US CUSTOMS SEIZES PARODY COMICS @ BORDER, CBLDF GEARING UP
http://newsarama.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=22835Citing that material contained therein constituted “clearly piratical copies” of registered and recorded copyrights, a shipment of comics bound for Top Shelf has been seized by US Customs in Charleston, SC. The books in question are copies of the Stripburger anthology containing the stories “Richie Bush” by Peter Kuper, and “Moj Stub” (“My Pole”) by Bojan Redzic. Top Shelf has asked the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund to look in to the matter, and as a result, the CBLDF has retained counsel to challenge the seizures.
According to the CBLDF: "Richie Bush," appearing in Stripburger (Vol. 12) #37, is a four-page parody of Richie Rich that also satirizes the Bush Administration by superimposing the personalities of the President's cabinet on the characters from the comic. "My Pole," appearing in Stripburger (Vol.3) # 4-5, which was published in 1994, is an eight-page ecology parable in Serbian that makes visual homage to Snoopy, Charlie Brown, and Woodstock in three panels. Customs seized five copies of the issue with the Peanuts reference and fourteen copies of the issue containing "Richie Bush." The stories were both published in the middle of their respective issues and no graphics from either story appeared on the covers.
“It’s an interesting thing – I take over as President of the Fund’s Board, and am ready to defend everyone else, and something like this comes along that falls right in my lap as Top Shelf,” said Top Shelf Publisher Chris Staros. “It’s very unusual, but at least I knew who to call.”
-snip-
We import a bunch of stuff, from Actus in Israel to Oog & Blik in The Netherlands, and even though we’ve never had a shipment detained by customs before, I wasn't immediately alarmed when I heard our shipment had been detained. I just figured that Customs was searching the entire sea container that our pallet was in for pests or some such. In any event, after a two or three week delay, I finally called our customs broker to ask what the problem was, and she told me that our specific pallet was being searched. That's when I started to get a little nervous.
“About a week later, on October 27th, I received a formal letter from Customs announcing that two issues of the anthology Stripburger had been seized,” Staros continued. “In the letter, they accused the two issues of being ‘piratical works’ of Richie Rich and Peanuts, and that if we wanted to protest the seizure we had to respond to them formally within thirty days. I knew what was in the Miniburger boxed set, because I had already seen an advance copy of it, so I knew their seizure couldn't have been related to the main body of the shipment. So, I immediately emailed the people at Stripburger and found out that they had also sent along a couple issues of Stripburger that had a Peter Kuper ‘Richie Bush’ story in it, and another story that had a couple of Peanuts cameos. -- By the way, the Flash-animated version of the printed ‘Richie Bush’ story can be seen on the web at Peter Kuper's www.RichieBush.com. -- Eventually, the Miniburgers were released to us, but the Stripburgers were firmly in Customs hands.”
- long snip-
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the article ends with this:
“It's the principle that matters in this case,” Brownstein continued. “U.S. Customs does not exist to act as the parody police. They police actual piracy, but anyone viewing these comics can clearly see that these comics are not representing themselves as copies of the real thing. They are poking fun at the real thing, an exercise of the rights the First Amendment affords parodists and satirists. It's a very slippery slope for Customs to start deciding what non-obscene literature can and can't come into the country, and it's something we want to see stopped, and stopped right now.”
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three guesses if it will be "stopped"
whose to stop the bloody hands bushgang?
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