Feb 11 2009
Cartoons & Copyright
It seems that in the last few weeks I’m finding more and more cartoons used on the Internet without credit being given. Sometimes the cartoons are posted on someone’s blog. Sometimes a cartoon is used as a person’s online photo.
Cartoons are popular for a reason. Cartoons make us smile, they can make us think. Cartoons can use satire or humor to make a point. If you draw a cartoon for yourself, then you own the copyright and you can do with it whatever you wish. But all those cartoons you find on the funny pages are copyrighted by someone else. So are political cartoons and cartoons found in magazines.
Let’s say there was a political cartoon on the editorial page of the Sunday paper that really sparked your idea for a blog post. It would be hard to write your post without showing the cartoon, so you scan the cartoon and add it to your post. To be fair, this usually happens because the user doesn’t realize that permission must be obtained for cartoons. This isn’t deliberate theft, but it is still theft.
Although you may never have a problem, you could be sued. If this happens, and you’re lucky, you’ll only be asked to remove the cartoon from your site. If you’re not lucky, you could end up in court. How willing to gamble are you?
If you add a cartoon to your site, unless you have asked for and received permission to use the cartoon, you are infringing on someone else’s rights.
How does one go about obtaining permission to use a cartoon? The same way you obtain permission to use a written article. If the cartoon was in the newspaper, you contact the Rights Dept. of the newspaper. If you’ve been following along with my posts, you know that I showed you in Asking For Permission: Step 3, “Making the ‘Rights’ Choice,” how to find and contact a copyright holder. I’ll demonstrate how to find the copyright holder for a cartoon in my next post, “Tracking Down the Copyright Holder for a Cartoon.”
© 2009 Anne Wallingford. All Rights Reserved.
Speaking of seeing cartoons, etc., that people use in their posts and other sites, there’s an even more serious problem. That’s finding such a thing online and “hot linking” to it to display on your site. It’s worse than just scanning or copying it and using it, it’s also a theft of services. So this is a double theft. It’s illegal use of copyrighted material, as you point out, but when a person hot links, they use the URL of the picture where it’s originally displayed to display the picture on their own site. That uses the original URL’s resources for holding and displaying the stolen picture.