Adventures in Copyright

This was odd… this columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle emailed me. He was writing a column on the dangers of paperless voting machines, and he wanted to include a cartoon of mine (which he had seen on another website) as an illustration. But he couldn’t offer any money.

Well, I saw it, and mentally kinda blew it off. I mean, my fees are on a sliding scale starting at five freakin’ dollars, and the Chronicle is a major newspaper. I don’t buy for a moment that they can’t afford to pay me a measly five bucks.

But then, two days later, I thought again. Hey, it’s no skin off my karma if the Chronicle screws over freelancers, and it has a much bigger circulation than most places that print my cartoons. What’s the harm of letting more people see my work? So I email the dude and let him know that if it’s not too late, he can use my cartoon.

Here’s the email he sent back (I’ve changed the names):

Thanks, Barry. When I didn’t hear from you, I called Joan Doe, who put me in touch with Bob Smith, who gave us his permission, as long as we credited B. Deutsch of Amptoons.com. He said he could represent you in that respect. On that basis I went ahead and submitted the bitmap I grabbed off Joan’s site, and the credit line. Barring some last-minute change I’m not aware of, it has probably been printed already and should appear in Monday’s Chronicle.

What the fuck?

I had never given Bob permission to represent me in any respect.

Now, Bob seems like a nice person; he’s got good politics, he likes my cartoons. Probably, in his mind, he was doing me a favor. And in a way, he did me a favor: in the end, I did decide to give the cheap-ass Chronicle permission, but it would have been too late had Bob not intervened.

But, nonetheless –

What the fuck?

What the hell is wrong with some people?

Probably I should email “Bob” just to remind him that he doesn’t have the right to speak for me, but I’m still too amazed at his chuzpah to know what to say.

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