I've been running a Calvin & Hobbes bot for ~20 years now. Back when Google Reader was a thing, the bot published an RSS feed which had greater than >1M subscribers. It's now a bot on Reddit (/u/CalvinBot) with >700k karma.
During that time, I've tried to be very mindful of Watterson's copyright and make sure I don't violate it anyway.
This had led to some interesting "bugs." Specifically amuniversal.com only publishes the comic strip as a GIF. But the official Reddit mobile app has a bug. It treats all GIFs as a video & disables other image features, like zooming. The nature of C&H is such that very often want to zoom to see all the wonderful details Mr. Watterson put into the strip.
Because of that I routinely get complaints about it being in a GIF ("GIFs are for movies!" the whippersnappers say) and tell me to publish them as JPG or PNG. Now converting a GIF to JPG or PNG is trivial, but there's no way I can do so without violating his copyright. I'd have to host the converted image myself, which I don't have the right the do.
So I won't do it.
It's minor, but knowing Watterson felt so passionate about copyright, I think it's important to honor. But because the team at Reddit won't fix the bug, the complaints continue to come rolling in. Enough that I wrote a FAQ about it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CalvinBot/comments/bdxb6h/why_are_p...
If any C&H fans knows anyone on the team at Reddit, I'd much appreciate it if you could ask them to fix it.
During that time, I've tried to be very mindful of Watterson's copyright and make sure I don't violate it anyway.
This had led to some interesting "bugs." Specifically amuniversal.com only publishes the comic strip as a GIF. But the official Reddit mobile app has a bug. It treats all GIFs as a video & disables other image features, like zooming. The nature of C&H is such that very often want to zoom to see all the wonderful details Mr. Watterson put into the strip.
Because of that I routinely get complaints about it being in a GIF ("GIFs are for movies!" the whippersnappers say) and tell me to publish them as JPG or PNG. Now converting a GIF to JPG or PNG is trivial, but there's no way I can do so without violating his copyright. I'd have to host the converted image myself, which I don't have the right the do.
So I won't do it.
It's minor, but knowing Watterson felt so passionate about copyright, I think it's important to honor. But because the team at Reddit won't fix the bug, the complaints continue to come rolling in. Enough that I wrote a FAQ about it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CalvinBot/comments/bdxb6h/why_are_p...
If any C&H fans knows anyone on the team at Reddit, I'd much appreciate it if you could ask them to fix it.