Plagiarism and the Use of Assistants

Various high-profile law professors at Harvard are having plagiarism troubles. Laurence Tribe – possibly the most influential lefty law prof in the world – is guilty of “plagiaphrasing” from another professor in a 1985 book, according to the current Weekly Standard.

Apparently, Tribe rewrote sentences from a book by a less famous scholar – so that ” noting that he would stand on his record as a Judge and Senator” becomes “said that he would stand on his record as a Senator and a federal appellate judge” in Tribe’s version, and so forth. He did this many, many times, throughout the book. I’ve done the same thing myself, in many academic papers. (Tribe also copied one sentence word-for-word). But Tribe didn’t credit his source, apart from a mention in the “Mini-Guide to the Background Literature” printed at the end of the book.

Is it plagiarism? If you agree with an expert the Weekly Standard quoted that “constant paraphrasing without at least semi-regular attribution constitutes a form of plagiarism,” then it is. I’m not sure Tribe could actually be found guilty in a courtroom – but then again, is it too much to ask for that one of the world’s most promiinant and honored legal scholars be held to a higher standard than “probably not convictable?”

(I should note – perhaps out of a sense of fairness, or perhaps just out of a desire to cover my own behind, depending on how charitably you think of me – that Tribe has not yet responded to the Standard’s charges; perhaps this story will look different after Tribe tells his side. UPDATE: Nope, the story doesn’t look different; Tribe has apologized.)

This year’s more interesting Harvard-Law-Professor-Plagiarism case involves another liberal icon, Charles Ogletree. Velvel’s blog covers the issue at length. Here the issue is both clearer and a great deal more muddy.

First, what’s clear – Ogletree definitely plagiarized. The first 2 and a half pages of chapter 16 are taken directly from a book by Yale law professor (and notable blogger) Jack Balkin.

It’s also clear that Ogletree’s plagiarism was an accident (no one would plagiarize so obviously at such length from such a well-known author if they were trying to deceive). As Professor Ogletree explained in his public apology:

During the final stages of the preparation of my book, material from Professor Jack Balkin’s book, What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said (NYU Press, 2001), was inserted in a draft section of the book by one of my assistants for the purpose of being reviewed, researched, and summarized by another research assistant with proper attribution to Professor Balkin. The material was inserted with attribution to Professor Balkin, although the extent of the quoted material was not entirely clear because a closing quotation mark was dropped. Unfortunately, the second assistant, under the pressure of meeting a deadline, inadvertently deleted this attribution and edited the text as though it had been written by me.[…] When I reviewed the revised draft I did not realize that this material was authored by Professor Balkin.

Frankly, Ogletree’s accidental plagiarism – although it involved far more direct quoting – seems to me more acceptable than Tribe’s.

But at the same time, Ogletree’s explanation points to a more serious and widespread corruption, which Dean Velvel discusses at length – how is it that an accomplished scholar can read through a book he’s currently writing and not realize that the first two and a half pages of a chapter were another author’s words?

Ogletree is a man sufficiently brilliant that he is a professor at the Harvard Law School. Yet he read a draft of his own book so sloppily, so carelessly, that even though the six paragraphs in question are two and one-half pages and 824 words long, and even though they introduce an obviously significant chapter which itself begins an entire section of his book, he did not realize that he himself had not written those paragraphs? A man of his acumen didn’t realize that? Boy, that must have been some sloppy reading! […]

Ogletree doesn’t say “When I reviewed the revised draft, I did not realize that I was not the author of this material.” Such a statement would of course imply that he was the author of the rest of the material in the book. But rather than say that, Ogletree said “When I reviewed the revised draft I did not realize that this material was authored by Professor Balkin.” (Emphasis added.) Well, how in hell was Ogletree supposed to know that Balkin authored the material (unless Ogletree is claiming that he read Balkin’s book and has a near photographic memory)? Ogletree’s wording smacks of being too clever by half. It smacks of wanting to cover up the fact that he knew and expected that parts of his book were written by others — by assistants — and that the problem here was that he assumed the six paragraphs had been written by an assistant while being unaware that they had actually been written by someone wholly unconnected with him.

This is, of course (and as Dean Velvel points out), an American norm.

