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Sun 27 Jul, 2003 07:52 pm
I would like to encourage members to post political cartoons. Is this illegal?
Damn. It;s hard enough to answer all the tech questions but a legal one?
I'm gonna have to defer this to one who knows. I know some cartoonists allow it with certain criteria and others don't.
I'm not sure if you can make the "for educational purposes" loophole.
In any case I'm moving this to the legal forum as this is not really a tech support request.
Helfino. Why not send an email to the cartoonist or the newspaper or magazine that publishes his/her work and ask?
Any of the cartoons you'd find in newspapers or magazines are copywrited so you'd have to get permission. I doubt posting them on A2K for general viewing would allow you to claim an educational or research exemption to the copywrite laws.
What about fair use? Ya know, tell the people to close the page after it loads 5%. ;-) kiddin'
But just an FYI, many of those cartoons allow you to divulge them but with a strict criters (some don't allow you to use them in collections, others require a link to their site, some allow you to display one every day....).
That's what I mean about asking. I think it would be best to get the straight dope from whoever owns the cartoons before going ahead.
Seems like we post newspaper articles all the time here. Why consider a cartoon differently from an article with a byline? Though I don't know the legal issues there, either...