright transfer, so he's just releasing DC of their obligations to him, so DC now owns Fables in perpetuity

- Well actually, Bill Willingham didn't draw the art[1], so you can't put Fables on Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, or Wikimedia Commons, all you can do is have all the male characters in your folklore be one man named 'Jack' and nothing more

As far as I'm aware, "artist burns down the copyright on their work to moot a publishing agreement" is uncharted legal territory. How any of these arguments would fare would depend on the exact text of the DC Comics publishing agreement Bill signed, which isn't public, and Bill probably can't proactively publish it. If he can, he should. Otherwise you'd only learn how much he can actually disclaim iff you get sued by DC and are able to bring the contract into the scope of discovery, which isn't exactly guaranteed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_the_shorter_term

[1] Copyright is not only viral, but also leprotic: every new instance of creativity accrues a separate copyright on that part of the work that is owned by that creator insamuch as it can be separated from the whole. This is why the GPL needs to have a copyleft clause.

prmoustache3• 3 years ago

Otherwise you'd only learn how much he can actually disclaim iff you get sued by DC and are able to bring the contract into the scope of discovery, which isn't exactly guaranteed.

Wouldn't the legal and financial burden be only on him?

He is by all account the copyright holder. He says you can do the f. you want with his work. You haven't signed any contract with DC.

You release some derived work commercially.

DC might sue him for granting rights to a third party that infringe n exclusivity clause.

But you aren't bound by any contract with DC, you aren't infringing anything if the sole copyright holder expressely gave you the permission.

costanzaDynasty• 3 years ago

Fables wouldn't exist without public domain, so in a way its come full circle.

skywhopper• 3 years ago

Good for him. I’d love to see more creators taking this route.

jccalhoun2• 3 years ago

I didn't see it pointed out but DC is owned by Warner-Discovery (or whatever it is called) so they have tons of lawyers on retainer to prevent anyone from actually publishing Fables but them.

There's also the issue of trademarks which might also prevent people from using the Fables name.

msla• 3 years ago

I didn't see it pointed out but DC is owned by Warner-Discovery (or whatever it is called) so they have tons of lawyers on retainer to prevent anyone from actually publishing Fables but them.

I don't see a way around this:

The one thing in our contract the DC lawyers can’t contest, or reinterpret to their own benefit, is that I am the sole owner of the intellectual property. I can sell it or give it away to whomever I want.

If he kept full ownership, and I obviously can't see any of his contracts, DC doesn't have any ownership and so can't stop any such publication. It's like how publishing a nice edition of Shakespeare doesn't give that publisher any proprietary rights to Hamlet.

chmod7752• 3 years ago

so they have tons of lawyers on retainer to prevent anyone from actually publishing Fables but them

That's not going to be a long court case regardless of how many lawyers they throw at it, since they would have been unable to produce anything showing that they owned the IP that you are allegedly infringing - because they simply didn't own the IP.

This was true before Willingham pulled this stunt. They never owned it, he did. The only one who could have sued would have been Willingham himself.

With this recent event technically everyone owns it (they too), but bringing that up won't help them at all.

Trademarks: I don't think they should have any, given that you can't trademark something you don't own. Searching trademark databases didn't yield anything.

toyg8• 3 years ago

This is why we can't have nice things: greed.

In an ideal world, the DC agreement is substantially fair: it gives independent authors the chance to receive better exposure, access to limitless amounts of incredibly talented professionals to help them polish their work, and a steady flow of income - in exchange for exclusivity, a chunk of money, and a certain regard for DC's investment.

But at some point, greed kicks in. DC "forget" to send a royalty check or three. They start making plans to make more and more money (games! movies!), for which original authors are just annoying roadblocks. And it all goes to hell.

It's so sad, because it's all so unnecessary.

mbork_pl3• 3 years ago

If I understand correctly, it wouldn't be so bad if greed were kept in check by honesty.

isk5172• 3 years ago

Unfortunately, considering this exact sentence shows up in every discussion on forms of government and modes of economy it isn't a easy problem to solve.

orf• 3 years ago

At a certain scale those who are dishonest have a competitive advantage over those who are not. So they win.

phreack2• 3 years ago

The worst part is the perversion of justice of the author being provably right yet unable to enforce his legally binding contracts as an individual against a well resourced company. Hopefully this sparks a copyleft movement of public freedom.

nottorp2• 3 years ago

If only courts would award legal fees to the winner…

WeylandYutani2• 3 years ago

In the 1970s Dutch lawyers, in the hippie spirit of the time, realised that only the rich could afford legal advice. So they decided to start doing pro bono work for the poor.

