MIKE GOLD: Steve Niles’ Courageous Act

Mike Gold

ComicMix's award-winning and spectacularly shy editor-in-chief Mike Gold also performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com (search: Hit Oldies) every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information.

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14 Responses

  1. Kyle G. says:

    It’s a little scary to think something like this might go forward. I can understand the position of wanting to stop people from getting your creative material for free, but do we need this kind of overreaction to it? Hopefully cooler heads will prevail.

  2. George Haberberger says:

    “Hey! People are inherently good. Go know!”

    I feel good about humanity again.

  3. Mindy Newell says:

    GREAT column, Mike!

    And let Steve know that I’m with him, 100%!!!

    Mindy

    P.S.: Surprise, surprise…it’s all about the money. *sigh* SHOW ME THE MONEEEEEEEEEEY! (Tom Cruise as Jerry McGuire.)

  4. Neil Robertson says:

    If SOPA could be enforced exclusively to combat piracy, I doubt there would be much of a squall against it. We rightly fear the misuse of it.

  5. Steven E. McDonald says:

    Both SOPA and PIP can be used handily to not just shut down any possibly infringing sites without due process, they can be used to crush competition and destroy any sign of criticism (Universal Music Group gave us a taste of this recently when they used their take-down rights on YouTube to remove the anti-SOPA video that was produced for Megaupload.)

    Within six months of passage, the Internet will look like a wasteland from within US borders — while one of the corporate backers of this travesty has said, “It’ll work for us just fine; after all, it’s worked out for China” I’d guess that it’ll actually be more devastating here. It’ll be chum in the shark pool, and a lot of people and businesses on both sides of the divie will end up paying for what will quickly become excesses.

    Fun world.

  6. Mike Gold says:

    Good point, Steven. The motivation behind SOPA well could be to crush the individuals and cockroach capitalists so the Big Six can control all the media once again.

    You’d think we’d be hearing enormous outrage from the Free Market community.

  7. Sean D. Martin says:

    “If SOPA could be enforced exclusively to combat piracy, I doubt there would be much of a squall against it. We rightly fear the misuse of it.”

    Laws shouldn’t be misusable. They should be carefully and narrowly crafted to make sure they can be used only for the purpose actually intended.

    It’s the “Well, sure. It could be misused. But it won’t be. Trust us.” that is rightly feared. Obama signed the law doing away with due process for all citizens, but then offers a signing statement that says “Sure, we could lock you up forever without trial for essentially any reason we want. But I wouldn’t do that.”

    Riiiight.

    If the intent of SOPA is to “exclusively to combat piracy: then it should be very carefully crafted so that that is all it can do.

  8. Mike Gold says:

    Sean, even if it’s narrowly defined there should still be due process of law. And, in fact, we ALREADY have this. You go to court, make your case to the judge and ask for a temporary injunction, and the other side — if they show — refutes it to the best of their ability. The temporary injunction would last until the end of the trial.

    Already on the books. There is no need for a new law unless you’re some fat ass megacorporation that thinks due process is for suckers.

  9. mike weber says:

    Actually, the Superman logo font is not trademarked – the logo is, the font is not and cannot be.

    Theoretically, it can be copyrighted, but someone can produce a font with a different name that duplicates it, and that’s okay.

    That’s why Apple’s primary font is (or was – they may have changed it) called “Geneva” – it’s a near-duplicate of “Helvetica”, which is named after “Helvetia” – Switzerland.

    With very little effort, i could find completely free and completely legal knockoffs of almost any existing typeface online – there are at least five (that i’ve run across) that duplicate the face used in the original “Prisoner” series. There’s even a site that will accept a sample of scanned text and find not only the name of the original font but of any free duplicates.

  10. Mike Gold says:

    Technically, I misspoke. It’s complicated. The sort of original, classic squared off version of the logo was registered with the patent office (Reg. US Pat. Off, a phrase Mike Grell later turned into a villain’s name for Bar Sinister). It’s been held that the style is unique and any adaptation of it using that style but in other words is still an infringement. By way of example, when the Air Force wanted to use that style in one of their recruitment ads in the early 1970s, they had to license it from DC, then National Periodical Publications, and credit NPP accordingly. Like I said, it’s complicated and predates current copyright/patent/trademark laws. If the style hadn’t been abandoned, it would have been grandfathered under ex post facto precedents. Whew.

    Yeah, I studied copyright and trademark law in J-school.

  11. Mark Evanier says:

    I don’t hate you, Mike. I don’t really hate anyone and I certainly don’t hate you.

    But I also don’t think you understand my viewpoint on this at all…and that by suggesting I hate you for yours, you’re suggesting to people that mine is the opposite of yours.

    So let’s just say I’m very annoyed at your misrepresentation of my views.

  12. Mike Gold says:

    I wasn’t trying to misrepresent your views, Mark, as I didn’t establish them at all. What I was doing was making a cheap and convenient joke and it did not occur to me that I could be offending you, and I apologize.

    To the extent that we have discussed this (long ago) and I have read your comments, I would most certainly like to know your views on these matters. I believe that digital publishing is the only profitable business model for the future — and I don’t mean comics, I mean publishing. It’s a bit late for me to say that “with digital publishing comes bootlegging,” as we had bootlegging of comics long before we had digital publishing.

    So, again, I’d love to see your viewpoint.

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