This is a follow-up to the recently-announced deal which will bring Diesel Sweeties to the newspapers, via United Feature Syndicate. Thoughts have come up which are too interesting, and too important, to allow to stay hidden in the comments section of this post, where I waxed enthusiastic about rstevens being able to keep his copyright.

In that thread, Eric Millikin points out that:

But I don’t think that not “expect[ing] him to sign over the ownership of the property, and the merchandise business … represents a sea change for United, and possibly for newspaper syndicates generally.” Diesel Sweeties will be just the latest of many syndicated comics that retain their own copyright and merchandising. There are plenty of newspaper comics that are simply distributed by a syndicate while the copyright is held by someone else.

Elsewhere, Scott Kurtz asks some good questions today on the PvP homepage; specifically:

What does “maintain my own copyright” mean? That can mean that an artist maintains total creative and legal control over his property, or it can mean nothing. I know more than one syndicated cartoonist who have been allowed to “maintain the copyright” to their strip and still have to give 50% of all profits to the syndicate on everything the strip makes and have no control over how the strip is sold or promoted.

And Tom Spurgeon provides further insight here (emphasis mine):

Unless someone can figure out a way to unpack it for me and change my mind, Stevens keeping the copyright seems to me a non-story. My understanding is that this is an option offered to cartoonists as a matter of course; the key isn’t the copyright as much as the contractual agreements regarding control, direction and profit described above. Because syndicate contracts are so explicit on these issues, a cartoonist once described to me the issue of who gets the copyright as a coin-flip decision. The only thing I can guess is that depending on the contract means that Stevens would have an easier time putting the strip back on-line full-time were his agreement with UFS to dissolve.

Where these questions have come up around the web, I’ve seen other people kind of balk at even speculating about the deal: it’s rude. Maybe so. But it’s also urgently important to get as good an understanding as we can about these kinds of rights issues, as the asteroid of webcomics hurtles headlong into the corporate atmosphere. Everybody (including me) is very, very excited about this development still — rstevens is a great guy and a major talent, and DS is one of the best comic strips in existence — but coming to as full an understanding of it as possible could be a big benefit for everybody. Not that anybody “in on” the deal has any obligation to share any information. Probably quite the opposite.

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