I just got an email from Creators Syndicate this morning.  Some woman (I’m assuming its a woman) by the name of Andrea Fryrear (which is an unfortunate last name if you break it up as a compound word) sent me an email (with a from name of only ‘Andrea’ which is a good way to get tagged as spam Ms. Fryrear) asking me to take down a farside cartoon that I had posted on my website.  A single cartoon that I had found on the internet and copied onto my site.  I immediately complied because I want to be a law abiding citizen.  However, I had some questions for her: 1) How could I legally re-use the cartoon (could I pay a license fee) 2) Could I link to a Far Side book on Amazon.com and then the cartoon could potentially be a revenue generating advertisement for them?  I haven’t gotten a reply yet, but the whole thing bugged me.

Gary Larson apparently has written about the subject and you can read about it on the syndicate website.  It strikes me as a problematic solution to the real issue: the interwebs is a new model for publishing businesses and they must deal with the change.  There are tons of ways they could go about making the new model work for them:

1) Require all comics that are republished by independent publishers (like bloggers) link to their site where they sell the books, mugs, shirts, cell phone wrappers, bumper stickers and collectible enema boxes to people who link through

2) Require the images to be linking to amazon.com with their associates ID so that they get to make money on Amazon.com selling their stuff

3) Give it away realizing that the more exposure they have the more likely people will seek out the funny/good content in sources that pay them (such as newspapers, paying websites, and again, Amazon.com)

4) Give it away and just say, “Gee, this interweb thing will hopefully be a passing fad.”

But sitting around hiring people like Andrea (who I am sure is really nice and probably makes a killer vegetarian salad when you come over to her house because she wouldn’t even hurt dead meat) to send out emails and seek out places where their old model is leaking and stick her finges in them is not an ideal method.