A couple of years ago, my friend Greg and I made an anti-Bush political cartoon called "Brother, Can You Spare a Job?". The cartoon was registered and released under the Creative Commons License so that we could allow it to be widely distributed and used by anyone, as long as they abide by the regulations set by Creative Commons: you must attribute credit to the creators, you may NOT use it for commercial purposes, and you may NOT alter, transform, or build upon this work.

Well, The Anime Network have a little promo commercial that compares Cartoons to Anime... Apparently their message is "Cartoons are gay, but Anime is Awesome!". I guess there's no room in their Robots & Babes themed programming for the cartoony goodness of Japanese animators like Osama Tezuka or Hayao Miyazaki.

You can view the commercial here. If you look closely, you'll see two brief sequences that were appropriated from "Brother, Can You Spare a Job?".

Needless to say, we're not happy to be included in the commercial, and it's in clear violation of our Creative Commons License for the cartoon. I assume the "geniuses" who made the commercial scoured Archive.org for what they thought were public-domain cartoons, found "Brother..." and threw it in the mix.

We're not sure what kind of action we'll need to take, but we intend to put an end to their wrongful appropriation of our cartoon.

Greg Saunders has also blogged about this here and here.

Stay Tuned for further developments.