Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Christmas in Toyland, Day 3
Eagle-eyed readers may notice that the copyright notices are missing from the strips. This isn't my doing. The Kansas City Star, which is the origin of my tearsheet run of this strip, made it a policy to remove all syndicate stamps from their strips.
Comments:
Hello,Allan------Just why do you suppose some papers decided to chisel out the syndicate copyrights? The Philadelphia Inquirer also did this for many years. (Dramatically abusive, they also shrank, re-arranged, and only fully colored precious ads.)-----King Cole Johnson.
# posted by 
: 12/19/2007 11:40 AM
: 12/19/2007 11:40 AM
Hi Cole -
I've always assumed that copyright removal was a rather absurd attempt to give readers the impression that all this stuff was produced by their local paper (remember the Omaha Bee, where every strip had a creator byline that read "Drawn for the Bee by "insert name"?). There are also those annoying papers that remove all the dates from their strips. Sometimes this was done for a somewhat decent reason -- they were running stuff late and didn't want to broadcast the fact -- but I think others did it because they felt the dates were a matter for internal record-keeping and should be removed so as not to mar the pristine beauty of the art (oh, except that for that big unexplained hole where it got scratched off).
-- Allan, King of Unciteable Factoids
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I've always assumed that copyright removal was a rather absurd attempt to give readers the impression that all this stuff was produced by their local paper (remember the Omaha Bee, where every strip had a creator byline that read "Drawn for the Bee by "insert name"?). There are also those annoying papers that remove all the dates from their strips. Sometimes this was done for a somewhat decent reason -- they were running stuff late and didn't want to broadcast the fact -- but I think others did it because they felt the dates were a matter for internal record-keeping and should be removed so as not to mar the pristine beauty of the art (oh, except that for that big unexplained hole where it got scratched off).
-- Allan, King of Unciteable Factoids
