Dear Alan Forner, Thank you for the concise explanation on how to use my "drum machine". I will write down your instructions right away and go use that thing. Sincerely, Fruit Juice Joey
Good question. A few different levels... 1. Art show--typically shows once in a gallery 2. Music videos--goes on my youtube/vimeo page, someone else's youtube/vimeo 3. Cable access--airs on cable access one or more times, goes on online archive
Does it make a difference if I make money or not? How much? Perhaps more importantly, what are the boundaries of fair use? I continually build a library of public domain videos, but occasionally I rip off youtube if I need something really specific. I heavily process all the videos I take off youtube... for the most part they are unrecognizable. Or I use just a tiny portion of the frame, like sampling in music where someone takes one second.
The gray area I worry about has to do with "upcycling" videos. Like, what if I take a video and don't make it unrecognizable, but actually IMPROVE its quality? The audio equivalent would be, like, making a bootleg remaster. This sounds dubious when I put it this way...
I think it's fair use, but what if it isn't? And how would I kow?
One of the reasons I am thinking about it now is that a project I am involved with may be licensed by a real TV channel. If that did happen, I would want to know that I could cover my butt....
option 1 dont tell anyone what the source is to any of your (video)samples and hope the copyright owners don't notice or care. if they do end up caring, you deal with cease and desist/destroy all copies requests then. brace for suit, or comply or something.
option 2 contact rights holders and ask them if they are cool with it. tell them how much money is being made.. if substantial, then offer them a percentage of potential profits (points on the package) or a flat fee. offer to credit their work in a list of samples in the credits
i can only speak from a dude shootin the shit looking at the music world standpoint but i feel like in the new glut of info era, where money is diminished into a vaporous 'long tail' more people are getting away with option 1 and if things get successful they clear shit later.
if this is bugging you, and you feel like you are stealing, then you probably are stealing not that stealing is bad, artistically speaking. i for one thinking stealing and altering recognizable things is dope as fuck!
Thank you, that is some great food for thought. I think I tend to be on the paranoid side... if you have seen any of my videos, you can see that they are abstract as hell and super processed. But I feel I have gotten lazy when it comes to building a video library... I used to only take stuff I felt good about ripping (thank you NASA) and copyright-free, ancient stuff, but since I got that little button on my browser for youtube I'm like "I need some footage of palm trees in twilight, STAT" or whatever. Everything I take, I process the f*** out of.
But through talking it out, I think I am going to increasingly go with Option 3: tape your own damn footage! Oh and also, steal from NASA/FDA/Centers for Disease Control/etc.
The answer to "What is fair use?" is "Whatever you can make a case for in court." Anyone can sue you for violating their copyright, and then it just depends on how good your lawyer/case is.
I had to go pretty deep on this stuff when I was handling DMCA copyright takedowns for a video site, and even the lawyers I was working with admitted that it's impossible to know if something is "fair use" until the court verdict.
A component of the new work that is looked at is how "transformative" the work is, which means that by heavily altering and distorting your source materials, you are helping your case. Another aspect they look at is the financial side, and by making money off your work, you are slightly harming your case, but not terribly so, because your deeply transformed work does not threaten the sales of the original.
3. How Do You Know If It's Fair Use? There are no clear-cut rules for deciding what's fair use and there are no "automatic" classes of fair uses. Fair use is decided by a judge, on a case by case basis, after balancing the four factors listed in section 107 of the Copyright statute. The factors to be considered include:
a.The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes -- Courts are more likely to find fair use where the use is for noncommercial purposes. b.The nature of the copyrighted work -- A particular use is more likely to be fair where the copied work is factual rather than creative. c.The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole -- A court will balance this factor toward a finding of fair use where the amount taken is small or insignificant in proportion to the overall work. d.The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work -- If the court finds the newly created work is not a substitute product for the copyrighted work, it will be more likely to weigh this factor in favor of fair use.