LegitShady4• 3 years ago

8kagine you're a creator who has just been accepting dc / marvel payments without auditing them until now. Maybe time to hire a professional to start working through all past payments and see how much they've been screwing you out of.

867-5309• 3 years ago

yeah, imagine being a millionaire and noticing missing pocket change

oh wait, you're still a millionaire..

ta8645• 3 years ago

It's so sad, because it's all so unnecessary.

That's a rather naive take. There's no point moralizing, or being wishful about it. Just embrace the game theory nature of reality.

Corporate and governmental power structures will always be susceptible to capture and exploitation. We need to set up structures that can not be co-opted by the psychopaths, or at least contain a poison pill that makes them much less attractive targets for such people.

The lesson from this example is that the author maintained ownership, and so in the end could do something meaningful to combat the company that has become corrupted.

djmips• 3 years ago

I'm kind of more afraid there's no psychopath to pin the blame on. I haven't done my homework but I suspect the system and a bunch of normal type people exhibit the same outward behavior.

me_again• 3 years ago

This may seem like quibbling, but I think when large companies do this kind of thing, "greed" is the wrong kind of explanation. Greed is an emotion, or moral failing if you will, humans have. A company like DC is a complex, non-sentient system. It doesn't have emotions, it has interlocking sets of incentives (sales bonus plans, executive compensation based on beating last quarter's numbers, etc) which collectively and incrementally nudge the behavior of their employees towards unethical shortcuts. This tendency can be temporarily reined in by regulations, civil suits, strong-willed executives and employees, or a company culture that prizes integrity and longer-term results. When those restraints don't apply strongly enough, this behavior kicks in. I'm not sure what the right term is, but I'm reluctant to call it greed for the same reason that ChatGPT isn't "lying".

Not making excuses for DC, btw.

posix863• 3 years ago

I would guess though that such arguably corrupt structures always emit from the leadership. The way to have a moral company is by having moral leadership. The issue is that there is no incentive for a company to have moral leadership (or not for that matter). It just gets the leadership it gets. If the leadership is into cutting corners, this will radiate out in the form of the mechanisms you mention, where in lower levels people WILL do immoral things not because they're greedy, but because of the compan structures put in place by the people who are.

Ultimately thoug I believe the market corrects for it. We're seeing that right now with Unity. It just takes a lot of time for a bit company like this.

heresie-dabord• 3 years ago

"greed" is the wrong kind of explanation. [...] A company like DC is a complex, non-sentient system. [...] it has interlocking sets of incentives [...] which collectively and incrementally nudge the behavior of their employees towards unethical shortcuts.

Institutionalised Greed is a form of Complicit Exploitation.

"I was just following orders," is one of the typical apologies.

This tendency can be temporarily reined in by regulations, civil suits, strong-willed executives and employees, or a company culture that prizes integrity and longer-term results.

These are checks on greed, dishonesty, and cruelty. All that stands between healthy social order and chaos is the social trustworthiness of people.

deterministic• 3 years ago

Nope. Companies don’t make decisions. Humans working for companies do.

prewett• 3 years ago

This is why we can't have nice things: greed.

It sounds like this crossed the line into gluttony and premeditated long-term theft (defrauding? expropriation? ip annexation? I'm not sure what a good word is). Greed is Unity's problem, but it sounds like DC has intentionally and systematically attempted to steal from the author over many years and that is qualitatively different. Let's not let DC off with simple greed.

dspillett• 3 years ago

I guess you won’t be getting much work from DC in the future.

I like the response to that.

Many years ago I had “You'll never work with us again if X” from a company, where “X” amounted to expecting them to keep their side of an agreement wrt payment terms, to which I enjoyed responding “Oh, I insist on X. Whether I work for you again is not entirely your decision to make. I won't be doing BTW.”. A couple of months later they asked me to look at something and were surprised when I didn't jump to make myself available… They were also upset that I wouldn't give them contact details for other people I knew who could help (I did offer to pass details out to my social circle, but they said to not bother myself - presumably they knew I'd include warnings with the job spec!).

