Comment by james-bcn
6 days ago
I think it's only the case that the first book has entered the public domain, not all the others, so technically you are breaking copyright if you use images from later books (as does this article).
Also copyright is not the same as a trademark, and I expect "Tintin", and perhaps the visual image of Tintin, are trademarked.
That would be Tintin in the Land of the Soviets[0], I believe.
Hergé's depiction of black people was pretty awful, sadly. I know that many folks don't like to admit that Tintin in the Congo[1] exists.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin_in_the_Land_of_the_Sovi...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin_in_the_Congo
He drew caricatures that would be easy for 1930s children to identify. There are very few depictions of non-white characters in the books that aren't in same way questionable.
It's unfortunate, but a lot of literature of the time needs to be read with the general ambient racism that was sloshing around in mind.
This is true. I have a couple of DVDs of old Tom and Jerry cartoons.
There's no way those cartoons would be released, today.
Come to think of it, Asterix wasn't really any better[0]. There just weren't so many black people to show.
[0] https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/asterix/images/b/ba/The_ma...
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The article is allowed to use moderate amounts of copyrighted material for illustration and commentary. In the US this is called “fair use”.
As a huge Tintin fan I find one of the interesting things about it is how few Tintin images you can find on the web. I expect that is because they have lawyers contacting sites that put up copyrighted images.
Yes, the copyright owners are known in the fan community for being really aggressive and hunting even harmless not-for-profit fan works. Which makes me sympathize even less with the two last paragraphs in the post (not that I would sympathize much anyway).