Everywhere in this country underlings write the speeches, the briefs, the articles, the books, the p.r. statements for which bosses, superiors, people on top take the credit. Politicians, university presidents, corporate executives, partners in law firms — wherever you turn people on top take the credit for the work of others. There are a million reasons (read excuses) for this: The top guys are too busy to do the work themselves. Or their talents lie elsewhere. Or it’s the job of the flack to do this work. Or the top guy told the flack what to say. Or Mister Big may have reviewed the work, may sometimes even have edited it, and agrees with everything he has put his name too. Or the flack was paid to write the big shot’s book for her. Or this is just the way the world works and everybody is doing it.

The justification — the excuses — don’t matter. It’s all a form of dishonesty: it all constitutes taking credit for work that was done by others.

Of course, being a cartoonist, I read this and immediately thought of Garfield, written and drawn entirely by assistants whose names rarely appear. Or of Doonesbury, which is still written and penciled by its creator, but is inked by a rarely-credited collaborator. At least those two strips’ creators are honest enough to occasionally credit their collaborators in public – many other comic strips are written and drawn by cartoonists who never get credit.

Is it still plagiarism if it’s the way business is done?

Meanwhile, due to work-for-hire copyright laws, DC comics can publish all the Superman stories they want. But if the creators (if they were still living) decided to publish a Superman story – now, that would be plagiarism. To me, work-for-hire creation is (at least in comics and music) primarily a way of making it legal for large corporations to plagiarize the ideas of anyone poor and desperate enough to sign a contract.

Why do we accept that as being okay? Because it’s just the way business is done.

(While I’m asking leading questions, is it ironic that a post about plagiarism consists mostly of words quoting from elsewhere? Ah, but blogs are different, I tell myself.)

Anyhow, I highly recommend reading Larry Velvel’s entire post.

UPDATE: Tellingly, I forgot to credit my source for most of the links – an anonomous emailer using the handle “AuthorSkeptics,” who presumably has been cold-emailing a lot of bloggers about this. Also, Jeremy’s Weblog has a post on the issue. The Boston Globe has an article about Ogletree featuring many scholars criticizing the write-by-committee approach.

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36 Responses to Plagiarism and the Use of Assistants

  1. Mr Ripley says:

    “Plagiarism” is spelled correctly in the entry but wrong in the heading. Velvel is not spelled correctly anywhere –perhaps there are places where a spellchecker changed it to “Velvet.” I infer from this uncharacteristic number of errors that the entry was written by “typo king” Steve Gilliard, and Amp neglected to credit him. How long, Amp, have you been the Harold Bloom of blogovia, allowing your hapless underlings to do the work for which you take credit?

    More seriously (yes, the above was an attempt at wit), how many of those underlings are thrilled to have their work stolen by an individual or corporation whose prestige reflects upon them? I spoke last year to a guy who’d been a grad student at Princeton, to whom the idea that such people should get credit for the work on which their professor’s name appeared was totally new. To him, “He worked under [Big Name Mentor]” was synonymous with “He had the honor of writing much of [Big Name Mentor]’s work.” And wasn’t there a thinly veiled retelling of the Siegel and Shuster story that made the same point, about these starry-eyed youths being pleased as Punch that their work was bought by National?

    If that mindset is a big factor in most such plagiarism cases, it’ll take a lot of change in people’s perceptions to change “the way business is done.”

  2. Ampersand says:

    Misspellings corrected, thanks.

    I think young, hungry artists are generally grateful for whatever they can get. But just becasue they’re eager to be screwed over doesn’t mean the law should be eager to help screw them over – “work for hire” is entirely an artifact of law, and doesn’t need to be set up in such a pro-corporation fashion.

  3. Fred Vincy says:

    Great post and great questions.

    As someone with one foot in academia and one foot in private practice, I don’t think the standards for giving credit are or should be similar. Refusing to credit an associate who wrote a brief may be rude and high-handed, but is not dishonest in the same way because the central purpose of the brief is to persuade, not to evidence the author’s thinking. At times, we have added big names — to show authority — or deleted names — to downplay the resources invested by the client. That said, the federal rules, at least, require the person signing the brief to bear responsibility for its accuracy, regardless of the actual author.

