Bonus post: Bill Day and "self-plagiarism"

There's a lot going on right now! This is the third bonus post this week!

So, here's the deal. Ordinarily, I'd post this kind of thing here as members-only content, but the truth of the matter is that I have a personal connection to the story. That personal connection was the reason I never posted about Bill Day's historic IndieGoGo campaign here in the first place.

Please... keep that in mind the next time I have to moderate someone here on self-promotion. I hold myself to the same standard -- heck, a stricter one. I could have easily rationalized posting about this fund-rasier here, saying that it held the potential to be the first time a political cartoonist used crowd-sourcing to fund his annual slary. But the fact of the matter is that Bill Day holds a special place in my esteem, and I wouldn't have been able to convice me that the post wasn't self-promotion-by-proxy.

So now, Mr. Day finds himself embroiled in a controversy that has a much broader implication to all cartoonists, and I think that not posting about it would be the greater disservice. But my previous decision prevents me from making my response a members-only post. Since I encouraged my Evil Inc readers to donate to the campaign, posting my thoughts about it here would, in effect, hide it from some of the people it effects directly.

So I posted my thoughts about the Bill Day self-plagiarism controversy on my Evil Inc blog. Here's an excerpt:

So, let's boil this down to what it is. Bill Day re-purposed one of his own drawings to offer it to newspapers (and readers of his work on CagleCartoons.com) as a new thought on a topical issue. In the example above, his argument about the racist overtones in the immigration debate are repurposed to being as appropriate in Arizona as they are in Alabama.

From Ted Rall's blog, we get the reaction from a newspaper editor:

Fortunately, there is hope in the form of some editors. One editor responded to the Bill Day story with comments that probably won’t surprise most readers but would come as a shock to the numerous American editorial cartoonists who really don’t think that plagiarism or self-plagiarism is a big deal: “As an editor who subscribes to Mr. Day’s syndicated work, we had always assumed that we were paying for new content. However, it appears that not only does Mr. Day steal the work of others, but has made a career out of using the same cartoon over and over again. My publisher is currently reevaluating the value of this syndicate and the work they provide to our chain of papers.”

In that same post, Mr. Rall names about a half-dozen other editorial cartoonists who has been caught in the art of re-purposing their own work ("self-plagiarism"). According to him, CagleCartoons hires "hacks" and offers their work at lower rates, instead of "[hiring] those of us who actually take this profession seriously."

And that's where we hit the real issue behind the outrage.

Read the entire post, and then feel fre to come back here and discuss it.