Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Büge]

http://www.ifanboy.com/content/articles/Colleen_Doran_on_Piracy

Walter Benjamin never anticipated the filesharing network.

[Mongrel]

I don't have the link handy, but there was that fellow did the spelunking park rangers story who recently put up all his material for free after a direct conversation with pirates and saw a huge uptick in sales.

I guess what I'm saying there is Doran's concerns are quite relevant, but the plural of anecdote is not data.

The piracy debate always kills me. Regardless of anyone's view on the moral implications, the behaviour is here to stay. I'm not sure I've ever heard of a campaign asking people to collectively take responsibility for their moral behaviour work for very long, if at all.

Enforcement has been tried and has failed for the most part. The reality is that we may simply face a world where the market's going rate for some forms of artwork is not enough to sustain production and that no one really has a perfect solution to that yet. But I can tell you that when the options are "Wait patiently, save up, and make judicious spending choices" versus "press a button and receive all that your heart desires", anyone expecting the former to win is an idiot.

When I was younger (long enough ago that it actually predated filesharing and torrents) I thought maybe a return to patronage systems (something that had worked relatively well for several hundred years) would be good for art as a whole since that would partially free it from commercial concerns, but that was the product of a fairly naive mind and is extremely unlikely to happen, so I have no idea what a functional solution is. Perhaps some form of hard-to-duplicate content (not in the sense of something that's copy-protected, but say access to artist chats or other social or time-dependent things).

The slow but clear decline in real incomes contrasts sharply with a consumer culture whose success rests on hiding that decline and which has a vested interest in separating the average consumer from every last dime it can. When you're mostly cannibalizing yourself, a bite of another man's flesh is awfully tempting.

I'm not going to venture into the moral quagmire of justifying theft on the basis of poverty, I'm just saying that given the social, economic, and technological circumstances nobody should be the least bit surprised that piracy is rampant and unlikely to decline.

[A²]

The story Mongrel refers to, where someone posts a comic on 4chan, and it inspires the creator to post in the thread and eventually put the comic up online

[TA]

Enforcement has been tried and has failed for the most part. The reality is that we may simply face a world where the market's going rate for some forms of artwork is not enough to sustain production and that no one really has a perfect solution to that yet. But I can tell you that when the options are "Wait patiently, save up, and make judicious spending choices" versus "press a button and receive all that your heart desires", anyone expecting the former to win is an idiot.

I feel that part of the problem is that people are insisting on giving only those options.  Pay $4 for a physical copy that you can lose or damage and which you'll have to pay another $4 to replace if you do and which is crammed full of ads, or pay nothing for a digital copy that never degrades and which you can just replace if your drive fails.  How about offering the option to buy a .cbr or .pdf for $1?

When the choices were Napster or CD, a lot of people went with Napster.  Then someone with the money and connections necessary cooked up iTunes, and as fucked up as Apple runs it, iTunes is a wildly successful business model.  Likewise with Steam.  I don't read many comics, but for the ones I do, I'd love a centralized place that gets pirate-quality scans or digital originals from the various publishers and makes them available, for download and redownload across platforms, for a price that reflects the dramatically shrunk distribution costs.  There are even a lot of pricing options, if you've got people like they have at Valve doing sales: "Pay $X for Final Crisis, and get all the Final Crisis books, all the various tie-ins and lead-ups, and a recommended reading order."  "Buy Batman: RIP, and get the weird-ass Silver Age comics that Morrison is talking about."  "Get all of Walking Dead to date for a discounted price per issue."  "Buy a year-long subscription to Justice League for 90 cents per issue instead of a dollar, and get notified when they become available."  If a business model is failing, you come up with a new one, you don't insist that everybody who doesn't follow along with it is evil. 

[Mongrel]

I agree that the microtransaction model is pretty smart and that digital volume sales may be the future.

People are FAR more willing to part with fifty cents or a quarter than they are with a couple of dollars. Make rationalization work for you!


EDIT:

The story Mongrel refers to, where someone posts a comic on 4chan, and it inspires the creator to post in the thread and eventually put the comic up online

Thanks Lyrai.

[TA]

Really, what it comes down to is, I like Fables, but I wouldn't $447-to-date like it, especially when I'd have to maintain some kind of storage system for my back issues in case I wanted to re-read them.

[Thad]

The piracy debate always kills me. Regardless of anyone's view on the moral implications, the behaviour is here to stay. I'm not sure I've ever heard of a campaign asking people to collectively take responsibility for their moral behaviour work for very long, if at all.

Enforcement has been tried and has failed for the most part.

This.  The ethical debate is important in some cases -- I feel totally justified, for example, in grabbing a torrent of 1963 since it will never be collected -- but it's not relevant to the question of how to fight piracy.

DRM doesn't work, lawsuits don't work, giving users an easily-accessible, reasonably-priced digital download works.  At least, as well as anything possibly can.

I've often commented that the TV networks could trivially implemented a service that works like sabnzbd only more reliably and with the capability of taking the word "the" off the front of filenames, but they won't.  Instead they're trying to cling to cable while rolling alternatives like Hulu out as slowly and conservatively as possible.

The most important solution to comic-book piracy is one that DC and Marvel are already working on: STOP CHARGING $4 PER BOOK.

The reality is that we may simply face a world where the market's going rate for some forms of artwork is not enough to sustain production and that no one really has a perfect solution to that yet.

I wouldn't say "some forms" so much as "some types".  TV's not going to go away, but we're going to see much smaller budgets for TV shows.

Comics -- well, the current form of single-issue distribution at specialty shops may very well go away, though I don't expect it'll happen in this decade.  But distribution in bookstores is huge, and we're just beginning to scratch the surface of digital distribution.

