Cartoon by P Steiner, July 5th 1993, the New Yorker
I finally got High Speed Internet connection at my new home in Texas. This blog should be back to normal speed now 🙂
I will have extensive coverage of the World Championship in Mexico City in 20 days, both from home and on site.
Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
Looking forward to your coverage of Mexico City World Championship.
What are the rules on copyright in the USA? Are blogs an exception?
The New Yorker cartoon by P Steiner, July 5th 1993 – “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” is justly famous.
Why would it violate anything? It’s not for making profit and the source is posted. Stop trolling. Susan, will you be in Mexico City?
It’s not even funny..
Perhaps it should read –
“Honestly, you don’t have a blog?”
There is no ‘troll’ in asking that this blog conforms with Copyright Law. There is neither controversy nor the requirement for anyone to what were rhetorical questions.
Even not-for-profit sites typically need prior permission, even a paid-for licence, to use others’ prior art.
In fact, it would be difficult to justify that this blog is not-for-profit. It markets and sells every Polgar event going.
If you go to Google Images and search “Internet nobody knows dog” (without quotes), you get *many* hits for the cartoon. Some of those don’t even give as clear a citation as Susan did. This degree of free clippability from Google Images is evidence that even if its being within the 17-year period since publication in 1993 would matter, it has been accepted as a “fair use” item.
For comparison, my Net-wide Google search (not just Images) on the full caption (without quotes) turns up a first hit that does give the full copyright notice:
here.
Since this particular use is non-commercial, for communication only, it complies by the same standards.
The third hit in that search turns it up at
The New Yorker’s own “Cartoon Bank” service. Acknowledgment to Cartoon Bank is given by
this user, but it’s not clear he/she had to pay for it. The New Yorker page only has pay options for big prints and T-shirts etc. of the cartoon, while right underneath the cartoon itself it has a “Share and Save” window for Digg and Del.icio.us and 4 other services.
So I conclude that the use was fair and free. Technically one should write “Copyright (c)” before the ack. to the New Yorker, but hmmm…the New Yorker’s own Cartoon Bank page does not have a copyright notice, just “ID 22230, Published in the New Yorker July 5, 1993” much like Susan had. Perhaps the recent revision of copyright law gave a shorter horizon than 17 years to clippable art? Here’s where I as an academic Comp. Sci. professional will gladly give way to any lawyers who might be viewing this…
A new home in Texas? How will this impact your Polgar chess center in NYC?
Thanks to kwregan for acknowledging the copyright issue, taking it seriously, and doing useful research.
It is certainly better that the source of the cartoon is acknowledged, rather than not. The “Copyright (c) ” omission remains a technical flaw here.
http://www.cartoonbank.com/item/22230 has the cartoon overprinted with “ALL RIGHTS RESERVED” indicating that use of the cartoon is governed by the terms of use of Cartoonbank.
http://www.cartoonbank.com/help/help_useragreement.asp?sitetype=1 is the authority on those terms of use.
The use of the cartoon by an academic institution is perhaps clearly ‘not for profit’ because of the nature of the institution. This is not the case with this blog which includes marketing and sales material in its content.
The wide use of the cartoon, as indicated by its many appearances in ‘Google Images’ indicates its popularity rather than a ‘free-to-air’ status.
The copyright issue includes the copying of other material.
I think this indicates that this blog should have a policy statement about its use of others’ material, and the terms of further-use of its own content for its readers.
‘Respect’ to kwregan: good work.
Troll! You sound like Lafferty.
There have been two calls of ‘troll’ in this thread: I assume this is refering to the discussion on copyright.
It seems that there are at least two contributors here who value this blog and do not wish it to stray into areas of illegality, lifting content without paying the appropriate dues to that content’s authors.
I’m also in that camp, and to me, those inputs to this blog are constructive and welcome.
I could find no reference to a Lafferty on this blog, and assume that this is not someone in the Polgar world.
Another troll!