Current mood:	curious
Current music:	Mythbusters :)

a decision to make, and a talk about copyright licenses
This might be a kind of long entry, so it's getting lj-cut. Only the first part is important to the comic; the rest is just me ranting.

Part I

First off.. Aggghhh. I know I haven't updated since.. Oh, February, was it? To say things have been hectic.. Well. I'm graduating in.. One week and two days, I suppose (there are two ceremonies, but we'll go with the earlier one), and I've been struggling to ensure that I get my last couple of requirements done and I have the grades necessary to graduate. ;P Japanese in particular has been kicking my ass, as always. (I'll be graduating with a dual degree in Political Science and East Asian Studies.) In even more exciting (and terrifying) news, I was accepted to my top choice law school - UT Austin! - and will be starting there in the fall. I'm currently looking for somewhere to work in the summer before I head off to Austin.

You can probably see where I'm going with this. I'm busy already, and law school is.. Well. Law school. I adore IA, and desperately want to see it unfold, but when I examine the situation realistically I have to ask how I'm going to have time when the current new page has been sitting half-finished on my scanner for the last.. month and a half?

So.. After giving it a lot of thought, I've started seriously reconsidering something I've been resisting literally for years. I've started wondering if I shouldn't just write the damn story.

I'm not exactly stellar about keeping up with writing projects, either, but my success rate there is infinitely higher than that with comics (and art in general). See, I'm just a really, really slow drawer. A relatively very simple page takes me ten hours. Even assuming that I could draw a page a week (which, as you can see, hasn't been happening), with about 45 pages a chapter and at least 13 chapters of the story planned, that's.. Over eleven years. And IA isn't the only story I want to tell - believe it or not, some of the characters go on to do things after the main story's been told. So it just seems.. Utterly impractical. I look at webcomics that update at least once a week with 4-6 pages per update, and I'm just completely in awe. I can't even fathom how they manage it. (Cough, cough, Inverloch.)

So.. Even assuming a fairly slow pace.. I could write an entire chapter in the time it would take to do a few pages. It would be so much faster. It's not ideal at all - a lot of the gags rely on visual humour and facial expressions (and chibis and sweatdrops and the like), but I would really like to work on my narrative anyway, and it would be an interesting challenge. IA's supposed ot be an epic fantasy anyway, right? So.. Basically, I'm asking you, the reader, what you think. I assume I would lose a large portion of my readership, because people who read comics don't necessarily want to read original novella. But I figure I'll lose an even larger portion simply by continuing to never update, and.. Mostly I just want to tell this damn story already. I want people to know about all the things that happen to these characters, and realise the depth and complexity of each and every one of them. I've barely been able to skim the surface of the characters in what I've drawn so far, and I haven't even touched the plot. I just want this story to go somewhere. I would really like to make it illustrated, to, perhaps with at least one illustration per chapter (and the option to add more later, of course).

What do you think? Honestly. Would you continue to read? Would you have any interest at all?

Part II

All of that aside, I'd like to rant on a totally unrelated topic, and that's the Creative Commons copyright licenses. You see them all over the web, and I've noticed a slew of webcomics recently slapping them up on their pages, but are they really worth the pixels that represent them?

I personally think not. As I mentioned, I'm going to law school next year (this by no means implies I'm an actual authority on this matter) and intellectual property is one of the areas I'm strongly interested in. In the US, anything "once created from originality through 'mental labor' is instantaneously considered copyrighted to that person."* As of 1989 (when the US signed the Berne Convention), you do not need the © symbol to appear on something for it to be protected; however, officially licensing something helps greatly establish that you do have the original claim to a work. Copyright holders have the exclusive rights to their works, including making a profit from it, but here is where the CC license first starts pissing me off.

This is the moist stringent license the CC offers, the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5. It claims anyone is allowed "to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work," provided they "make clear to others the licence terms of this work." But if you look at the list of rights exclusive to a holder of a copyright by default, they include the following rights:

to sell or assign these rights to others

Emphasis mine. (Source.) By fair use, you're typically allowed to make copies of copyrighted works for private use (typically defined as less than 10 copies), but you're not allowed to publicly display the works, etc, without explicit permission. According to the CC license, I would be able to print out your work and display it at, say, an art gallery at a convention, or use it to generate sales at my booth, and there's nothing you can do about it. You've given me permission to display your art for whatever.

Unfortunately, obtaining an actual copyright license can be a hassle, you have to pay for it, and typically the work you wish to copyright has to be completed first, making it useless for those who publish their works piecemeal, such as webcomic artists. So to some, it seems the CC license offers the perfect solution; however, note that the CC has about the same (or perhaps less) effect legally as if you were to just write your own copyright notice. Even if you submit details of your work to CC, it doesn't have the same validity as a real license - for one, in a real license the government retains a copy of the copyrighted work, so it's the surest protection there is that it was created by the holder at or before the time it was alleged to have been. There's only been one case as of yet involving an artist who claimed copyright under a CC license, and unfortunately it wasn't in the US and we have only the precedent set by Dutch courts. Essentially, a guy sued a paper for publishing some pictures from his Flickr site, and the ruling was that the paper would only have to pay restitutions if it did it again.* Yep, that's some protection! The guy had the Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike license from CC, which even specifically stated that his works could not be used for commercial purposes. Yes, it's only one ruling (so far), but it's a disquieting precedent.

In short, I find the CC license a rather useless endeavour, designed more to promote feel-goodness in those using it than to actually legally protect their intellectual properties. You can be assured that a CC license will never appear on the pages of any of my works, but you can be equally confident that each of my works belongs to me and that my rights to those works will be jealously guarded. The only exception I allow is for derivative works, as per the typical webcomic's rules: Fanart and fanfic are delightful, and fancomics are good so long as they remain fanworks and not, say, attempted remakes or the like. And all must be properly accredited if displayed. I'm sorry if this makes me seem like a hardass to some people, but I am utterly respectful of the works of other artists (and writers) and expect to receive the same level of politesse from others.

Copyright is really not such a complicated thing, though enforcing it can be. It's largely a matter of hoping to god you're never the target of blatant theft, because it's almost impossible to come out of such a dismal situation unscathed. I've seen countless artists like hardartist become hardened and cynical after incidents of theft, and I'm particularly sensitive because of the initial popularity of talasiths (due to my adoption site and later the RPG Tannas Hollow) and the number of people I noted at the time creating their own talasith or talasith-like characters and then using them in everything from other RPGs to their own comics. I'm flattered to be so inspirational, and I can't say anything about the talasith is particularly unique - long ears (though to be fair, I thought they were quite original when I designed them, never having seen Lodoss War or the like), fae, part animal. However, I've worked extremely hard at developing my own mythology, history, geography, and everything else for this world and these characters, and it still pains me somewhat to see characters with designs similar to my own, even when I know there isn't even the slimmest possibility that theft took place. (I guess I could also take that as a sign to strive for more original character designs. XP)

So.. There's my tuppence. I'll be extremely interested to explore this topic further in law school, but until then, I remain completely sceptical of the powers of Creative Commons.