By on 18 January 2013 - creative commons
Based in Auckland, New Zealand, Dylan Horrocks is best known as the author of the award winning Hicksville, a story of a small, comics-obsessed town on New Zealand’s East Coast.
Hicksville was named a ‘book of the year’ by Comics Journal and features in Auckland University Press’s Anthology of New Zealand Literature, alongside canonical New Zealand writers James K Baxter, Maurice Gee and Katherine Mansfield.
Dylan is also a long-time supporter of Creative Commons. In fact, since 2009, Dylan has been releasing his work on his website under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 3.0 New Zealand licence. Users can find finished stories and ongoing serials, including Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen.
Dylan first became interested in the the relation between copyright and culture when, as a young comics reader, he saw how many authors had lost the rights to their works—including Siegel and Shuster, the creators of Superman, who sold their work to National Periodicals (later, DC comics).
As Dylan relates, “When freelancers got paid in the early comics industry, they had to sign the back of the cheque to cash it. On the back of the cheque, though, was a printed statement, which basically said ‘all rights to this story and the characters contained therein are hereby handed in perpetuity to the publisher.’
“The key lesson was: never sell your copyright to a company. For a long time, my view of copyright was that it was very, very important for the artist and that you must hold on to it, no matter what.”
Dylan’s view of copyright changed when, in the process of researching a guest lecture for Auckland University, he realised the potential effects of the Internet on the production and distribution of culture.
Full article at creative commons
Hicksville was named a ‘book of the year’ by Comics Journal and features in Auckland University Press’s Anthology of New Zealand Literature, alongside canonical New Zealand writers James K Baxter, Maurice Gee and Katherine Mansfield.
Dylan is also a long-time supporter of Creative Commons. In fact, since 2009, Dylan has been releasing his work on his website under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 3.0 New Zealand licence. Users can find finished stories and ongoing serials, including Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen.
The American Dream, Page 13, by Dylan Horrocks. This image is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 New Zealand licence
As Dylan relates, “When freelancers got paid in the early comics industry, they had to sign the back of the cheque to cash it. On the back of the cheque, though, was a printed statement, which basically said ‘all rights to this story and the characters contained therein are hereby handed in perpetuity to the publisher.’
“The key lesson was: never sell your copyright to a company. For a long time, my view of copyright was that it was very, very important for the artist and that you must hold on to it, no matter what.”
Dylan’s view of copyright changed when, in the process of researching a guest lecture for Auckland University, he realised the potential effects of the Internet on the production and distribution of culture.
Full article at creative commons
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