But I can tell you that when the options are "Wait patiently, save up, and make judicious spending choices" versus "press a button and receive all that your heart desires", anyone expecting the former to win is an idiot.

Indeed, but "charge a low price for an easy download" fits under the latter category pretty well.

[Büge]

The piracy debate always kills me. Regardless of anyone's view on the moral implications, the behaviour is here to stay. I'm not sure I've ever heard of a campaign asking people to collectively take responsibility for their moral behaviour work for very long, if at all.

Enforcement has been tried and has failed for the most part.

This.  The ethical debate is important in some cases -- I feel totally justified, for example, in grabbing a torrent of 1963 since it will never be collected -- but it's not relevant to the question of how to fight piracy.

No, but it is a good point. It calls to my mind the argument over scanlations of manga* and how that can harm/help sales.

_{*doujinshi is kind of a grey area, since it often unauthorizedly uses copyright characters.}

[TA]

No, but it is a good point. It calls to my mind the argument over scanlations of manga* and how that can harm/help sales.

That argument has a lot of other factors at work too, though - like format, quality, and timing.  Western comics tend to be 0-day releases, so it actually is almost as simple as "Do I drive to the comic book store and spend $4 on the latest Thing, or do I click a rapidshare link for free?"

[Bal]

I'm a pretty avid Comic book pirate, but here's the thing. Most of the books I read aren't good, and the ones that are good usually get collected, then I buy the collection, but risking $4 a pop for each book that is going to be about 80% of the time terrible is just not something I'm willing to do, so I sample and later collect. They're getting more money from me than they otherwise would, because I've been able to sample what I like and don't like, but I won't pretend I'm not a pirate.

[Niku]

I'm a pretty avid Comic book pirate, but here's the thing. Most of the books I read aren't good, and the ones that are good usually get collected, then I buy the collection, but risking $4 a pop for each book that is going to be about 80% of the time terrible is just not something I'm willing to do, so I sample and later collect. They're getting more money from me than they otherwise would, because I've been able to sample what I like and don't like, but I won't pretend I'm not a pirate.

This.

[Ted Belmont]

"Get all of Walking Dead to date for a discounted price per issue."

ahem

[TA]

Where's the download option, so you're not reading in a flash player in a browser?  Just not available for their free offerings, or does that not exist at all?

[Lottel]

I pirate. I do buy comics (when not unemployed) but I pirate more than I buy. I enjoy a lot of comics. Let's say I buy 3-4 a week (not unreasonable) that's $15 in comics roughly. And that doesn't contain all the little bits. Sometimes you have to pick up this issue or that to get the full story. So I buy only the bare essentials of what I want and pirate the filler. And the other stuff. I just like digital copies for backups.

I'd actually really like it and would buy more comics if the digital comics not only gave EVERY comic but right up to date and had a good method of distribution. I've been debating getting a nook color (because I am a sheep and have to own everything) once I get a nice safety net.  What would really push is if every Wednesday morning, all my comics would be downloaded to the device and I could read them there.

[Bongo Bill]

For the time being at least, one of the important lessons of the internet in the past decade is that it is now possible to make more money giving things away than by selling them. Previously, the biggest and most expensive challenge for (some) creative works was the logistical difficulty of getting them in the hands of the audience; currently, that challenge is making the audience interested in them in the first place. If they like what you've given them and you give them an opportunity to, in aggregate they'll find their own way to pay you for it, even if any given individual doesn't.

[Ted Belmont]

Where's the download option, so you're not reading in a flash player in a browser?  Just not available for their free offerings, or does that not exist at all?

Unfortunately, there is no download option, but from what I hear, their iphone/ipad app is pretty amazing. If you have one of those. Which I don't.

[Rico]

I have a friend who has the iPad app and he blows like $50 a week on the thing.  It looks really good.

My general comic book piracy entails buying a TPB of an arc I've heard about from friends and want to read, but then pirate it because as much as most story arcs need a little bit of editing to be a good TPB most of the time they're too trimmed down and I know I'm missing meaningful content.

[Burrito Al Pastor]

Current publication is a real issue. I recently had some Amazon credit and wanted to use it to replace the unjustifiable shortage of Tintin comics in my library; I went to Amazon, found a very nice looking boxed set, and oh look THEY'RE ALL FUN SIZED. The idiots who made it shrunk those gorgeous 8.5x11 pages down to 7x9.5, and apparently in the process made the text Very Hard To Read.

So I downloaded a .zip with PDFs of the whole damn franchise off /rs/. Big scans, good quality, read 'em on my monitor, didn't cost me a cent.

Rank incompetence.

[Mongrel]

Yeah, I don't like that shrinkage myself - although Hergé's art actually shrinks very well. Fortunately they do sell the individual large Tintin issues pretty cheaply. My personal goal was to get the small boxed set in English, then work on picking up the traditional large-format hardcovers in French (the latter part of that plan has been somewhat derailed, though I do have a couple of the large ones). 

At least with Tintin, you CAN get full-size reproductions. Shrinkage actually made me furious with GitS 2, because I deliberately didn't buy issues (thinking I'd get the TB) - only to find out the TB was the first Dark Horse Manga TB to be shrunk by 30% or so (they had previously all been full size). "Luckily" GitS 2 turned out to be something I hated, but uh, that's not really much of a consolation.

I'd tell you what I'd kill for though: A full-size boxed set of Blade of the Immortal. Because THAT comic does NOT shrink well at ALL. You have no idea how disappointed I was that they discontinued the individual issues. Or a full-size Asterix Box set (another comic that DOES NOT shrink well).

[Büge]

Strange. I mean, Calvin and Hobbes was reprinted at better than full-size. You would think that syndicates would print something at a size that was, y'know, readable.