Matt Buck's Hack Cartoons

A summation of where we are with the copyright of content creators from Shane Richmond at the Telegraph.

Matt Buck’s animated drawings

One of the most difficult things about making things is knowing what your rights are when you try to sell them. I know lots of very experienced professionals who are in ignorance of this basic business issue. This ignorance can lead to a lot of difficult financial and legal problems. The most basic confusion I come across is that between possession of copyright and the licensing of rights.

Briefly, at any time an artist makes a piece of art he has copyright automatically, without doing anything. It is an 'implicit' right earned by the skill and time and labour which the artwork has taken. There's a link explaining more about it here. You can download a pdf factsheet here. Importantly, before any self-employed artist has no legal claim to copyright, they have to have signed it away, in writing. Once this basic legal idea is understood, things can seem a lot clearer.

Essentially, what creative people like me sell are the rights to use our artwork, usually, exclusively. I will write some more about this.

Matt Buck’s animated drawings

An old problem has raised it's head again - people stealing your images and then passing them off as their own work.

One of my colleagues, Andy Davey, has found people 'borrowing' or stealing parts of his drawings for use in their photoshopped internet mash-ups. And they've been appearing on popular internet blog sites, such as Guido Fawkes and Ian Dale's Diary. The latest one turned up on Iain's diary over the weekend.

To be fair to Iain and Guido, both have sort-of apologised for using unattributed images, but there is a serious responsibility to check where artwork is coming from if you are going to publish it on the web.

Old media had to develop a system of employing artists and creators to help decorate their products, it would be nice to think that successful web sites could start to think about doing that too. After all, the visitor benefits are obvious - everybody likes drawings which are rude about politicians.

Perhaps one simple solution would be for all artwork posted to political blog sites like these to be signed - and noted with a URL - that way, we get to know who thinks what. And also, Andy would have some chance to track down the person who 'borrowed' his work.

There is an interesting exchange between my colleague Morten Morland and Iain Dale about this issue at the link below.

Face-off

Some of Andy Davey's borrowed belongings