Fanzines by Teal Triggs- Chapter 6

Professor Teal Triggs at the Royal College of Arts 2010 publication ‘Fanzines’ talks about the craft and design of contemporary zines, she starts off by talking about the development of the craft culture within the fanzine world dating back to the early 1990s starting off with ‘Riot grrrl scene’ and leading into craftivism (an amalgamation of ‘craft and activism’) by british artist Betsy Greer in 2003, she then goes on to talk about crafting alternative communities describing the lifestyle shift into the publishing of ‘how to’ zines explaining that there are two categories that these zines fall into, the first being the zines that write about how to make a zine and the second are the zines that provide lo-fi ‘how to’ guides on making your own crafts/products; in the latter of the category she references the ‘Stolen sharpie revolution: a DIY zine resource’ a minizine by ‘crafty girl’ Alex Wrekk describing how Wrekk suggests tips on the consideration of copyright ‘if you are going to reprint something from another zine’ which ironically is the where the majority of criticism on Teal Trigg’s publication is based around- as a lot of controversy on copyright issues came soon after Trigg’s book was published because a lot of the imagery of the fanzines she included in her book were without the permission of the original artists and in some cases miscredited or not credited at all. (Triggs, 2010)

In my opinion I feel that Triggs should be accountable for the misuse or lack accreditation however the book itself contains a lot of imagery relating to her essays and it would be a lengthy process for her to contact every single artist involved in addition to this formality I believe that because the main element of a fanzine is that it is ‘self published’ implies that the artist has no official publication protection over there zine however after researching into UK copyright law I found out that Under U.K. copyright law, self published work is protected as soon as the artist/author puts the pen to paper. ‘Copyright is based on your creative authorship and is not dependent on any formal agreement with a book publisher or self publishing company.’