Putting my money where my mouth is

If what I've said about using cartoons is true, at least this post should elicit some more reactions than my previous ones.

Last time I said there are many ways to find good cartoons. One thing I wanted to add: please don't steal them...

Sure it’s dead easy to scan a cartoon or just copy/paste it off the internet. But it’s a violation of the intellectual rights of artists who take pride in their work, and who have to eat too.

What do you think? 

Comments

[Liam]

I'm afraid that I can't ever claim to be without guilt here...I've used pictures etc in the past.

However, with sites like Flickr I've found that for pennies it's easy to get good quality images.

And now, having recently seen some of my work quoted in someone else's presentation without attribution I know how it feels. Sue and I try really hard with all our training materials to credit stuff where we know where it comes from (it does get a bit tedious saying "...and here's something else from Bill Quirke..."!).

But at the presentation I mentioned, this guy had cut and pasted something I'd spent hours thinking through and debating with Sue. And anyone watching would have thought "...this guy has some original ideas...".

OK, we've not produced nearly as much new thinking as someone like Quirke who is used unattributed all the time...but it is a horrible feeling when someone has stolen your ideas.

Liam

[Graeme Ginsberg]

I used to provide strategy consulting for music and entertainment corporateions. IP theft as a result of new technoologies - particularly peer-to-peer (P2P) - was, and still is, a major problem.

In the music industry, the artists have become increasingly powerful in controlling the rights to their recorded work, although record companies still tend to dictate, particularly to newly-signed artists.

But, with the rise of P2P and lost sales as a result, they've had to adapt to survive. Interestingly, EMI has recently taken the DRM (digital rights management) off their music files on iTunes. This is a very controversial and progressive move for lots of reasons I won't go into here --- IP is a very complex issue that has massive repercussions for internal communication. 'll no doubt be posting about elsewhere.

For now, it's worth mentioning that in my capacity as consultant for these organisations, I was torn between considering what was best for the organisations as opposed to the artists. Difficult since I have a number of artist friends. Which side was my bread and butter buttered...?

Ultimately, I believe that creators' work should be protected to the extent of the law as they would like it to be - they've also increasingly wanted to take the protection off - although I've certainly been guilty of nabbing stuff off the internet. I think it's about commercial versus personal use.

Interestingly, as a slight tangent, when it comes to music and film, the US has a different legal position to the UK. In the US, they have something called 'fair use', where individuals are allowed to copy the music they own so long as it's for private use. The Sony Betamax lawsuit in 1983/1984, where the film industry became petrified about new video technologies and notably Universal City Studios tried to nip it in the bud but failed, was a fascinating landmark in this area.

The Supreme Court denial statement for the Betamax case can be found on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's website - very interesting reading: http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/betamax/betamax_supreme_ct.pdf

Graeme

[Alex Manchester]

I remember reading a while back, maybe on Neville Hobson's blog, about the idea that copyright or no copyright, when something is on the open, non-firewalled parts of the web it's up there for all and sundry to see (that's the point) but inevitably this also means it can be copied. Most people are honest with this sort of thing, but even if 95% are honest an 5% aren't that's still a lot of potential people who will use it.

I guess there's a need to be very vigilant, and with images and documents an effective method of protection is to watermark something, but this obviously has many drawbacks and limitations.

On a different note, Jereon, it's great to see one of your cartoons up here and I wonder, what's the view of authors and readers on this blog regarding humour in internal comms?

Obviously done badly it can be a disaster but thinking positively...?

[Sue]

I wonder whether this is one of those things that has to get personal before it hits home? I have to admit, like Liam, I've used copyright photographs before. But these days our presentations get sent around so many people that purely from a self-protection perspective I'm paranoid about not using images that might be copyright.

I've also worked for a CEO who, like Graeme, worked in the music industry and used to get very jumpy if we thought about using music or film clips in conferences without paying for them.

And I also avoided a nearly very embarrassing scenario in my early days, when I'd set up a meeting with Bill Quirke for one of my colleagues. She wanted to show him 'her' communication escalator that she used in all her plans, and wondered if he could incorporate in a workshop he was running for us. Until I pointed out that actually 'her' communication escalator was 'his', and he might not be too impressed if she proudly unveiled it and gave him a lecture on how it worked ... (the dangers of unattributed materials!)