copyright Electronic Frontier Foundation 2002
I try to be a good netizen.... I credit everything I put on my tumblr (except for my secret blog, when I credit only if I'm not being lazy)
oh god you guys if you knew what i was dealing with right now w/r/t Fair Use and copyrighted materials in the classroom??? Professors getting sued for $100,000 by publishers because you gave your kids a pdf of half of a chapter from a book that the library owns Or like, there's a scholar who puts his own articles online for free, but it's then illegal for me to give my kids a printed out version of it, I have to give them the url to his site and have them click on it themselves just making your syllabus a total nightmare everyone freaking out gone are the days of sending your class a pdf or a chapter excerpt even though literally NO ONE can actually tell you what falls under Fair Use and what doesn't. You're like "I thought if it was less than 25% of the text it fell under Fair Use" and the school attorneys are just like "WE DON'T KNOW! PLAY IT SAFE!" and filling this legal gap between publishers suing professors and professors just trying to assign readings are big corporations who are trying to make money as middlemen. So now for the first time I am required to send my reader to this company than then gets the copyright permissions FOR me, for a fee of course. this means my reader from last semester, which was free on our course website, will cost my kids like $200+ next semester if I do it legally. My only other option is to get the library to put all the books on reserve and then each kid has to go personally photocopy whatever chapter excerpt I've assigned, every day, which even that I don't think is technically legal. It's such a bummer. I understand copyright, I get that artists/authors should be paid for their work, but in an academic setting it is just so crazy and getting crazier. Like now journal subscriptions are bankrupting the entire budgets of school libraries, because just one institution subscription to some science journal can be as much as $10,000 a year, because What If Students Photocopy Articles From It, We Don't Get Money From That!!!! What on earth is going on I want authors to be protected but I also do think there should be something special about the realm of education/academia/teaching.....or maybe there shouldn't be? Maybe having access to everything you want, to educate your students, isn't important...maybe picking course materials based on which have the cheapest permissions is a good thing...?? Like I'm literally just not going to teach this Freud essay next term because we can't find a copy we're allowed to use. That's pretty unreal. And Freud's been dead for a million years, it's like 90% of the time the permissions money isn't even going to an author/artist but rather to a publishing house.
Tell your students to go to the alley behind the library. Someone who may or may not look like me will sell them those materials for a mere $100 a pop. HALF PRICE!
OK. What you need to do is set up an online learning portal, and, here is the important part, set up an IP address in Russia. Better yet go ahead and port your domain to a Russian server. Do your class like normal... log-in to the projector, type terminal:rus.11 into the address bar, and you should be able to set up your virtual essay library there. NO copyright laws!! BOOM! Pro tip: to take a shortcut directly to Russian bootleg PDFs, query "Frued" into the search engine.
Also, I solved my artistic freesourcing ethical dilemma...... from now on, all of my videos will be taken exclusively from videotaped court proceedings involving Fair Use deliberations.
Licenses aren't very hard to write. They are just letters that confirm what it is you want to use, how long and where you want to use it. You have the licensor (the other party) confirm that they are the legitimate owner of the work in question and have them affirm that this grant of license will not infringe on any other party's rights. You say something about how disputes would be settled and both sign it. You'd probably want to ask for the right to edit and incorporate the "licensed work" with audio, visual and still images from other sources.
For your work, I would think free, worldwide, perpetual, non-exclusive, licenses for re-editing, on-line, broadcast, theatrical, venues/public performances, in exchange for credit, would be fine. Maybe a small fee - $10 - if you feel like it.
You can find the basic elements on line by searching "video license" or something. Edit and expand on that. It's a lot like looking at recipes on-line and making your own version out of three or four others.
I met someone the other day who said they had a family member in the music biz. What do they do? They produce private events. I was like hmm I bet business is booming.... do you think this might be one aspect of the music industry that could actually make gains as the $ gap widens?