BasilPH• 3 years ago

I can't seem to find that statement and the response to it. Could you link or copy/paste it?

Edit: Nevermind, I found it in his follow-up:

Q: I guess you won’t be getting much work from DC in the future.
Bill: I haven’t worked with DC for the more than two years since I handed in my final script for this new run of Fables. At that point I fired the lot of them and haven’t regretted it. Why spend my remaining years continuing to work with thugs and conmen?

ZeroGravitas• 3 years ago

The current laws are a mishmash of unethical backroom deals to keep trademarks and copyrights in the hands of large corporations, who can largely afford to buy the outcomes they want.

Succinct but accurate summary of the current state of the law.

anotheraccount9• 3 years ago

Where can I download Fables?

loughnane• 3 years ago

I think this strikes a great balance. Creators have a comfy window for financial reward and big firms have less of a stranglehold on culture.

In my template for radical reform of those laws I would like it if any IP is owned by its original creator for up to twenty years from the point of first publication, and then goes into the public domain for any and all to use. However, at any time before that twenty year span bleeds out, you the IP owner can sell it to another person or corporate entity, who can have exclusive use of it for up to a maximum of ten years. That’s it. Then it cannot be resold. It goes into the public domain. So then, at the most, any intellectual property can be kept for exclusive use for up to about thirty years, and no longer, without exception.

tetris11• 3 years ago

the IP owner can sell it to another person or corporate entity, who can have exclusive use of it for up to a maximum of ten years.

This could be abused in an infinite loop. There should be a max resell limit of 2

Edit: I should learn to read. Indeed it cannot be resold.

mpsprd3• 3 years ago

it cannot be resold

He covered it.

marcinzm3• 3 years ago

Reselling seems fine if the clock doesn't reset in subsequent sales. You also can't really avoid it since they can have an LLC buy the IP and then just sell the ownership of the LLC.

phkahler• 3 years ago

The problem with that is the same as with current copyright law. It's easy for lobbyists to get simple changes like changing "10 years" to "70 years". Or resold once to resold twice, because what's good for the economy one time must certainly be double good if we do it twice.

I lean toward making copyright non-transferable. The author keeps it for X years. They are free to license it if someone else can do better at making money from it. The problem with this seems to be group works like movies. Not sure how that would work.

xiaq• 3 years ago

It seems that the one-time reselling clause can be easily abused by the original IP holder to effectively extend their 20 years to 30 years and enable unlimited reselling? Just sell it to a company you control at the end of 20 years, and you get another 10 years. You can then sell the company to whoever is interested in the IP, and they can also do that, as long as it’s the ownership of the company rather than the IP that’s being transferred technically.

It seems much simpler to just shorten copyright protection. Whether 20 years or 30 years, the world will be a more creative place than it currently is.

ralferoo3• 3 years ago

I don't really understand what the point of this is. The complaints largely seem to be "DC weren't respecting me, so now anyone can do what they want with this". One of the things he complains about is how they wanted to do something, thinking they owned the rights, he said no and then they couldn't do it. But... now they can, because it's now in the public domain.

Actually, all this is ignoring the fact that AFAIK, you can't just revoke copyright and put something into the public domain, you have to explicitly grant a non-exclusive licence to everyone instead. That's why all the CC style licences exist.

mpsprd3• 3 years ago

The point is to hurt DC financially in reprisal.

Also, characters from fable came from the public domain, so it's a logical conclusion from the point of view of the author.

ralferoo3• 3 years ago

Except that now he's put this into the public domain, DC can also do what they want with it to the extent that anyone else can.

It doesn't hurt DC financially, other than potentially diluting the Fable brand because anyone else can also use it now. There's also a strong likelihood that DC do in fact own partial copyright over anything that isn't the comic - so any figurines, film spinoffs, etc., in fact anything that wasn't wholly created entirely by Willingham, even if he still owns the underlying IP, so people almost certainly aren't free to make copies of anything other than just the comics.

