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Scott,

You know, I’ve long been a fan of your work and your ethos, but this article actually sickens me.

You yourself admit earlier in your article that DJ stuck with PS well after problems arose, and yet your little cartoon says he jumped ship at the first sign of trouble?

Given some of the rants and comments I’ve seen you post, this entire article smacks of a distasteful mix of hypocrisy and “I told you so”.

You have done yourself a large disservice in writing this tripe and drawing that cartoon.

You just lost yourself a reader.

- Sunder

Uh oh, a “lost reader” card! They put these in boxes of Cracker Jacks.

DJ didn’t jump ship at the first sign of trouble, but he did make vague allusions to what Platinum was doing. We may never know to what extent he was dealing with them on this behind the scenes, but we may also never know how much the gossiping damaged his position with Platinum.

The only difference between Scott and my opinion is that I think Platinum couldn’t have cared less about DJ and his rights, and that DJ would have never seen them—the circumstance in which DJ could have licensed them back would have been some variant of this one, and this is a negative one. Platinum just wants to crawl back into its positive PR and forget about this (I would imagine).

I’d feel bad for the guy if I didn’t already feel like DJ Coffman was a self righteous, unrepentant shill.

Scott isn’t saying I told you so.  In fact I’d wager he’s the kind of good soul who wishes he’d had the chance to warn DJ Coffman this sort of thing was going to happen.

Just like he’s trying to warn and help other naive (or just plain foolish) creators with this article.  I didn’t interpret ridicule coming from this article. 

Just a stern and honest assessment of an artist’s mistake, with a reminder that it was the artist himself who was responsible for that mistake.

Actually, where does Scott say that DJ stuck w/ Platinum after problems?  Is that in some invisible text I didn’t see?

Scott is just pointing out - this was business, and it was a 2-way street.  PS was crappy in their motives etc.  But in the same time, DJ knew the rules and understood that he was giving up his rights.

Another things, that I am reading between the lines, is that Scott is pointing out a few things:
1. be wary of deals where you are up front giving your rights away
2. if things do seem to be heading for trouble/or you have found it, don’t go running to air out the dirty laundry immediately.

I am not saying that he would have gotten his right back had he not made the financial situation public, but it didn’t help.

I feel for the guy, it really sucks, but unfortunately, this is business, which can be cold and heartless sometimes.

But as Scott seems to be pointing out, future artists should look at this as an example of problems that can arise in these situations, and make their future decisions accordingly.

-RonB

I’m in total agreement with Scott.

As a creator, the rights to your work are literally the only thing you have. Why ANYONE would willingly sign them away is totally beyond me.

I call it ‘American Idol’ syndrome. Enter the contest, sign on the dotted line and you could be world famous tomorrow! Of course, even if your idea is a landslide success, you get a ‘wage’ while others get rich off your idea. (Just ask Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel what that’s like).

The other thing is, it’s easy to cast Platinum as the ‘bad guys’, the ‘evil corporation’ stamping on the little guy and stealing honest creators’ work…but the truth is they didn’t STEAL anything. DJ knowingly and willingly signed over his rights to them. Sure, it would be NICE of them to return his rights, but in simplest terms they’re a business. They make their money by buying intellectual property, not by being ‘nice’. I’ll admit that not paying DJ on time is unacceptable…but that’s the only thing they did wrong.

For me, what it boils down to is this: Hosting and bandwidth are cheap. 20 years ago, we had no choice but to go through a larger entity to get our work out there. Today, ANYONE can reach a worldwide audience with a minimum investment.

Sure, it may take longer to become popular, there’s no amazing ‘overnight success’ but you come out the other side STILL OWNING YOUR WORK…instead of becoming little more than a disposable employee at best.

In simplest terms, you can either keep the cow, or sell it to someone and hope they’ll keep giving you the milk.

In closing, let me re-state something that Scott said in a previous post. We Are Not Contestants. If someone thinks my idea is good enough to market, let them come to me and I’LL negotiate the terms. I won’t enter a contest where the only ‘prize’ is that I get to sign away my rights.

Without seeing the contract we cannot know what was promised etc. However if DJ was unwiser enough to sign a contract giving his rights away regardless of him getting paid for his work well… I hope a lot of people learn from this.
However PS are in breach of contract by not paying him, whether or not it is that initial contract that has not been fulfilled or a subsidiary one.

hopefully this will be able to be sorted out with all parties involved without any legal action.

