I've been running a Calvin & Hobbes bot for ~20 years now. Back when Google Reader was a thing, the bot published an RSS feed which had greater than >1M subscribers. It's now a bot on Reddit (/u/CalvinBot) with >700k karma.

During that time, I've tried to be very mindful of Watterson's copyright and make sure I don't violate it anyway.

This had led to some interesting "bugs." Specifically amuniversal.com only publishes the comic strip as a GIF. But the official Reddit mobile app has a bug. It treats all GIFs as a video & disables other image features, like zooming. The nature of C&H is such that very often want to zoom to see all the wonderful details Mr. Watterson put into the strip.

Because of that I routinely get complaints about it being in a GIF ("GIFs are for movies!" the whippersnappers say) and tell me to publish them as JPG or PNG. Now converting a GIF to JPG or PNG is trivial, but there's no way I can do so without violating his copyright. I'd have to host the converted image myself, which I don't have the right the do.

So I won't do it.

It's minor, but knowing Watterson felt so passionate about copyright, I think it's important to honor. But because the team at Reddit won't fix the bug, the complaints continue to come rolling in. Enough that I wrote a FAQ about it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CalvinBot/comments/bdxb6h/why_are_p...

If any C&H fans knows anyone on the team at Reddit, I'd much appreciate it if you could ask them to fix it.