Also I don't understand why my comment (the GP to this comment) was been moderated down so much. Is it just that my opinion is unpopular with fans and so it was downvoted rather than debated? For instance, re my comment about public domain vs explicit license there are many articles like this: https://www.techdirt.com/2015/01/23/why-we-still-cant-really...

catapart• 3 years ago

Personally, I fully support this "Willingham copyright". 20 years for the creators (I would have said 50, but I guess I'm greedy), and then a limited private run so that the creator can sell it and get a nice mature payment for it (again, would have gone 20 years on this, just to get the companies that are going to do a 10-movie saga plenty to salivate over), and then it's off to the public domain! Sounds perfect, to me!

My way would have kept it out of public hands for ~70 years, which feels about right to me. I don't know if I, personally, feel like content made in the 90's shouldn't profit the creator anymore. Whereas stuff from the 50's and before definitely feels like no one should be able to take ownership of it. If it stuck around that long, it's in the pop culture and belongs to all of us. "Mickey Mouse" isn't just a character, it's a touchstone for other content to riff on. That's kind of the whole point of public domain; that and reinvention.

All of that said, I guess "Ghostbusters" kind of has a similar pop culture weight so I'm happy to amend my numbers down toward Bill's. My main interest is in making sure creators get paid commensurate to the impact of their work (as opposed to the work they put in to make it), in such a way that they can make a living off any profitable endeavor for the duration of that project's viability. If 30 years works for that, then I'm completely for it!

Fantastic work here, Bill! Thank you!

SamoyedFurFluff3• 3 years ago

I would agree with your preference, especially because many artists have to retire off of their creations, and also disabled people are likely more represented in art. The woman who wrote Jonathan strange & mr norrell has severe chronic fatigue syndrome, obviously can’t work. By the presented logic she’s almost out of time for earnings, and she’s nowhere near old enough where that wouldn’t be significant.

MrDrMcCoy2• 3 years ago

I think 10-15 years of exclusivity, followed by 20 years of compulsory licensing before entering the public domain would be even more fair. That way, creators can get paid for longer, while further creativity is less stifled.

arp242• 3 years ago

If I understand the law correctly (and be advised that copyright law is a mess; purposely vague and murky, and no two lawyers – not even those specializing in copyright and trademark law – agree on anything), you have the rights to make your Fables movies, and cartoons, and publish your Fables books, and manufacture your Fables toys, and do anything you want with your property, because it’s your property.

The tricky bit with this is, are you okay accepting a lawsuit from DC comics, possibly one that will drag on for years and years?

Aside from the murky nature of the law, anyone can sue anyone in the US, for more or less any reason. And unless it's complete bogus and gets thrown out at an early stage, you can cause someone a whole bunch of hurt. Who is right and wrong according to the law only marginally comes in to play.

In this case, it's not even clear to me Willingham has the right to single-handedly place something in the public domain; did no one else work on those comics? Don't they also own a piece of copyright (which they perhaps signed over to DC?) This is like the main author of an open source project single-handedly changing the license, which isn't something you can "just" do even if you wrote 95% of it (even though many small one-line contributions often don't meet the threshold of originality for copyright to apply, it's not so easy to determine where this threshold is, legally speaking, and things can get quite murky rather fast).

It's essentially the same problem Willingham has, where suing D.C. is just too time-consuming and expensive, except that Willingham can choose to sue DC or not, whereas you don't choose if someone sues you or not.

I'm very sympathetic to Willingham's plight and I'd love it if more people would just place things in public domain (or other CC licenses for that matter), but here I'm not sure if he legally can, and even if he could it's murky enough that DC most likely will sue, so practically speaking he can't anyway.

marcinzm3• 3 years ago

Exactly.

As I see it this move helps DC since they can now do whatever they want with Fables (make a movie, change characters, etc, etc.) without the author having any say as they also now own it 100% as the author says. At the same time they have enough lawyers to keep everyone else at bay for long enough that it won't matter.

phreack2• 3 years ago

According to the article, their contract still stands as it's legally binding, so DC specifically still needs to abide by it as it can't be unilaterally revoked. But the rest of the world doesn't, so there's loopholes if they do it not as DC but another entity.

gaganyaan• 3 years ago

I doubt that he's trying to put stuff he didn't work on into the public domain. This is more like an open source project maintainer relicensing their code and not that of contributors.

Everyone else can now write stories using the characters without worry. Anyone depicting the characters visually will want to make sure that they don't strongly resemble the art that DC presumably still has a copyright on.