I see it as an unpublished artist (does deviant art count??), I have a property that I’d love to see animated ( and most of my fans), but what PS offered, I would not do in a million years, and when I heard DJ doing it with HBN, I knew something like this would happen.
I just hope DJ can come out of this with something positive.

scott you say it best when you suggest that DJ screwed up before he ever went public with dirty secrets. he screwed up when he signed his rights over to a pissant middle man publisher. and kris is right, there’s no way they would give his IP back, he’d have to buy it. what does platinum even trade in if they don’t have IPs, and why would they exist? i mean sign your rights over to paramount, or robert evans. you know, someone with some juice. platinum ... riiiight, just like my rims :P

I see most of you didn’t read both articles.

The gist is this (as I see it, maybe I’LL be called out for “not reading both articles”):

Both Straub and Kurtz know that DJ signed his rights away to Platinum, and that Platinum pretty much has full control of “if and when” DJ gets the rights back to those works.

Straub believes that they would never have released control of his material back to DJ - whether he was being a nice guy or not.

Kurtz believes that had DJ “played ball” and been a bit less of an ass-hat, that Platinum would probably have given (or been more likely to) him his rights back.

The history of musicians, artists, etc,etc, would suggest to me that the Kurtz view is a bit naive. I don’t think that DJ would ever have gotten the rights back to his work (whether he was a nice guy or bad guy) without a good lawyer.

Contests like this really are for amateurs, that’s all: someone who wants a bunch of free publicity and attention, but not much else. 

If you go into a contest like this with the idea of promoting yourself, your work, your style, and hopefully drawing people to your other websites and comics, then maybe it’s worth (possibly) sacrificing the idea you put on the block for the contest. 

If you can’t afford to lose it, don’t gamble it.  But if you are already having any measure of success elsewhere, then entering a contest like this seems like a waste of your time and energy: it seems like you’re better off just pouring yourself into creating a quality product consistently, on your own terms.

I worked with D.J. and can tell you that there’s not a more hardworking or down to earth creator I’ve met. I also think from having discussions with him he’s a natural born businessman and knows exactly what he’s doing, he didn’t just fly off the handle without careful consideration about the future of Hero By Night. In a very odd and round about way I don’t think he ever really wanted the rights back, he said himself he never asked for them, and said this wasn’t a “creator rights” issue. So what was his plan in all of this? The last conversation I had with D.J. he mentioned he was out for doing what’s best for Platinum Studios, and sometimes especially in the corporate climate where really nice people have to make really tough decisions and lose sleep, what a company really needs is some tough love. I don’t think D.J. hates anyone personally at Platinum, he’s not out to get them. I get from reading his blogs that he’d like to see them do what’s smart for them.

Believe me, he’s not airing their “dirty laundry.” The entire situation could be fixed if the powers that be at Plat swallowed a little pride and just granted him the rights to continue it himself on the web. I’d be willing to bet even if they did, he wouldn’t continue it anyway, which would prove my point that it wasn’t his plan anyway. Oh, and Hero By Night was one of my favorite books there, almost everyone’s favorite. D.J. is a talented guy and I wish him well and I hope this works out for him and the other creators. The saddest thing to me right now is that there’s no more Hero By Night to check in on! If nobody has read it or actually checked out the work it’s still on Drunk Duck. Com, and http://herobynight.com takes you there. That Hero vanished though, maybe someday he’ll be rediscovered!

Was it not part of DJ’s contract that he be paid for his work? If Platinum still owes him money, is the contract not null and void? Maybe the contract was so one-sided that it specifically stated Platinum could stop paying him at any time, but I can’t imagine anyone would sign that. I’d suggest he get a lawyer.

On topic, though, I agree with Kris. Platinum never had any intention of giving the rights back to him… They own it, they don’t have to give it back, so why would they? They might sell it back, but only if no one else is offering to give them more for it than DJ could afford.

I never said that Platinum would simply give DJ back his rights to HBN. But if you go by the letter they sent him, they were considering licensing it back to him. DJ probably could have, for a nominal or waived fee, be granted a limited license to produce HBN on the web or in print.

Companies do this all the time with vendors. Marvel, DC and all the publishers sell different vendors licenses to create products based on their IP. It just seems silly and sad in this case because DJ sold away all rights to what he created and would probably have to by some of them back in a limited capacity to keep his project going.

So again, I do think that probably he could have worked something out. Just pretend for a second that you’re an exec at Platinum.

1) You’re producing this comic for two reasons: To have an active comic title to pitch to Hollywood, and to keep up the appearance of being a premier producer of graphic content so you can attract more potential creators to mine. Allowing DJ to keep HBN going on his own allows you to maintain both.

2) The comic will be produced without any production cost to yourself. Now you don’t have to worry about continuing to pay DJ to produce HBN. You just catch up on past payments.

3) You still make money selling back a license to the dude who created it in the first place and are probably guaranteed a cut of profits in case some fluke happens and the comic starts selling like gangbusters.