    In academia, however, it is nothing more than rank dishonesty and abuse of position to pass off another’s work as one’s own. While persuasion is part of scholarship, attaching a big name is a dubious method of persuasion and, in any case, does not preclude co-authorship. For the most part, then, the purpose of author naming is to promote one career at the expense of another. Moreover, at a bare minimum, I would think that Ogletree should be responsible for every word he signs his name to. There’s nothing inherently wrong with accepting suggestions from editors and assistants, but genuine authorship requires that the acceptance must be active — the author must consciously read and adopt the suggestion as his or her own writing, with all of the responsibility that entails.

  4. Tara says:

    Wow, that was a great post, thanks for bringing that up.

    What would be the harm in having the name of the writer of the brief on the brief? That wouldn’t prevent the signer of it from having responsibility for it, right?

  5. jam says:

    a few days ago i was attending a talk in a recently constructed building at a local university. it’s got all sorts of neo-architecture going on but the thing i was most impressed by was a huge copper panel in the main hall of the building which lists every person’s name who was involved in the construction of the building: plumbers, electricians, etc.

    in a similar way, i always find the acknowledgements section of any scholarly work to be often quite revealing of the general character of an author. those who acknowledge the contributions, & who are clear on just how substantial those contributions often are, of their colleagues, students, children, spouses, librarians, lunchmates, etc. are authors that i feel more respectful of generally…

    it’s rare that anyone can say “I & only I made this thing”…. or, to get all Latin-y: creatio ex nihilo is something only God can claim (& he’s got serious credibility issues), i agree with Fred that straight out plagiarism matters more in academia, but i also have heard from many grad students at many different schools how often this is done by their professors. thus, when one professor or another gets singled out, there is that odor of hypocrisy that just seems to linger everywhere, y’know?

    i mean, one could argue that capitalism itself is predicated upon the principle of “taking credit for work that was done by others” …

    btw, i’ve heard the mighty Aaron McGruder has an unacknowledged artist working with him on Boondocks…. is this true?

  6. Ampersand says:

    Yup, I’m pretty sure I read an interview with McGruder in which he mentioned that his strip is drawn by a hired artist nowadays (although he still writes it).

  7. Ampersand says:

    Now I remember, it was this New Yorker piece. The person who draws Boondocks nowadays is a cartoonist named Jennifer Seng.

  8. Soul says:

    I really think you should probably ignore anything that comes from the Weekly Standard. This is just Bend-over-backwardsism at it’s worst. Somehow, if a story criticizing Condi Rice for plagarism came from The Nation, I doubt LGF would care…

  9. mythago says:

    Soul, regardless of the source, do you believe the article’s point is incorrect?

    Now, personally I’d guess that the “was authored by” language is more professorial Big Word English than a revealing slip–but the rest of the article is correct.

    Interestingly, Fred, the briefs vs. academic papers thing works at the lawyer level, but not the judge level. If I write a brief that a partner submits, it’s considered perfectly acceptable for me to later point to that brief as an example of my work, and I’ll get the kudos for having written it. But if I am, say, a Supreme Court clerk, it’s the judge and not the clerk who is forever credited as the author.

  10. Ampersand says:

    Soul, “what would LGF do” isn’t really my model of how to behave. :-)

    I do think the Weekly Standard is the best of the right-wing magazines. I did worry a bit about if I could trust this article – which is why I included a disclaimer that the story may look different once Tribe has had his say – but on the whole, it felt unlikely to be just made up (it’s not as if Tribe doesn’t know how to sue people). And if the story’s facts are right, then it’s worth posting about, imo.

  11. lucia says:

    Everywhere in this country underlings write the speeches, the briefs, the articles, the books, the p.r. statements for which bosses, superiors, people on top take the credit. Politicians, university presidents, corporate executives, partners in law firms ….

    When evaluating whether or not the practice is wrong, you should consider whether or not the person doing the work actually does get credit. We all know politicians employ speech writers, and quite frequently, everyone knows which parts of speeches are written by speech writers. The speech writer lists “speech writer ” for so and so on their resume. So, that person does get credit for speach writing– although likely they don’t get credit when a line from the speech is quoted.

