[Commons-Law] Scott Adams (Dilbert Comics) on Copyright...

[Lawrence Liang]

I have personally been a bigger fan of Calvin and Hobbes than of 
Dilbert, and the creator of Calvin
 Bill Waterson had a very interesting experience with the realities of 
the copyright and licensing system; The assumption that copyright is 
meant for the poor struggling author is often a  misguided one, since in 
reality the creators of material are rarely the owners. And in fact more 
and more one even sees copyright being used against the creators of 
material itself, as Tim Maloney for instance discovered. So extracting a 
small piece by Bill Waterson on creativity, merchandising and exploitation

I recently wrote to Universal Publishers for permission to reprint one 
strip from  Calvin and Hobbes for a non profit publication, and was told 
that the use of a single strip would be in the $1,200 range   

Lawrence

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Extract 1

For years, Universal pressured me to compromise on a 'limited' licensing 
program. The syndicate would agree to rule out the most offensive 
products if I would agree to go along with the rest. This would be, in 
essence, my only shot at controlling what happened to my work. The idea 
of bartering principles was offensive to me and I refused to compromise.

With neither of us valuing what the other had to offer, compromise was 
impossible. One of us was going to trample the interests of the other. 
By the strip's fifth year, the debate had gone as far as it could 
possible go, and I prepared to quit. If I could not control what 'Calvin 
and Hobbes' stood for, the strip was worthless to me.

But at this point, the syndicate agreed to renegotiate my contract. The 
exploitation rights to the strip were returned to me, and I will not 
license 'Calvin and Hobbes.'"

Extract 2



My attitude toward the strip's production also put me in a strange 
position when the pressure built to license Calvin and Hobbes. On the 
one hand, it provided a simple clarity in the decision to forgo all 
merchandising. I didn't think greeting
cards, T-shirts, or plush dolls fit with the spirit or message of my 
comic strip, and I didn't like the idea of using this hard-won, precious 
job to peddle a bunch of trinkets. I wanted to draw cartoons, not run an 
empire, so the offers and requests were not tempting in the slightest. 
On the other hand, none of my reasons for declining involved business 
considerations, so these arguments were not particularly persuasive to 
my syndicate, which flat-out owned the rights to my work and stood to 
split the immense wealth these products likely would have generated.

Over the years, I've come to realize that it's almost impossible to make 
anyone understand why, five years into the culmination of my life's 
dreams, I was ready to quit the strip and lose everything, rather than 
get appallingly rich off Calvin and Hobbes products. All I can say is, I 
worked too long to get this job, and worked too hard once I got it, to 
let other people run away with my creation once it became successful. If 
I could not control what my own work was about and stood for, then 
cartooning meant very little to me.

In hindsight I see that, with so much money at stake, the artistic 
issues I argued about were irrelevant. In the end, it was simply might 
makes right. I was an unknown cartoonist when I started, and my 
contractual disadvantage reflected my nonexistent bargaining power when 
I got the job. Five years later, I was a big enough gorilla that I could 
turn the tables. Even though I finally got my way, the whole mess is 
depressing to recall, even all these years later. The fight was 
personally traumatic. For several years it poisoned what had been a 
happy relationship with my syndicate, and in my disillusionment and 
disgust at being pushed to the wall, I lost the conviction that I wanted 
to spend my life cartooning. Both sides paid a heavy price for this battle.

Bill Waterson, Creator of Calvin and Hobbes (Introduction to Collected 
Calvin and Hobbes)