I finally bought the new Ariel (I'm saying first name basis here). When I ripped the plastic off the vinyl to experience the first level of delight in a newly acquired, coveted music, my eyes lost their sparkle. Really boring cover art... not even bad in a good way. The image has bad jpg artefacts. The type is rudimentary. The full-bleed vinyl sized photo was badly digitized not-on-purpose. I actually think someone just put together a CD layout and then simply made it bigger for the album. The liner notes contained dumb lettering mistakes (having to do with text being drawn at different sizes, then scanned). No designer was listed on the credit details, so evidently no one cares how it looks. And this is on 4AD! I'm saying, design has become badly devalued. People don't use professionals like they should. Maybe they think that they want to have something look bad.... as with anything, it takes as much skill to make something look bad-on-purpose as to look good on purpose. How about this.... if you want to design a record that looks amateurish, use a Xerox machine, not Photoshop.
My general feeling is that, while we live in an increasingly visual world, simultaneously there is a decline in visual literacy.
I think "shitty photoshop" is kind of that Ariel guy's vibe? Don't his records also sound like they were mastered underwater in 1983? I agree though, it is odd to me though that 4AD would sign off on it. This is the peril of giving artists full creative control, maybe?
“At first you acknowledge that the artist’s view is wider than your own, otherwise you would not be entranced by them. The second stage is normal despondency because they haven’t actually noticed you on a personal level. The third stage is assassination.” — Morrissey: on celebrity worship
i suggest licensing a D L Alvarez image and like some hand-drawn "heavy metal lettering" widely spaced, with an overlay of color made to appear as though through a colorful newspaper "Ben Day" mesh, as an over-inked silk screen or even wood cut.
Pandora is in a perfect spot to develop compelling personalized audio advertising that would be pleasant to listen to and patent it. Instead they are being lazy.
I would like to see more parity between platforms. But you achieve parity by bringing the rates that are astonishingly low (satellite) up to something more reasonable. You don't achieve parity by bringing the rates that are basically fair (Pandora) down to astonishingly low levels. It's just another way of screwing artists.
all entertainment economy discussions end with tee shirts
conversation in 2019: "the movie file is just a promo item for the theater tour, which doesn't make enough at the door so they made merch, you should buy the tee shirt to support the actors and director"
Check out my latest venture: REMOVE THY SHOES SHIRTS Co.
I partnered up with a person who pretends to hate music culture outright.
We have made an initial tee shirt of snoopy and woodstock in jazzy Joe Cool Saxophone Mode with the words Ambient Music written in schultz font underneith
on cheap heather gray shirts i got at the weird place on 82nd which were all i could afford at the time
Is copyright violation of Snoopy and Woodstock different than not paying for Forkmin's music? I think we probably all agree that it is. But playing a modified form of "What is a sandwich?" I wonder what the difference is...
Initially I thought perhaps it's that Forktin is currently and actively making a living from his music. But on the flip side, many people are making a living from Snoopy (The peanuts characters are owned by Peanuts Worldwide, LLC, a joint venture of the Iconix Brand Group (which owns 80%) and Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates (20%)). In fact, the fate of a lot of people are tied up in Snoopy as Iconix Brand Group is a publicly traded company (NASDAQ:ICON).
I think social reality makes big different than small. Two entities "doing the same thing" are not really doing the same thing if one is very small and the other is very big.
Is not paying for a Frogtor download different than not paying for a Phil Collins download? I would say yes, at least until Frogtor has established economic security for himself and his loved ones.
@Marc_Zuckerburg I don't buy that argument. By that logic the Calvin pissing on things is okay because Bill Waterson chose not to merchandise that character.
At what point does size of organization or profit lower the ethical threshold for theft?