    In contrast, likely, the grad assistants working for Ogletree would never have been acknowledged. People only learn of their contributions– which are substantial– only because of the goof up. Pne has to wonder, how would Ogletree have characterized their role had there been no snafu? Would Ogletree have described their work as theirs, or simply said it was editiorial? As a result of the plagiarism snafu, it become clear the students are the authors in a fairly real sense.

    There is, of course, also the issue of pay. These are grad students. One has to wonder whether or not they are remunerated fairly? Do they get benefits? I’m sure they don’t get royalties!

  12. Fred Vincy says:

    Tara,

    You’re right that having the author’s name on the brief would not reduce the legal responsibility of the signer. My point was not that omitting the author’s name was inherently a good idea, but that sometimes there are good reasons for it and that the client’s interests are more important than the author’s credit. For example, in one case, I wrote a brief for my partner and (at my suggestion) he signed it without including my name; my reasoning was that I did not want the other side to see that he was “sweating” by having to bring a second lawyer into the case. In another instance, we represented a large bankruptcy debtor in a major appeal; we omitted the names of 3 of 5 authors (myself included) because we didn’t want to rub the court’s nose in the fact that a bankrupt was paying 5 lawyers to write a brief.

    Mythago,

    You’re absolutely right about judges and opinions. Unlike a brief, an opinion’s authoritativeness does depend on authorship. However, I think being a law clerk is somewhat analogous to being a speechwriter, in that subsequent employers do have a pretty good sense of what you have done for the boss.

  13. Simon says:

    I’m used to speeches by public figures being written by hired speechwriters, and court opinions being written by clerks. But I was still naive enough to think that academic scholars wrote the books they put their names on: what assistants did – I thought – was do research and gather data. As a sometime small-time scholar, I’d rather do my own research: I know the material better that way.

    As for Harold Bloom, I know that assistants gather the material in the thousands of anthologies he “edits”. But if he makes the final selection, I don’t think it unreasonable to claim him as editor. And I’m sure he writes the introductions that he signs. No assistant would be caught dead being as sloppy and superficial as Bloom regularly shows himself in these introductions.

  14. Sally says:

    Three quick points:

    First of all, in my department, it is definitely not standard practice for graduate research assistants to write for professors. Research assistants do all sorts of scut work: they compile bibliographies of primary and secondary sources; they sort through primary sources and copy the relevent parts; I was once asked to read a secondary source and note every time a particular issue was discussed. For this, you get an hourly wage and an acknowledgement. But I really don’t think it would be considered kosher for a professor to put his or her name on something a student had written. The one time I’ve heard about that happening, the professor published a student’s paper as his own, and he (the prof) was severely disciplined by the department. I’m sort of surprised that this is considered ok anywhere.

    Second, part of the reason that academics are slow to jump on this is that I think we’re all painfully aware of how easy it is to inadvertantly commit plagiarism. For one thing, if you read literally hundreds of books a year, it’s sometimes difficult to keep track of which ideas are your own and which you encounter somewhere else. But there’s also a whole new level of peril thanks to computers’ cut and paste functions. I almost had a disaster when I inadvertantly downloaded someone else’s abstracts of books into my bibliographic software. I didn’t even realize I was doing it: I meant to download records from a library (which is standard practice), and the records came with abstracts. It would have been incredibly easy for me to think that I’d written the abstract and then copy it into an article or chapter I was writing. Honestly, it still freaks me out to think about it.

    And finally, I don’t know if people here followed the Michael Bellesiles mess, but it makes me a little nervous. Bellesiles was a professor at Emory who wrote a book that pissed off gun advocates. They took it upon themselves to fact-check his book, and they found really significant errors. (Actually, it appears that he faked a lot of his evidence.) I’m not in the least defending Bellesiles: what he did was outrageous. But I do think that it gave right-wingers the idea that it might be fruitful to police lefty academics. I don’t think anyone is subjecting conservative, moderate, or apolitical academics to similar scrutiny, and I worry a bit about a double standard.

    That wasn’t so quick! Sorry.

  15. mythago says:

    I don’t think anyone is subjecting conservative, moderate, or apolitical academics to similar scrutiny

    You have got to be kidding. The Bell Curve, anyone? Does anybody really believe that left-wing academicians never, ever raise a peep about the facts in righties’ books? Or that Bellesiles was the first left-wing academic to be gone over with a fine-toothed conservative comb?

