I found this story today from online comic strip artist, Scott Kurtz. He recounts his dealings with the comic syndicates responsible for the comics that you see every day in newspapers. I didn’t realize it was such a racket. I’ve seen cartoonists make jokes about the syndicates hovering over them and the criticism that Jim Davis gets for completely and utterly selling out with Garfield, but I didn’t realize what a racket they have going. It’s worse than musicians and record labels. It’ll be interesting to see if Scott’s ideas come to pass. Everybody’s aware of the battle between P2P and the record industry. Cory Doctorow is a big proponent of distribution of books over the Internet.
Some of the things that Kurtz says reminded me of some of what I said last month about large media conglomerates. Also, I thought I had linked Ted Turner’s article on the same topic, but I can’t seem to find it in the archives.