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Twitter invades the daily comics (well, Zits, at least) - and the annoyance of copyrights prohibiting embeds

So there I was this morning in the usual daily routine of having breakfast and reading the comics in the daily newspaper (yes, I still get a daily paper - two, in fact), when the world of social media landed in the comics. There in the "Zits" comic strip, Jeremy and his friend Pierce are gasping at the thought that students actually passed notes on paper in the time "B.T.", as in "Before Twitter"! I admit to laughing out loud and getting perplexed looks from other household members.

You can see it for yourself (click on the image):

comic-cannot-be-embedded.jpg

And I would have loved to embed the comic here, but I definitely respect copyright notices and the notice on the page for the comic is very clear (my emphasis added):

© 2008 Zits Partnership. This feature is presented with the permission of King Features Syndicate, Inc. and is furnished solely for personal, non-commercial use. Redistribution in whole or part prohibited.

That last part would indicate to me pretty clearly that I can't just go and embed the graphic in my post, which is too bad, as it would be a lot more interesting for readers to see the comic in the context of my commentary here. But between someone applying stock copyright terms and probably someone else's desire to have the page viewed "on the property", it means viewers here have to go over to that site to see the comic. Some will... some won't. It's just annoying.

Now if they provided "embed" codes for the comics like you have for, say, YouTube videos (or most other video sharing sites), the publishers would be able to ensure they gather statistics but they would also get the added publicity of having their comic strip embedded on other sites and increase the number of people who have seen the strip.

But I digress...

My main point today was merely to point out that it was fun to see a mention of Twitter on the comic pages today. I'm sure there will be a lot of readers of the comics who won't have a clue what this means... but for those of us who do understand, we can laugh along. (While simultaneously realizing again why some schools are futilely trying to ban cell phones.)

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