4) It’s good PR. You could probably even repair a bit of rep damage because you’ve given the appearance that you’ve restored DJ’s rights, in some capacity, back to him. And you know that DJ will continue to cheerlead for the company as long as he’s kept happy.

I just don’t see why it would be a bad business decision for them to sell a limited license back to DJ in order for him to keep HBN going in some capacity.

To X-Platinum: First, thanks for posting anonymously. Second. Why would DJ negotiate with Plat for his rights if he didn’t want them in the first place? What’s his master plan there? I don’t get it?

Chris and Scott, I applaud your comments, your honesty and above all - your willingness to wade into this. As a long time fan of comics in general and online comic specifically, I appreciate two major artists contributing their personal feelings and opinions on this subject. Too often the vague an anonymous nature of the internet allows those who post their opinions to do so without recourse. Posting using your real identity not only adds to the legitimacy, it drive the point home to many people. Whether or not anyone who reads these posts agrees with either artist, at least they stepped forward openly. Bravo

Scott, D.J. had said on his blog that it was Platinum that brought up the rights stuff to him to allow him to continue it on his own. I think ultimately DJ would like to keep the book coming out at Platinum if they had the money to keep putting into it, or would have rather they paid him to produce OGNs once a year in chapters or collect the webcomic version, rather than going it on his own. It could even be the case that by them offering anything back to him that he knew this was a sign that it was “over” in a lot of ways. but the book market is bad all around, all over. It always seemed to me from conversations that if HBN ended, he’d move on to other projects he had wanted to do, which it looks like he did do in this case right away. I guess now he’s probably most upset that he hasn’t been paid, I’m not sure how much he’s owed, but I know from talking to him that he almost lost his house hoping his pay would come on time. That’s unfortunate, and probably ended up setting him off after there wasn’t good communication about his problems. Just my guess. I’ve been in similar positions in life before.

There’s a couple of issues here:

DJ’s rights to the work in question
The unpaid bill

If DJ is not interested in (and hasn’t asked for) his rights back then what’s the issue? As much as it might upset those who disapprove of selling the rights to their works (which I can understand), the fellow made his own grown up decision and is living with it without making a fuss about it.

Regarding payment:
Seems to me that there is far more going on behind the scenes.  But no matter what, Platinum must pay the man his money. If they do not then they *are* in breach of contract and a lawyer could possibly argue DJ’s rights back for him.
I can certainly sympathise with DJ if he almost lost his house - that’s bad and if Platinum knew it then they really are corporate scum… but it’s an assumption that they did. They may not have known.

As for “you knew what you were walking into” - well there is always something to that and yes if DJ did then maybe he shouldn’t complain too loudly.  But if a company owed me money, refused to pay even after being cajoled at length and I almost lost my house because of it - well maybe I would go public just to get them to do something as well.

Bottom line: PLATINUM, if you owe the guy his cash then pay him.  It’s the most sensible and honest thing to do.

Yeah. Platinum HAS to pay these guys immediately. These are people’s lives that get smurfin up when payments don’t go out. That’s just stomach wrenching to think about.

I have to agree with Scott’s assessment about creators must keep control of their creation.

This plays not only into the world of cartoonists but any body who creates a body of work. If you sign your rights to your work away then you really only have yourself to blame.

I don’t know about web comics, but most artists in general do not make enough off their art to pay the bills.  Most people know this and for that reason, they jump at the chance to become “famous”.  Because, let’s face it in the world today, money seems to flow to the famous, no matter if they are talented or not.

For me, the lesson isn’t don’t sell out, it is don’t sell out without doing your homework, sell out to the guys with deep pockets, and don’t sell cheap.

Being indepenant is great, and if you can make that happen, more power to you, but I suspect there are a lot more DJ’s and a lot fewer Scott’s and Kris’ out there trying to get by and make a living.

Entering a contest where you sign your rights away is like playing the lottery.  Odds are you won’t win.

Keeping your rights is like building a 401k.  It takes longer but you have a better outcome.  Stock market crash not withstanding.

People want to get paid today not tomorrow.  It boils down to perserverance vs instant gratification.

Perhaps this is also demonstrated in the average amount of time people spend at the same company.  People change jobs more frequently now than they have before.  It is easier to get a raise by leaving one company and going to another.  Granted you may lose some vacation time but generally it is ‘worth’ it.

The problem is most people don’t look into the future.

I haven’t done complete verification of the below but I suspect I’m not too far off.

Consider:
The TV adds promising you thousands of dollars for only a few dollars a month.  Here if you meet the minimum payment you are actually going deeper into debt.

