Cynic Direct Action Blog

My Editoral:

How could copy someone else’s toon and take credit for it? There are times when current events causes creative minded people to think along the same lines and that certainly happens but usually we all have different approaches to the same thing. Course when the item is so universal it is possible to have the same toon from the perspective, though line by line copies is surely stealing.

The best solution to reading someone else’s toon is to give them inspirational credit. I’ve read toons that inspired me to write a completely different toon on a completely different topic yet it was all inspired by another creative artist.

This is why I support creative commons and advocate open source. Usually when you do something it inspires others to at the very least perhaps pursue their own dreams even if they are in a totally different area. A painting inspires the musician, the musician inspires the sculpture. Creative ideas by their very nature inspires more generation, regeneration, innovation and mixes.

Mickey Mouse did his first film and it didn’t do much at the theaters. Mickey Mouse appeared in his second cartoon which was a redoo of another real life actor and the rest is history. Now ironically Disney Corporations seeks to ban redoos for others that made it a multimillion dollar success story.

Here’s the part from Free Culture Lawrence Lessig Keynote from OSCON 2002 about Disney’s thievery as at least how Disney defines the act when done by others…

Here’s my favorite example, here: 1928, my hero, Walt Disney, created this extraordinary work, the birth of Mickey Mouse in the form of Steamboat Willie. But what you probably don’t recognize about Steamboat Willie and his emergence into Mickey Mouse is that in 1928, Walt Disney, to use the language of the Disney Corporation today, “stole” Willie from Buster Keaton’s “Steamboat Bill.”

It was a parody, a take-off; it was built upon Steamboat Bill. Steamboat Bill was produced in 1928, no [waiting] 14 years–just take it, rip, mix, and burn, as he did [laughter] to produce the Disney empire. This was his character. Walt always parroted feature-length mainstream films to produce the Disney empire, and we see the product of this. This is the Disney Corporation: taking works in the public domain, and not even in the public domain, and turning them into vastly greater, new creativity. They took the works of this guy, these guys, the Brothers Grimm, who you think are probably great authors on their own. They produce these horrible stories, these fairy tales, which anybody should keep their children far from because they’re utterly bloody and moralistic stories, and are not the sort of thing that children should see, but they were retold for us by the Disney Corporation. Now the Disney Corporation could do this because that culture lived in a commons, an intellectual commons, a cultural commons, where people could freely take and build. It was a lawyer-free zone.

Enjoy the world, have fun and try to stay ethical, caring, sharing and respectful.

Love,

sovereignjohn