I think rather than size of organization/profit the true issue here is culture. Big cultural things get appropriated with less ethical concern.
not that it really matters with where this discussion is going, but just for the record saying that i make a living from my music would be a GROSS over-estimate of my income. the truth of the matter is that i've either been dirt poor, unemployed and scraping by on random moneys, or i have been working a day job while making music around it, or i have borrowed money in order to get by.
also, we only made 15 units.
also, sampling is fun.
also, i didn't design that shirt.
also i think "ownership" is a complicated and multi-faceted concept.
I love that shirt I also think it makes a dif whether we're talking about Sony Corp or Forkman / Peanuts or Kate Beaton, when it comes to "stealing" and/or "sampling" or whatever.
I am not a full bore capitalist in the sense that I think someone can ultimately make "enough" money, after which I no longer really feel their "right" to continue making money. Phil Collins has enough money. Snoopy does too. Plus Charles Schulz is dead. Once the creator is dead I don't give a FLYING FUCK about copyright
@Mikey, you ask smart questions that make me think. It's cool. But Forkman making 15 units of a conceptual joke is very different than people not paying for his music in my opinion. 15 people buying a weird hand-printed Snoopy shirt has less of an impact that 15 people pirating Frogner's music. The effects of 15 copyright infringement Joe Cool shirts are not immediately felt by Charles M. Schulz's family, the effects of 15 people pirating dude's music mean fewer chances for him to pay the bills, eat food, survive.
Also, as much as I am a huge fan and admirer of Bill Watterson, making a weird next-level very limited edition art shirt using Calvin and Hobbes' image is pretty hilarious and inoffensive at this point. I feel the same way about Garfield, Tintin, the Simpsons, Beavis and Butthead, and a ton of other famous cartoons which have been traced and/or poorly rendered by vast numbers of people to promote their own beliefs/paranoias.
I think using the work of someone like R.Crumb without permission (something that happens frequently) would be more questionable. R.Crumb is alive and well and still needs money to support his growing family.
There are a lot of grey areas. Let's say if someone was hired on by Hergé (Tintin's creator) relatives to pick-up the Tintin comic book series where it ended and made a bunch more books I would feel a lot more distraught, because that clearly is fucking with someone's legacy. And also, because I am a nerd when it comes to comics, I happen to know that it was in Hergé's will that no one would get to draw Tintin after his death (Tintin dies in the last, unfinished, Tintin book).
Also, comic book authors getting fucked over is not uncommon: Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster all created superheroes which turned into billion dollar franchises and still they all pretty much died in poverty.
Yeah, I am in 100% agreement that the shirt is both okay and totally different than the scenario I was proposing.
I'm just curious (as always) with where the line is. It bothers me that it is a hazy grey area. I like black and white, but I know it's not always possible to define things neatly (ie, the Sandwich).
It's interesting that it's not the creator's choice for their work to achieve a level of fame and cultural impact that allows us to feel "ownership" over it. We can say they are usually well-compensated so it's okay... but they never made the choice!
What was the original copyright laws for fair use public domain? So many years after you are dead? Would be cool to return to that, or use that as the ethical line in the sand.
I hate when people use stuff without permission to advertise a product. I also mostly hate it when they do have permission. Still, I find myself thoroughly enjoying poorly made wooden Looney Tunes characters, or weird Soviet-era "Disney" animals. I also love shirts like the ones Froknog is making. I love an ugly reggae Bart Simpson wallet. I want to silkscreen my own favorite cartoon character on a shirt.
I have very black and white opinions but sometimes the greys challenge me in ways that I feel more grown-up, or even more decided afterwards.
Comments
Thank you for the concise explanation on how to use my "drum machine".
I will write down your instructions right away and go use that thing.
Sincerely,
Fruit Juice Joey
1. Art show--typically shows once in a gallery
2. Music videos--goes on my youtube/vimeo page, someone else's youtube/vimeo
3. Cable access--airs on cable access one or more times, goes on online archive
Does it make a difference if I make money or not? How much?