    That said, it wasn’t outraged gunbunnies who started Bellesiles’s unraveling. That started when scholars who had nothing to do with gun-related topics were excited to see that he had, for example, probate records that they also wanted for their own work.

  16. sally says:

    I don’t think that the Bell Curve is the same kind of thing. It was part of an old debate about racialist psuedo-science, and the ways in which it was picked apart were standard practice for the discipline. It is really not standard practice to check historians’ footnotes to see if they’ve made things up, and when you can’t find something someone has cited, your first impulse is to think that it was a mistake or the document was moved, not to accuse the author of academic fraud. (At least, that’s what I’ve thought when I haven’t been able to find documents cited in people’s footnotes. And it’s happened more than once.) At any rate, it was widely speculated in the historical profession that if Bellesiles had pulled the same stunt in a less-controversial book, he would have got away with it. If it’s true that initial concerns were raised by other scholars, not gun nuts, then that might be wrong. But I do think the right is better organized and more annoyed about bias in the academy than the left, and I do think that they’re more likely to look for holes in work they disagree with. There’s nothing wrong with that: people who commit plagiarism or fraud should be held accountable. But it could give the impression that lefties are disproportionately guilty of that kind of thing, when in fact they’re just disproportionately likely to get caught.

  17. Richard Bellamy says:

    As a former clerk for a judge, I know that I get a sense of pride every time I see one of “my” sentences quoted in another court’s opinion.

    On the other hand, I know that I would be looked at very distastefully if I were to ever say, “Oh, yes, I wrote that!” I know for certain that I would NEVER be allowed to put on my resume, “Wrote Judge X’s influential Y Opinion.”

    The judge read my draft, made whatever changes she thought was necessary (if any), and only then signed it, making it HER work, not mine. Sometimes she would add a paragraph, if there was a point she wanted to make more explicitly, but if I — or any other co-clerk — plagiarized an opinion, there’d be no way that she would know. And it would simply be impossible for a judge to write all of her opinions.

    I guess the division of labor works out so that the judge would pen herself those parts of those opinions she felt would be most controversial (as well as all of her dissents) and assume that, for all the rest, there would be a combination of clerks who were honest and a public who wouldn’t care.

  18. jo. says:

    I completely agree with Sally; this isn’t acceptable in English, even if it might be in Law. Frankly, starting a chapter with six paragraphs quoted from another souce — even if properly credited! — is a practice unfamiliar to me.

    One major difference between academia and the other professions mentioned here: in the academy, your reputation is based on your work. If you’re in the humanities, your work is your publications. If a professor plagiarizes the writing of a graduate student, they are, in effect, forcing the student to do their work for them.

    Everybody knows that ‘Bloom’ is a corporate author, but most people are presumed to have written their own books.

    RAs do research work, and fact-checking and notations for anthologies and other forms of scutwork and brush-clearing, and they should be credited. But only a fool would put their name on top of a piece written by another person. It’s not *that* easy to plagiarize by mistake.

  19. Excellent post, and very helpful analysis of these issues. You beat everyone in bringing the Weekly Standard article to people’s attention and including so much analysis, it seems. In particular, “How Appealing” didn’t post until this morning, and “Volokh Conspiracy” hasn’t yet posted, although it had a couple of nice posts on the Ogletree plagiarism story.

    FYI, the information on Harvard plagiarism stories sent out in several e-mails over the past two weeks to which you refer has now been collected in blog form, at: http://authorskeptics.blogspot.com. A post by Harvard Law School student Jeremy Blachman, quoted extensively in the top post of the blog, is especially good and well worth reading.

    AuthorSkeptics@hotmail.com

  20. i’m currently reading a lot of books about jfk, for a chapter in a book on lbj i may never write.
    there was a flap over whether he had written “profiles in courage” which got a pulitizer. essentially he did write it, with lots of help, adequately credited. i dimly recall a related issue about mlk jr. when (rarely) i author a brief for another lawyer, i credit myself and get miffed if that gets edited out, but i think i saw lately where some court’s rule said -not- to attribute. (i am enjoying a day back in blogland, my blogs are on hiatus while i deal with some personal crises, including being depressed because i miss blogging as a way of avoiding my personal crises.)

