Walt at Random

If you care about balanced copyright, fair use, and real creativity (which almost always means creating new works based in part on existing works), you really should go look at Tales from the Public Domain: Bound by Law?.

It’s a 70+-page comic book (color covers, b&w interior), with the first and last pages done in “Tales from the Crypt” style, and it tells an interesting and difficult story–and does so about as fairly and clearly as I’ve ever seen the story told.

It’s from Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. You can view it online, download it, or buy print copies.

What can I say? I’m impressed. I’ll certainly revisit it when I get around to a big C&I piece on balanced copyright. (This is important: The comic book is not an attack on copyright or a claim that everything should be up for grabs–but it also doesn’t buy into the “permission culture” where every use of every artifact, no matter how fleeting, requires rights clearance.)

This work by Walt Crawford is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 16th, 2006 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Copyright, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.