[profh0011]

BEST thing I have EVER read from this guy.  EVER.

03-05-2015 NEAL ADAMS writes:

DC and Marvel, the companies, have NEVER created any-thing! Like publishers of

[crashryan]

Adams is right, of course, but I wouldn't hold out much hope for help from the Supreme Court. Whichever candidate wins the presidency, the court's pro-business bias is likely to continue. All the copyright legislation since 1978 has been crafted to enable big media/entertainment/digital/etc. corporations to capture ownership of an increasing share of creative works and to extract profit from them forever. Even a "liberal" court (which in the US means a court only slightly to the right of center) is unlikely to undo the damage. It would cost too many big players way too much money.

An even-handed court would throw out most of the DMCA and its bastard offspring and return some power to the actual creators and to the public domain. Not likely, though. The country is busy spreading this nonsense around the globe through trade deals.

The only way to stop the sort of exploitation Adams decries would be for ALL creators to refuse to do work for hire for ANY company. Of course that ain't gonna happen. The suits know that somewhere in this interconnected world there is someone who'll work for less and surrender creator's rights "to get a foot in the door." (Or to pay the rent!) The alternative would be a mass worldwide refusal to honor extortionate laws. A dozen or a hundred artists producing independent new work with characters they created would be sued into submission. Twenty thousand of them could conceivably win concessions.

Whenever this sort of action is suggested, the affected start crying about disrespecting the Rule of Law as if the laws in question were handed down by God Almighty. In fact the laws were written by those who benefit by them and enacted by their hired representatives in Congress. It's only through creative disobedience that individuals harmed by work for hire and eternal copyright stand a chance of tilting the scales back toward balance.

[mr_goldenage]

Not that I am advocating this but...

One could always scan all the Non Public Domain "stuff" and in it's digital form....disseminate it through the internet which would impact the Publishers who defy the human cost of and to creators (writers, artist and the like) thus impacting their all mighty profit line. This has already been done in the music field and has spread to movies, why not the printed media. As one has seen since digital media came into existence this has been going on in all types of media, comics included. Does anyone remember the site H33T? Or download sites like that one like Pirate Bay ( Megaload and the like) or any similar sites. So the artist suffer, yes they do, but the impact has been greater for the companies that put out all this "Stuff". One can see that such sites are being systematically being shut down or sued, or the owners jailed or attempted to. But Wikileaks does this and no one shuts them down. Again I do not promote this type of behavior but it does happen. Just my thought.

Richard Boucher AkA Mr_Goldenage