CSotD: No pay, but no exposure either
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Rachel Dukes has done a sort-of-study of a cartoon which she posted in two places: One resulted in several "shares" with her credit at the bottom and one was quickly picked up and shared elsewhere, but with the credit cropped out.
The one without credits got a lot more views: 588,310 views, compared to 81,595 views for the credited version.
When I first read her blog posting, I thought she was suggesting that uncredited comics are more apt to be shared, which made no sense. Reading it again, her point, rather, is that there are some greedy, stupid people out there who (A) rip off artists for no particular reason and (B) know how to get eyeballs.
Her point is not that she wants compensation for those 588,310 views, but she wants credit. She wants at least some of those people to say, "That artist is funny. I wonder what else she's got?" and be able to find out.
Artists bitch (with reason) for being asked to work "for exposure," but this is working for neither money nor fame. That's about as pointless as it gets.
And her frustration is that there's no reason to clip the credits off a comic. It is still a copyright violation, and if nobody is likely to spend the time and money to pursue you for it, neither would they be stopped from collecting damages if they did.
In fact, they'd be more apt to sue you for not providing the credit, the reasons for which she explains eloquently.
As she preaches to the choir.
That is, the part where she wishes people wouldn't pass clipped artwork along is futile, which she admits in a later post. There are a lot of people out there who are not artists, not part of the art community and, frankly, don't get it.
These are the people who pass along the urban legends that 30 seconds in Google would reveal as nonsense, and who never read the comments below one of these postings to see that someone has linked back to Snopes. They just hit "share" and pass it on.
And even if you do correct them, their response is "I guess I should learn to check Snopes first!" and then, the next time someone announces that 7UP cures cancer or that a new law will make going to church a capital offense, they hit share again.
My only suggestion for reaching them is to start an urban legend that sharing things on Facebook makes your genitals fall off. Logically, of course, that would keep them from helping that one go viral, but experience suggests otherwise.
Which is why it would be futile.
Howsoever — as she rightly notes — the people who do the clipping are making a living by passing along other people's work, and they are few enough, and smart enough, that they can be reached.
But they clearly don't care, which makes reaching them equally futile.
That is, if they didn't think of themselves as thieves, why would they try to cover their tracks by cropping out the credit line?
Smart enough to know how to get views, not smart enough to understand copyright.
There's a dilemma for yez.
I got this story from Tom Spurgeon's website. And Rachel Dukes posts comics here and also here.
(See? That didn't hurt.)
All aboard!
Pirate Cove is starting a new story arc today, and given the incredible length and convoluted storylines of a Pirate Cove arc, this is a viewing tip worth passing along, because this is one really funny misadventure strip but you'll never figure it out if you don't get in at the start of a story.
I don't know what the strip has to do with pirates. Or coves. And I don't know why today's is not colored, but I've learned over the years to put up with a certain amount of inconsistency from this strip, in return for which I get some really entertaining absurd humor.
Not art lessons. Humor.
There are all sorts of strips featuring good art and bad stories. This would be the opposite of that.
Juxtaposition of the Day:
An interesting interplay here: Edison Lee riffing on the exploitation of fast-food workers, and PC & Pixel on the testing they must endure in order to qualify to be exploited.
When I graduated with a bachelor's degree and a 7-months-pregnant wife, I noted the shortage of employment ads reading "Philosopher King Wanted For Small Island Nation" and began looking for other opportunities in the interim. One of them was to be a "manager trainee" for the Southland Corporation.
Which turned out to mean stocking shelves at a 7-11. Which didn't seem to have nearly the potential of being a "manager trainee," but the woman conducting interviews in the office — did you think Tak Bui was making that part up? — explained that it basically meant if everyone above you in the pecking order quit, you'd probably wind up the manager.
The FTA or Labor Dept or someone has since cracked down on describing a position as "manager trainee" if it doesn't somehow actually involve training someone to be a manager. Today, they call that position "intern" and the compromise with business is that they were previously required to pay manager trainees minimum wage, but interns can be hired for free.
Anyway, even knowing that the job description was a scam, I needed some kind of job, and I figured working at a 7-11 would suck enough that, if you could take it at all, you'd probably move up fairly quickly.
But then she informed me that they tested for drugs, and I started laughing and withdrew my application.
I wasn't afraid of failing the test, mind you, so much as I objected to the intrusion. I knew guys who refused to work for Coors for the same reason, and those jobs not only paid a lot more but featured free beer.
As far as smoking dope on the job, I've never quite understood it. The one time I gave it a shot, it just enhanced my impression of how much I hated being a food prep man, which impression it further enhanced by making the shift seem to last about 20 hours instead of eight.
Anyway, that was back in 1972 when we felt evil overlords should have to put in some shoe leather to gather data on us. We weren't going to volunteer it.
Heck, the wife and I never even bothered to have our baby fingerprinted by the police, if you can imagine that.
Mind you, we'd already been taught not to rely on the accuracy of such things.
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