  21. Ruth Hoffmann says:

    RAs doing scutwork may have been the standard in the humanities, but in the sciences it’s very different. You work in Big Name’s lab, and they put their name on all your publications (you do get a co-author credit). As your career advances, your name goes higher in the co-author list. Eventually *you* aim to be the one to put *your* Big Name on the top of your own students’ work.

  22. lucia says:

    You work in Big Name’s lab, and they put their name on all your publications (you do get a co-author credit).

    Even this depends on which branch of the sciences you work in. But, in any case, your name is listed as co-author along with everyone elses. In contrast, I suspect Ogletree was not listing the students at all.

    I really think one useful question is this: How do these authors characterize the students’ contributions when they nothing goes wrong?

    If it is standard practice for professors to use students work this way AND they actually say this is what the students do, then one can assume this is standard practice.

    But, I bet you’ll find that the professors, when not caught, claim all the students do is scut work! If I am correct, this would tell you that the practice is not accepted and not highly regarded.

  23. Vardibidian says:

    Not entirely relevant, perhaps, but Bob “Bowling Alone” Putnam’s latest book Better Together is by “Robert D. Putnam and Lewis M. Feldstein, with Don Cohen”; in the acknowledgements, it says that Don Cohen “did most of the actual writing.”
    I suspect y’all can guess the size of the various names on the cover, and which gets left off the spine. I suspect Don Cohen is perfectly happy with this, as he couldn’t possibly have sold a hundred copies of the book with only his name on it (and an Introduction by Mssrs. Putnam and Feldstein) and it’s not like anybody else is pretending to have written it. But it seemed odd.

                               ,
    -Vardibidian.

  24. Echidne says:

    This stuff has been going on in academia in general for a very long time. I have a friend who wrote a famous book for a professor about twenty years ago, and he is not even mentioned in the thanks. But I doubt that it has ever been terrible common. For one thing, you can only do this when you have a lot of power in the department and in the specialty. For another, information does pass around and graduate students may not sign up for your courses and projects if they get nothing from them. Still, it’s not unheard to have a graduate level course with the only purpose of doing all the research for the professor’s new book. Mind you, I have never exploited anyone this way in may academic work. Maybe that’s why I’m not famous…

  25. Shair says:

    As a former agent representing comic book artists, I’ve seen artists take a lower wage just for the chance of drawing Batman, or give away new villain designs just for the fun of getting to design them. “But xxxx,” I exclaim, “What if this new guy is the next Joker?” And the answer always comes back as “Ooooh, that’ll be so cool.” with no thought to the financial compensation.

    I agree that people *should* be compensated for their creativity. However, human nature is such that sometimes, the joy of creation is enough. What people don’t understand is that while businessmen measure success by monetary value, others value success in pride. I had the opportunity to meet Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel in 1984 and their pride and joy in being asked to autograph my book was priceless.

    As for your question “Why do we accept that [work-made-for-hire] as being okay? Because it’s just the way business is done.” That’s not the only reason why. The two industries you cited – music and comics – mostly involve people who are in love with the craft itself. We accept the work-made-for-hire practices because people in love with the craft won’t be *that* concerned with finances (hence, the hiring of agents). We also accept it cause in business, payoff=investment*risk. Since the risks taken are usually financial, those financially at risk, reap the rewards.

  26. Shair says:

    oh, just to be a smart-ass, since these words are appearing on your blog, will the rights belong to me? or you guys? :)

  27. Shair says:

    oh, just to be a smart-ass, since these words are appearing on your blog, will the rights belong to me? or you guys? :)

  28. Ampersand says:

    If you look at the story of Jack Kirby, it’s hard to argue that even for someone who loved the medium, work-for-hire can’t eventually lead to bitterness. (For that matter, before DC finally relented and gave them a pension rather than suffer more bad publicity, Superman’s creators were pretty bitter too. It’s possible to be both bitter at mistreatment and proud of what you’ve created; the two feelings are not mutually exclusive).

    We also accept it cause in business, payoff=investment*risk. Since the risks taken are usually financial, those financially at risk, reap the rewards.

    I’ve heard that rationalization a hundred times, and every time it smells more and more like manure.

