> Also...any feedback on copyright issues? For example, I've created a great
> Calvin and Hobbes backdrop for myself..but would I be in trouble
> if I posted
> it as a backdrop for others to download? (Any lawyers out there? I'd
> appreciate your two cents on this.)>
Not a lawyer, a media specialist, and one of my responsibilities is
copyright; I read ridiculously large numbers of related books/articles/etc
and even go to the occasional conference on the subject. Basically, it's
pretty clear cut, although people like to try to see it "grayer" than it
really is. Legally you can't distribute anything with Calvin and Hobbes on
it to anyone, whether or not you make money from it. That would be true of
any licensed images, but Watterson is particularly tight-fisted with his
copyright. There are NO officially licensed products with Calvin and Hobbes
on them, I don't believe. All those little car stickers and things like that
are rip-offs and are blatantly illegal. So are the Star Trek stamps you can
get for NewtWorks, by the way, unless (and I think this highly unlikely)
someone actually got clearance from Paramount for them. Yeah right ;) The
web is full of copyright violations, which doesn't make them any less
illegal. There is at least one article on the web that I wrote for a
magazine six or seven years ago that I sold "First Rights" to and have the
contract to prove it. That means they are breaking copyright by publishing
it to the web, since I own the rights after their first publishing the
article in an issue of the magazine. That's a reputable publisher violating
copyright. It happens all the time.
Steve Vander Ark
Library Media Specialist
Byron Center Christian School
Byron Center, Michigan
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