Public Domain Superheros, Copyleft

This is the symbol for copyleft, a form of mark that indicates that an author wants you to distribute their work as widely as possible.

This is a copyleft image of Scott McCloud, who is the author of Understanding Comics and Making Comics.

I wanted to post a picture of a superhero on my blog with a comic book character in the public domain. I ran into a little problem. Nerod comics had a number of characters that were in the public domain, but these characters had been recreated for the current market in a very simiilar manner to the old characters creating a kind of weird hole of legality. I am very careful about this kind of thing. There are numerous articles on this subject. This is article seemed to sum it up very well. http://www.newsarama.com/dynamitenew/Superpowers/PublicDomainHeroes.html

So, I decided to post a Krazy Kat panel. What I found out was very interesting. While the image was in the public domain, the words Krazy Kat had been trademarked. You could not use the words without permission.

Today, I have started reading The Big Switch, Rewiring The World, From Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr. Hopefully, it will provide some interesting insights.

Last night I did a search for sites which linked to my website. I checked my site referrals on Sitemeter. Then I did a link:bookcalendar.blogspot.com search on Google to check for any sites that had linked to my site. There were a few. I looked at a few of the sites. Finally, I checked to see who was commenting on my blog posts on Technorati. This gives me an idea of who is linking to my site. If you are new, it can be a way to build your blogroll or link exchange.