    How many millions of dollars does the publisher have to make before they’ve been fairly compensated for the teeny, tiny initial investment – and fairly minor risk – they made in agreeing to publish Superman?

    Would you really feel that if DC had been legally obliged to pay a royalty – say, a tenth of one percent of all the billions and billions of dollars they made off of Superman – to the creators, that would mean that DC had been cheated? That they hadn’t received a fair compensation for their risk?

    Work-For-Hire means that the company gets EVERYTHING, and the creator gets NOTHING.100% of rights to corporation; 0% to creator. Can you really not imagine a fairer division of rewards and rights than that?

    It’s easy to imagine laws that would let publishers grow rich while still giving something to the creator. Work-for-hire is not needed economically; it is not needed to give publishers a fair reward. It’s only needed to help publishers screw over creators whose youth, whose poverty, and whose (as you point out) love of the work makes them vulnerable to being screwed.

    The question is, does the law exist to protect the weak and vulnerable, or to help the powerful take advantage of the weak and vulnerable? I think it ought to do the former; but in the case of work-for-hire, it clearly does the latter.

  29. Ampersand says:

    I apologize if that came off a little too harsh; I’m passionate about this issue.

    As for your final question, ;-P my guess is you own your words (it’s not like I can sue you if you reprint your words elsewhere, right?), but by posting it on my website you’re implicitly giving your permission for them to be, well, posted on my website. :-)

  30. Shair says:

    LOL! Most comic publishers have royalties but those don’t kick in until after 75,000 copies are sold on the direct market or something silly like that so they are legally bound to pay royalties. No, you didn’t come off harsh at all. While I was agenting, I had to come to terms with both an artists’ viewpoint (that is, convince them that their conceptual art is worth something) as well as the business end.

    Look, I see both sides cause I see people like Jeff Smith, who are so passionate about their own work (Bones) that he self-published, and then SELF-PROMOTED his book to distributors, retailers and readers. Jeff took all the risks with his creation and it’s paid off for him, multiple times over.

    I personally think what needs to be recognized is that there are many different types of rewards. For instance, one of my clients was also a voice actor. As part of his compensation for a concept design, I tried to get him an audition for that company’s related animation department. While the reward wasn’t financial, I can tell you right now, if I had managed to procure that for him, the stars twinkling in his eyes would’ve rewarded me much more than 10% would’ve. And the fact that I could use this as a conversation piece for the rest of my life… how can we value that?

    I’m seriously not advocating for publishers here. But I’ve yet to find a compromise that will give creators what they deserve.

  31. alsis38 says:

    I would demand triple for drawing Batman. This is because Batman is more boring than cold Cream of Wheat.

    Perhaps this is the key to my failure as a cartoonist. :D

  32. lucia says:

    oh, just to be a smart-ass, since these words are appearing on your blog, will the rights belong to me? or you guys? :)
    As a non-lawyer who has occasionally read about this subject, the answer seems to be the copyright to the words you post here probably belong to both you and Amp! (But don’t ask me what that means as a practical matter! LOL!)

    Other than that, the answer is: Some things about copyright are really confusing; others are easy!

    If you want a real answer, go over the Volokh conspiracy and ask him! Copyright seems to be Eugene Volokh’s particular area of expertise.

  33. mythago says:

    As you are the creator, the rights belong to you unless you do something to change that, like sell them to Amp.

  34. carl jones says:

    I know this is kind of a late post response but this is the artist that draws the Boondocks now.Aaron does acknowledge my work on the strip.It is also signed by me on each and every strip.He just has been really busy getting the show of the ground wich scheduled to air in october of next year and doesnt have time to draw it anymore.The show is going to be extrodinary!there has never been an animated series that has done what he is about to do!It will be like the animated equal to the dave chapelle show.Hope you guys will enjoy it for those that read the strip.

  35. jam says:

    that’s good to hear, carl jones! i was beginning to wonder if Mr. McGruder was more Riley than Huey.

    of course, now i can’t remember if Huey credits Caesar for his work on the Free Huey World Report… ?

  36. Larry Carr says:

    Carl, what’s up. This is Larry. Brett hit me up and told me about the Boondocks work. Holla back at lmcarr1227@gmail.com.

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