Perhaps more importantly, what are the boundaries of fair use? I continually build a library of public domain videos, but occasionally I rip off youtube if I need something really specific. I heavily process all the videos I take off youtube... for the most part they are unrecognizable. Or I use just a tiny portion of the frame, like sampling in music where someone takes one second.
The gray area I worry about has to do with "upcycling" videos. Like, what if I take a video and don't make it unrecognizable, but actually IMPROVE its quality? The audio equivalent would be, like, making a bootleg remaster. This sounds dubious when I put it this way...
I think it's fair use, but what if it isn't? And how would I kow?
One of the reasons I am thinking about it now is that a project I am involved with may be licensed by a real TV channel. If that did happen, I would want to know that I could cover my butt....
dont tell anyone what the source is to any of your (video)samples and hope the copyright owners don't notice or care. if they do end up caring, you deal with cease and desist/destroy all copies requests then. brace for suit, or comply or something.
option 2
contact rights holders and ask them if they are cool with it. tell them how much money is being made.. if substantial, then offer them a percentage of potential profits (points on the package) or a flat fee.
offer to credit their work in a list of samples in the credits
i can only speak from a dude shootin the shit looking at the music world standpoint but i
feel like in the new glut of info era, where money is diminished into a vaporous 'long tail' more people are getting away with option 1 and if things get successful they clear shit later.
if this is bugging you, and you feel like you are stealing, then you probably are stealing
not that stealing is bad, artistically speaking.
i for one thinking stealing and altering recognizable things is dope as fuck!
anyway, maybe ask Jib Slizzard what he do tho?
But through talking it out, I think I am going to increasingly go with Option 3: tape your own damn footage! Oh and also, steal from NASA/FDA/Centers for Disease Control/etc.
I had to go pretty deep on this stuff when I was handling DMCA copyright takedowns for a video site, and even the lawyers I was working with admitted that it's impossible to know if something is "fair use" until the court verdict.
A component of the new work that is looked at is how "transformative" the work is, which means that by heavily altering and distorting your source materials, you are helping your case. Another aspect they look at is the financial side, and by making money off your work, you are slightly harming your case, but not terribly so, because your deeply transformed work does not threaten the sales of the original.
There are no clear-cut rules for deciding what's fair use and there are no "automatic" classes of fair uses. Fair use is decided by a judge, on a case by case basis, after balancing the four factors listed in section 107 of the Copyright statute. The factors to be considered include:
a.The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes -- Courts are more likely to find fair use where the use is for noncommercial purposes.
b.The nature of the copyrighted work -- A particular use is more likely to be fair where the copied work is factual rather than creative.
c.The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole -- A court will balance this factor toward a finding of fair use where the amount taken is small or insignificant in proportion to the overall work.
d.The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work -- If the court finds the newly created work is not a substitute product for the copyrighted work, it will be more likely to weigh this factor in favor of fair use.
copyright Electronic Frontier Foundation 2002
I try to be a good netizen.... I credit everything I put on my tumblr (except for my secret blog, when I credit only if I'm not being lazy)
you guys if you knew what i was dealing with right now w/r/t Fair Use and copyrighted materials in the classroom???
Professors getting sued for $100,000 by publishers because you gave your kids a pdf of half of a chapter from a book that the library owns
Or like, there's a scholar who puts his own articles online for free, but it's then illegal for me to give my kids a printed out version of it, I have to give them the url to his site and have them click on it themselves
just making your syllabus a total nightmare
everyone freaking out
gone are the days of sending your class a pdf or a chapter excerpt
even though literally NO ONE can actually tell you what falls under Fair Use and what doesn't. You're like "I thought if it was less than 25% of the text it fell under Fair Use" and the school attorneys are just like "WE DON'T KNOW! PLAY IT SAFE!"
and filling this legal gap between publishers suing professors and professors just trying to assign readings are big corporations who are trying to make money as middlemen. So now for the first time I am required to send my reader to this company than then gets the copyright permissions FOR me, for a fee of course.