I suspect if he got sued that he'd be able to get good legal help either from organizations like the EFF, or with crowdfunding. I'd certainly donate to that.

chronicsonic• 3 years ago

Alan Moore’s battles with them are well known. Corporate America sucked him dry and his hatred for them turned him into a Wizard.

egypturnash• 3 years ago

A cute gesture I guess but honestly "adult revisions of old public domain children's stories" is a really glutted genre in comics, there's a constant churn of people trying to build a reputation in the field with "what if Snow White had guns and a sword and grudge against the Three Big Hogs who run all the crime in this town" or whatever.

Effectively he's just handed this property off to DC for free, I sure wouldn't touch this without an expert IP lawyer willing to defend me for free and a deep dive into the exact copyright/trademark status of everything related to Fables. It might be a decent publicity stunt for a small publisher to bait DC into suing them, I'm sure there's a few people who are already pondering this and asking themselves who in their regular stable of artists and writers might be willing to spend a while on a risky project like this. And if they're willing to risk the whole company on it.

PS. In issue 17, "The Guns Of Snow White" pivots to "The Fabulous Adventures Of Hans My Hedgehog" after he was introduced as Snow's sidekick in issue 12 and kinda stole the show with his snarky ultraviolence act.

jshaqaw• 3 years ago

Not surprising that the omni-shambles which is WBD (Warner Bros Discovery) continues to hemorrhage any remaining goodwill with the creative community. There is a mandate there to get short term cash flow up to service all the accumulated acquisition leverage and nothing else.

axus• 3 years ago

More quality input for machine-generated art, hooray!

dalbasal• 3 years ago

I know we're supposed to be jaded by our past defeats, licking our wounds and cringing at the echoes of naive digital ideas we once thought had legs... I know that he's tricking me into liking him by writing well, with conviction and to the point. I know that it's hopeless now. That the empire has won. I do know these things, but... it's hard for me not to have hope.

Is it really possible that modern culture will all just be owned in one or three portfolios.

r3trohack3r• 3 years ago

We build the world we want one decision at a time.

omega3• 3 years ago

I was interested in the technicalities around releasing something into the public domain and found that there is precedent and case law around it already in the US:

“[T]he author or proprietor of any work made the subject of copyright by the Copyright Law may abandon his literary property in the work before he has published it, or his copyright in it after he has done so; but he must abandon it by some overt act which manifests his purpose to surrender his rights in the work, and to allow the public to copy it.”[0]

[0] https://www.lawcatalog.com/media/productattach/l/j/ljp_694pu...

orblivion• 3 years ago

Since you're on the theme of technicalities I have a slightly different technical question: How could his work ever be released, practically speaking?

Can he release it? No, according to his contract (per the OP blog post) he can only publish it through DC.

Can some other entity release it? They'd need a copy of it. But are there any copies that are actually 100% his work? If you alter a public domain work, I don't think that altered work is public domain. It's not like the GPL. I'd imagine the altered work belongs to the alter-er. Surely DC had some slight nuance, a watermark, a logo, etc on whatever copies they released. Could they file a suit against somebody who scans and re-releases an old release?

Maybe a old friend has a manuscript somewhere...

kevinmchugh5• 3 years ago

Well, it's comics. I can't imagine he somehow ended up with the copyright on the art.

Semaphor2• 3 years ago

This is not about releasing old works, but releasing new content based on it.

bazoom42• 3 years ago

Interesting move, but I think a likely outcome is that nothing happens. In theory other publishers like Marvel are now able to publish Fables content, but why would they? They have their own IP.

calibas• 3 years ago

The current laws are a mishmash of unethical backroom deals to keep trademarks and copyrights in the hands of large corporations, who can largely afford to buy the outcomes they want.

RunSet• 3 years ago

This is going into my file of counter-arguments for when others adopt the posture of:

"Without draconian legal fictions to the tune of intellectual property, all artists would cease creating entirely out of sheer greed."

jl6• 3 years ago

What precisely has been gifted to the public domain? As I understand it, Willingham was the writer, not the graphic artist, so the words are his to give away but the finished comic book product is not - is that right?

belenos462• 3 years ago

If he's the "creator" of record, then he can give away characters, setting, plots &c. The words and concepts, as you suggest. So derivative works based on the concepts would be kosher, photocopies of the existing books wouldn't. New art based on old scripts might fly, though my gut instinct says it wouldn't, but rewrites with new art probably would, that sort of thing.

staticman22• 3 years ago

No, without seeing his contract, you can't know what ownership he retained even if he's nominally the copyright holder. He can be the "copyright holder" of record and have exclusively licensed away the characters, settings, and plots in the contract. He obviously thinks he has not done this, but who is the "creator" of record tells you nothing.

