According to the blog post assignment I am supposed to determine whether or not a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon is protected under copyright law or not. For reference here is the link to the strip in question. What I finally came to a consensus of when debating whether or not the comic strip was copyrightable or not, I came to the conclusion that it is. Because the author of the comic strip, Bill Watterson, is still alive meaning that the work is still protected under U.S. copyright law. Therefore because the author is still alive and yet was not asked if his cartoon could be shown on this particular blog website, the copyright law has technically been broken. What copyright does is it helps an author, artist, ect, protect their work. It is the right for the owner to control what people can and cannot do with their work. In theory, in order to obtain permission to copy an author’s work, you would first have to track down the author, and then you would then contact the owner to ask permission to use their work. Sometimes it is even asked to pay a permission fee to use their work however that can be negotiable depending on the owner.
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