this means my reader from last semester, which was free on our course website, will cost my kids like $200+ next semester if I do it legally. My only other option is to get the library to put all the books on reserve and then each kid has to go personally photocopy whatever chapter excerpt I've assigned, every day, which even that I don't think is technically legal. It's such a bummer. I understand copyright, I get that artists/authors should be paid for their work, but in an academic setting it is just so crazy and getting crazier. Like now journal subscriptions are bankrupting the entire budgets of school libraries, because just one institution subscription to some science journal can be as much as $10,000 a year, because What If Students Photocopy Articles From It, We Don't Get Money From That!!!! What on earth is going on
I want authors to be protected but I also do think there should be something special about the realm of education/academia/teaching.....or maybe there shouldn't be? Maybe having access to everything you want, to educate your students, isn't important...maybe picking course materials based on which have the cheapest permissions is a good thing...?? Like I'm literally just not going to teach this Freud essay next term because we can't find a copy we're allowed to use. That's pretty unreal. And Freud's been dead for a million years, it's like 90% of the time the permissions money isn't even going to an author/artist but rather to a publishing house.
I just don't know
For your work, I would think free, worldwide, perpetual, non-exclusive, licenses for re-editing, on-line, broadcast, theatrical, venues/public performances, in exchange for credit, would be fine. Maybe a small fee - $10 - if you feel like it.
You can find the basic elements on line by searching "video license" or something. Edit and expand on that. It's a lot like looking at recipes on-line and making your own version out of three or four others.
Good luck!
I finally bought the new Ariel (I'm saying first name basis here). When I ripped the plastic off the vinyl to experience the first level of delight in a newly acquired, coveted music, my eyes lost their sparkle. Really boring cover art... not even bad in a good way. The image has bad jpg artefacts. The type is rudimentary. The full-bleed vinyl sized photo was badly digitized not-on-purpose. I actually think someone just put together a CD layout and then simply made it bigger for the album. The liner notes contained dumb lettering mistakes (having to do with text being drawn at different sizes, then scanned). No designer was listed on the credit details, so evidently no one cares how it looks. And this is on 4AD! I'm saying, design has become badly devalued. People don't use professionals like they should. Maybe they think that they want to have something look bad.... as with anything, it takes as much skill to make something look bad-on-purpose as to look good on purpose. How about this.... if you want to design a record that looks amateurish, use a Xerox machine, not Photoshop.
My general feeling is that, while we live in an increasingly visual world, simultaneously there is a decline in visual literacy.
http://foundmagazine.com/2012/09/going-to-portland/
— Morrissey: on celebrity worship
Hey, anyone got any strong feelings about this Pandora bailout?
i suggest licensing a D L Alvarez image and like some hand-drawn "heavy metal lettering" widely spaced, with an overlay of color made to appear as though through a colorful newspaper "Ben Day" mesh, as an over-inked silk screen or even wood cut.
Pandora is in a perfect spot to develop compelling personalized audio advertising that would be pleasant to listen to and patent it. Instead they are being lazy.
conversation in 2019: "the movie file is just a promo item for the theater tour, which doesn't make enough at the door so they made merch, you should buy the tee shirt to support the actors and director"
Check out my latest venture:
REMOVE THY SHOES SHIRTS Co.
I partnered up with a person who pretends to hate music culture outright.
We have made an initial tee shirt of snoopy and woodstock in jazzy Joe Cool Saxophone Mode with the words Ambient Music written in schultz font underneith
on cheap heather gray shirts i got at the weird place on 82nd which were all i could afford at the time
http://www.etsy.com/shop/removethyshoesshirts
$15 plus $4 shipping.
S, M, L, XL
local delivery also available. cash/paypal. hollar at a dogg.
