The Complete Zenith

[Jim_Campbell]

Second part of Laura Sneddon's investigation into the facts of Zenith ownership.

And here's Part Three.

Wow, that's a lot of unsupported assertion, unjustified conflation and agenda-driven inference-drawing masquerading as a piece of journalism.

Cheers

Jim

[Buttonman]

Gave up at this point :

So how does UK copyright work? Very basically (and bearing in mind that I am a freelance writer, not a lawyer!)

[TordelBack]

Gave up at this point :

So how does UK copyright work? Very basically (and bearing in mind that I am a freelance writer, not a lawyer!)

That was probably wise.

I would like to go to the comments there and really have a go at addressing some of the unsupported assertions the piece as a whole makes, but is there really any point?  Maybe if I have a skinful some evening this week I'll feel sufficiently combative. If I ever get off this night-time working lark long enough.

[opaque]

To me that quote from Morrison from 2009 screams out  'I don't own it so I can't do anything about it'

[Frank]

If I ever get off this night-time working lark long enough.

Congratulations, neebs.

[TordelBack]

If I ever get off this night-time working lark long enough.

Congratulations, neebs.

Unpaid, Sauchie, alas all unpaid!  Don't even ask, it's not worth it.

[Frank]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7948084

[TordelBack]

It's a nice idea, but according to the wife I'd have to pay my clients.

[Jim_Campbell]

One of the (many) things that really gets about these pieces is Sneddon's habit of repeatedly citing the date that formal contracts were instigated and implying that this pretty much validates Morrison's claim.

If it were that cut and dried, that would mean there are no existing contracts for anything Alan Moore wrote for IPC and he'd long since taken his ball home when Rebellion did their "mopping up" exercise laying claim to previous work in current contracts. Why would Moore have bothered with his long-repeated "give me back the rights to Halo Jones" stance when approached by 2000ad editorial if he had a strong legal case that 2000ad/Rebellion/Fleetway/IPC never owned them in the first place?

Cheers

Jim

[Jim_Campbell]

I note that Laura is moaning on Twitter about people "making things personal" and specifically citing this thread. FWIW, I was prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt until an exchange on a FB group where she claimed that Rebellion had "just made £100K" on the Zenith book, so I asked her whether she was contending that the book had ZERO overheads, or if the claim was inaccurate which got a reply something along the lines of* "Only inaccurate if you don't accept the underlying truth of what I was saying". So... accurate in every sense except being factually correct, then?

Bah!

Jim

*I've departed from said FB group for the sake of my blood pressure and can't furnish an exact quotation.

[Professor Bear]

She probably meant my earlier posts when I said her conclusions were based on presupposition rather than an evaluation of UK copyright law and that this was because she smells of wee.

Still, the articles got Brendan McCarthy's blood up until he weighed in so they're not a write-off.

[IndigoPrime]

"making things personal"

Unlike, say, a three-part series based around the legal problems surrounding a story a friend wrote?

I've a lot of time for the author, but this series hasn't been her finest hour.

[TordelBack]

I'm a bit lost here.  Did anyone here say anything negative about Laura herself, other than in general we thought she was a good online writer but (by her own admission) in this instance influenced by her friendship with the subject?  We certainly complained plenty about what we saw as misleading statements and other problems in the specific articles, but I would have thought that was far from a personal attack.  If anything I thought we were making allowances for her fondness for Grant.  We all have our own biases after all.

[opaque]

Ahh I've obviously missed something if there's a personal connection.

[Dunk!]

I take two things away from that article.

1: Gawd I so want to see all that old Steve Yeowell art that personally I haven't seen since it was originally published.

2: Brendan McCarthy considers himself "a very slow artist" - I have laboured under the impression that due to his film/TV work and the sheer energy of his comic pages (The Black Atlantic in particular) he was quite a speedy artist. There ya go.

Dunk! - learning something new every day.