Rant ON!

 Read this dead link and then come back.

 When you sell something, it no longer belongs to you!  If you don't like that idea, don't sell it.  When something no longer belongs to you, you do not have any right to tell the owner what they can or cannot do with the item in question.

Mr Duffy, if you wanted control of your artwork post-employ then you should have negotiated a different contract for it's use.  Of course, that would have meant taking a much smaller amount of money for it since the Register would have had to worry about you selling it again once the terms of the usage contract had been satisfied.

Scott Kurtz, the author of PvPonline, has ranted before about how artists should better protect their work.  He has linked to essays by other authors expressing that they should retain the ownership of the original art and any characters they create.  Mr Duffy did not follow that advice and is now taking the consequences.  Now that Mr Duffy is unemployed I should demand that the Des Moines Register GIVE him the art they PAID for just because he finds himself out of a job?  No, Mr Kurtz, I don't think I can support that position.  The property that the DSM Register bought from Mr Duffy is rightfully theirs to dispose of in anyway they see fit, including destroying it.  That they are choosing to donate it to a University is both within their rights and preserves the work for future generations.

I notice that there's no mention of Mr Duffy making an offer to buy his work back from the Register.  Just in case he has, I want to establish that no injustice exists in the Register refusing Mr Duffy's offer and then giving the catalog to the University of Iowa.  Again, it is the property of the Des Moines Register to sell, destroy or dispose of in any way they see fit.  That's how property rights work and that's how they are supposed to work.  I cannot get bent out of shape when they are working exactly they way they are supposed to.  I can see this hitting the courts and a judge forcing the Register to surrender the artwork to Mr Duffy.  THAT would be an injustice.  That would be stealing at the point of a gavel.  I don't think Mr Duffy is going to get very far in the courts, Paul McCartney was unable to get the songs he wrote for the Beatles back from Michael Jackson via the courts.

Let the tale of Mr Duffy be a warning to you who hope to earn a living by creating.  Accepting the steady paycheck in exchange for the ownership of the products of your imagination leads to owning nothing that your paycheck couldn't buy.  If you think that it's your work and you own it forever, then let your contract with the publisher say that.  Let your contract stipulate the terms under which they may print your work, accept your fee, let them profit as they may and retain the product of your imagination.