Initially I thought perhaps it's that Forktin is currently and actively making a living from his music. But on the flip side, many people are making a living from Snoopy (The peanuts characters are owned by Peanuts Worldwide, LLC, a joint venture of the Iconix Brand Group (which owns 80%) and Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates (20%)). In fact, the fate of a lot of people are tied up in Snoopy as Iconix Brand Group is a publicly traded company (NASDAQ:ICON).
Is not paying for a Frogtor download different than not paying for a Phil Collins download? I would say yes, at least until Frogtor has established economic security for himself and his loved ones.
; - )
At what point does size of organization or profit lower the ethical threshold for theft?
I think rather than size of organization/profit the true issue here is culture. Big cultural things get appropriated with less ethical concern.
the truth of the matter is that i've either been dirt poor, unemployed and scraping by on random moneys, or i have been working a day job while making music around it, or i have borrowed money in order to get by.
also, we only made 15 units.
also, sampling is fun.
also, i didn't design that shirt.
also i think "ownership" is a complicated and multi-faceted concept.
also, i think there are many sandwiches
also, girls eating sandwiches
also, steal guitars
also, it takes two to make a thing go right
I also think it makes a dif whether we're talking about Sony Corp or Forkman / Peanuts or Kate Beaton, when it comes to "stealing" and/or "sampling" or whatever.
I am not a full bore capitalist in the sense that I think someone can ultimately make "enough" money, after which I no longer really feel their "right" to continue making money. Phil Collins has enough money. Snoopy does too. Plus Charles Schulz is dead. Once the creator is dead I don't give a FLYING FUCK about copyright
It's cool.
But Forkman making 15 units of a conceptual joke is very different than people not paying for his music in my opinion. 15 people buying a weird hand-printed Snoopy shirt has less of an impact that 15 people pirating Frogner's music. The effects of 15 copyright infringement Joe Cool shirts are not immediately felt by Charles M. Schulz's family, the effects of 15 people pirating dude's music mean fewer chances for him to pay the bills, eat food, survive.
Also, as much as I am a huge fan and admirer of Bill Watterson, making a weird next-level very limited edition art shirt using Calvin and Hobbes' image is pretty hilarious and inoffensive at this point. I feel the same way about Garfield, Tintin, the Simpsons, Beavis and Butthead, and a ton of other famous cartoons which have been traced and/or poorly rendered by vast numbers of people to promote their own beliefs/paranoias.
I think using the work of someone like R.Crumb without permission (something that happens frequently) would be more questionable. R.Crumb is alive and well and still needs money to support his growing family.
There are a lot of grey areas.
Let's say if someone was hired on by Hergé (Tintin's creator) relatives to pick-up the Tintin comic book series where it ended and made a bunch more books I would feel a lot more distraught, because that clearly is fucking with someone's legacy. And also, because I am a nerd when it comes to comics, I happen to know that it was in Hergé's will that no one would get to draw Tintin after his death (Tintin dies in the last, unfinished, Tintin book).
Also, comic book authors getting fucked over is not uncommon: Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster all created superheroes which turned into billion dollar franchises and still they all pretty much died in poverty.
I'm just curious (as always) with where the line is. It bothers me that it is a hazy grey area. I like black and white, but I know it's not always possible to define things neatly (ie, the Sandwich).
It's interesting that it's not the creator's choice for their work to achieve a level of fame and cultural impact that allows us to feel "ownership" over it. We can say they are usually well-compensated so it's okay... but they never made the choice!
What was the original copyright laws for fair use public domain? So many years after you are dead? Would be cool to return to that, or use that as the ethical line in the sand.
Still, I find myself thoroughly enjoying poorly made wooden Looney Tunes characters, or weird Soviet-era "Disney" animals. I also love shirts like the ones Froknog is making. I love an ugly reggae Bart Simpson wallet. I want to silkscreen my own favorite cartoon character on a shirt.
I have very black and white opinions but sometimes the greys challenge me in ways that I feel more grown-up, or even more decided afterwards.