Slashdot Mirror
Copyright and Webcomics - A New Trend?
Selanit writes "There's an article at Publisher's Weekly reporting that Seven Seas Entertainment, an up-and-coming publisher of English-language manga, has adopted a new copyright policy. When contracting to publish webcomics like Earthsong or Inverloch, they offer the artists full control over the copyright. This is highly unusual in comics - most companies use joint-ownership arrangements. The founder of Seven Seas asked himself 'For properties that were already written and illustrated without any input from Seven Seas, how could I justify asking for partial ownership?' And apparently, the answer led him to abandon that practice. It'll be interesting to see if this helps his company attract new talent. (There's a previous Slashdot article that may be relevant.)"
This is great to hear. They don't even go around suing preteens and single parents. I wish everyone was this nice.
Way to get press coverage for implementing an idea from the 70s. The big fight over creator owned comics happened years ago. While many mainstream comics remain owned by the publishers and not the creators, there are many comic properties owned by their creators now. There are publishers founded on the idea. David Sim's Cerebus is perhaps the most famous; he was one of the early people to make a big ruckus over the importance of creator owned comics.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Shush - you'll scare the fangirls away.
Many distribution contracts says that they own the work, and this may have made sense in the old days when printing/etc was new, but now it's clearly the author/artist who makes the book what it is, the publisher is merely the middle-man.
If your contract is worded this way, don't sign. You never need hosting or a printer badly enough to sign all your creative work away.