Last Friday, while scrolling through Facebook, we found this deeply dark, wonderfully satiric cartoon by CartoonStock artist Ron Hauge whose specialty is skewering Donald Trump. In this case, the skewering was of that arch Trumpian Rush Limbaugh after The Donald awarded The Rush the medal of freedom.
The good news is that this wonderful cartoon received a huge number of shares; the bad news is that Ron Hauge was never credited in any of the posts. No one knew that it was Ron’s work – and if they liked what they saw, they had no way of seeing more of his work and no way to license the image for a blog, post, newsletter, presentation, or anything else, all of which is the Cartoon Collection’s business … as it is for our cartoonists with whom we split everything we sell.
Too often, people assume that the cartoons they see on the internet are free. Usually, this is not the case. Nor is it the case if you’re using the image on a commercial Twitter profile, Facebook, or Instagram page. The fault lies not with the 11 thousand people who reshared the post on Facebook.
The fault lies with the original poster. Sometimes an artist will donate his work to a network they believe in, as long as the image is credited. But that’s for the artist to decide. Our artists really like to be paid for their work. Not only like, but need to – especially when the rent is due.
The license to share a cartoon on social media is very reasonable: only $11. Cartoons are great for injecting some easy levity into your business page, for grabbing the attention of your audience, or making your point, just as the page sharing Ron’s cartoon was doing.
This story has a happy ending. When we reached out to the page managers to ask for credit for Ron and a link to the image on CartoonStock.com, they were more than happy to instantly oblige.
When we let Ron know that we’d been able to resolve the credit issue, he replied:
“Well, that’s wonderful. Thanks so much for looking out for me. You’re the best!”
Any time, Ron. That’s what we’re here for.
Yours in Good Humor,
Bob