Credit Cards, 3% monthly payment, 19.8% annual interest.  It would take over 10 years to pay off a $3,000 balance.

Money Advance businesses.  Give us a check for $250 and we will give you $200.  Umm? 20% off the top?

Yes these all have their place and so does Chapter 11.  Think before you act.  Then think again.  Get advice.  Be it from a lawyer, CPA, similar business person, spouse, significant other, bartender, hairdresser, cat, beer can.  Just be sure you trust their judgement.

‘Nuff Said.

Given that Platinum hasn’t paid him for his work, aren’t they in breach of contract?  Couldn’t DJ sue to retrieve his rights?

I imagine the Rights and the employment contract are separate just in case. I can’t imagine a company like Platinum *NOT* doing two different things. After double checking the rules, there are a few items to sign: “sign and return a [1] Comic Book Publishing and Acquisition Agreement and a [2] Work-For-Hire Agreement (collectively, the “Creative Materials Agreements”), and c) have each Team Member, if any, sign a [3] Rights Release (“Team Member Release”)”

In this case while they are all related to the “Grand Prize”, they are not inclusive to each other. You don’t sign one agreement for everything, so Platinum breaching the terms of the Work Contract is not at all related to you saying “Peace” to your rights in exchange for: (from Prizes): “Sponsor will, subject to the terms of such agreements and the provisions of these Official Rules, publish a comic book or graphic novel based on the Creative Materials submitted by the Grand Prize Winner (the “Comic Book”). Such Comic Book will be released at a major convention in 2008 as well as on an Internet website of Sponsor’s choosing. Such Comic Book will also be advertised on major comic book web sites of Sponsor’s choosing. The Grand Prize Winner also will receive fees for writing and art services in developing the Comic Book in accordance with the provisions of the Creative Materials Agreements.”

In short, the creator will have *A* book published (could be a single, 22 page comic), have advertising, and get paid for developing (which is probably nominal). The development payment is likely tied to the rights contract so there is little argument about who owns what if they creator isn’t paid down the road for work-for-hire.

Many of these are educated guesses based on the information that is public. Unfortunately, the exact wording of contracts is not posted publicly.

Some food for thought: If the work-for-hire and the rights were tied directly together, what would those asking about Platinum’s “breach” be asking about if DJ was fired or replaced? Your assumption about rights being null because he didn’t get paid is unfair and doesn’t understand the contracts involved.

Also, if a creator had the money to hire a good attorney to get his payment and/or rights back, said creator would not be stressed about missed payments for work (or be concerned about possible foreclosure on their home).

Hope that answers some of the repeated questions..
-Michael

Coffman is surely in the LEGAL wrong, and i never heard of him before now, but I know one company I will never patronize, and that’s Platinum.

Lousy rights-hoarding creeps like this are the reason we can’t have new Tick comics.

INVARIABLY whenever you hear someone say something like ‘it’s just business’, they’re screwing someone out of some money, they know it, and they need to excuse themselves for doing something they know is wrong.

As someone who is not an artist this situation seems a lot simpler to me than people are making it out to be.

As I see it Platinum Studios employed DJ to work on Hero by Night then they stopped paying him.

The fact that he pitched the idea that got him the job or the terms of his contract seem largely irrelevant to me.  In business people give away great ideas to their employer all the time in exchange for a regular paycheck.  Platinum isn’t bad because they’re an uncaring corporate entity sticking it to artists - they’re bad because they don’t pay their employees.

Furthermore expecting their former employees to keep quiet about not getting paid is ludicrous.  If you had a 9 to 5 job and quit because they stopped paying you how would you respond if they said, “Oh hey - don’t tell anyone we stopped paying you.  We’re going to need to hire some more people and that would be bad for us. Okay?”

You know, Scott’s right, he’s been a voice of advocacy for the webcomic industry for a long and knows his stuff.

As he points out no one stole these rights, DJ Coffman signed an agreement and it doesn’t sound like he was coerced into doing it.  Even having personal hardship and someone offering you money isn’t coercion.

If Platinum lives up to their end of the contract(money or what ever) then DJ Coffman must live up to his (giving them the license). 

The bottom line is as follows NEVER SIGN A CONTRACT YOU DON’T READ AND FULLY UNDERSTAND, OR ARE UNWILLING TO ABIDE BY.

You can agree with or disagree with Platinum’s stance or their business practices, you don’t have to buy their stuff.  But they are in the legal right, and that’s what matters.

And one side note.  Art is a job.  Don’t act like it’s a hobby.  If your trying to make a living off your life, don’t expect to love it every day.  Don’t expect to instantly become famous.  You will struggle, and you might not make it but that’s the same as being a programmer, a race car driver, or what ever you want to be.