Multicomp• 3 years ago

My question is how can he give away a character in a legal sense? Can characters be copyrighted? Mickey Mouse is a Disney Trademark, same with Spiderman and other name-brand 'on the cover' characters.

But what about if I make up a novel and sell it starring the character Peter Parker beat in the match ring in the early aughts film? I say this character is the same character, make up a story of how he recovered from his injury, opened a hot dog launching factory as a novelty theme park, then died of cancer.

The story is set in Earth 616 ostensibly, but I don't use Spider-man beyond that being the past of this main character.

Is that a derivative work? Can you copyright a name/character traits without using trademark law to focus on customer confusion?

EDIT: I think this is laudable what he did, I'm just curious if he even needed to do so in the first place, or if the law already allowed you to do this, in the same way that the Open Gaming License of DND 5E only gave you rights to use the rules system of 5E that copyright law already allowed you to do in the first place?

jccalhoun2• 3 years ago

Bleeding Cool points out that Willingham has don't this public domain thing before with his Elementals comic book: https://bleedingcool.com/comics/bill-willingham-declares-fab... (they link to this clip where Willingham says it: https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkx7E0hDkYBOAdDIvVymTsdPoFnv4g... )

From this perspective it seems like what he is doing by declaring things public domain he is basically calling the bluff of the companies. Whether it is whoever claims to own Elementals or DC, he seems to be hoping that someone will take up his offer and take the companies to court for him.

nottorp2• 3 years ago

Is he taking donations for the legal fees from the upcoming Marvel lawsuit? He’ll probably need them.

corethree• 3 years ago

Wait so does this mean it's legal to download scanned copies of the entire fable comic series?

njharman2• 3 years ago

What was once wholly owned by Bill Willingham is now owned by everyone

Public Domain IP (USA) is owned by no one. As the preceding line alludes to

surrendered my Fables property to the public domain

their property rights were surrendered. Now, no one has those rights (which are really the power to restrict other's "rights". copy"rights" are rights of denial, you can't copy, you can't perform, etc.). Meaning the property has returned to its natural state, unrestricted.

Pxtl• 3 years ago

So what exactly did Willingham own of Fables? Like, does this mean the books themselves are now free of copyright? Or is it a matter of owning the characters for derivative works?

Edit: his follow-up post says he signed away publishing and adaptation rights to DC... isn't that.... all of the rights?

scoofy• 3 years ago

We all owe this man a drink!

xoxxala• 3 years ago

DC has responded:

"The Fables comic books and graphic novels published by DC, and the storylines, characters and elements therein, are owned by DC and protected under the copyright laws of the United States and throughout the world in accordance with applicable law, and are not in the public domain. DC reserves all rights and will take such action as DC deems necessary or appropriate to protect its intellectual property rights."

https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/55100/dc-responds-bill-w...

justinclift3• 3 years ago

DC Comics have followed up with an official statement saying Fables is NOT in the public domain:

https://www.cbr.com/fables-dc-statement-not-public-domain/

Zuiii• 3 years ago

The Fables comic books and graphic novels published by DC, and the storylines, characters, and elements therein, are owned by DC and protected under the copyright laws of the United States and throughout the world in accordance with applicable law and are not in the public domain. DC reserves all rights and will take such action as DC deems necessary or appropriate to protect its intellectual property rights.

If Willingham indeed retains the rights to "storylines, characters, and elements therein", then these clowns are knowingly lying.

justinclift3• 3 years ago

Wonder if this is something the EFF would have an interest in?

glimshe• 3 years ago

It goes without saying that one should never let go of the ownership of their IP when signing a contract for distribution of said IP.

politelemon• 3 years ago

One thing I'm missing from all of this, how was it made public domain? Was there a special post he had to make or some legal document, or is it that substack post itself which is what makes it public domain?

Willingham sends Fables into the public domain

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