LOST IN SPACE 2: Commentary corollary 3 (of 5)

 

COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT

 

Before I used The Mekon and The Freak Brothers in the second issue of Time We Left 2 in 1994 (Lost In Space 2 pages 6 to 10 and 14) I wrote to the copyright owners asking for permission to use the characters in my own little comic. I received formal responses from both Fleetway (the then copyright holder of The Mekon) and Knockabout Comics (the holder of the copyright for The Freak Brothers in the UK).

 

When it came to using all of the famous comic characters in for the interviews story in Time We Left 3, there was no way I was going to try and get permission as it involved about 50 characters in total. What I did do was cheekily add the proviso “No similarity between between any of the persons in this comic and anyone else is intended except for satirical purposes” to my own copyright statement as a workaround. I did credit the creatives behind each of the characters though.

 

 A few years later in 1999 I was at a party in London thrown by Bloomsbury (the publisher of my two stare-out books) and I ended up chatting with a member of the Bloomsbury staff. Our conversation turned to copyright and the ownership of artistic intellectual property and I mentioned I had written to a couple of publishers asking to use their characters for my second comic. The woman from Bloomsbury rolled her eyes and proceeded to tell me Bloomsbury receive loads of written requests of this nature and they were a right royal pain in the arse. She gave me an example of a recent request she had to deal with which came from a woman who was getting married and was seeking permission from Bloomsbury to reprint her favourite poem in her wedding service cards. The woman from Bloomsbury told me that all publishers hate these sort of requests as they all have to be dealt with and replied to formally, all of which takes time. She went on to say that publishers couldn’t care less about this sort of thing, they only care if their property is being blatantly plagiarised or if any serious money is being made from its use without permission. In the case of the wedding, I remember the woman from Bloomsbury saying “Just print the fucking thing!”.

NEXT: “Big Mekon is watching you”