Following on from yesterday’s thoughts on comics piracy there’s quite a lot of discussion going on about the subject, noticeably on Warren Ellis’ The Engine forum (link via Dirk at Journalista). Cutting through the moral arguments over intellectual property theft and the possible effects on creators, publishers and retailers The Engine simply posted the question “what sites do you use?” I found the ensuing forum discussion quite interesting – some of it does seem to confirm some of my own suspicions that there may not be as much in the way of lost sales as some might think because when someone does read online it isn’t necessarily instead of buying the print comic, they are reading something they wouldn’t have bought, which, as I pointed out before, could offer a possible new avenue for the comics biz to exploit in terms of hooking more potential readers who develop a taste for the material online and find they now want to buy the actual comics. I would add one proviso here though – most of the discussion, I think it would be fair to say, is coming from people who are active comics fans, which may not be the case with the bulk of the 90, 000 plus folks who downloaded Sin City for example.
(an altogether nicer form of comics pirates – Ted Naifeh’s Polly and the Pirates from Oni Press)
When you are competing for the leisure dollar against movies, games, music and more you need every edge you can find to reach that audience, especially when it comes to material outside the mainstream (well, mainstream for UK-US-Canada etc) – this comment by Mario the Boon on the Engine discussion seemed to bear this out “And some blokes have started to put a lot of Belgian and French BD on there too. Which I find interesting. I’ll download what looks interesting or whatever the hype is just to be up to date. Stuff I’ll never buy anyway.” So perhaps there is a possible silver lining in there if some people get exposed to new and different material which interests them into exploring new comics material (especially unusual indy fare or work from abroad). I know that listening to downloads of music session via some sites like the BBC has certainly got me more interested in seeking out new bands – in fact I think I have listened to more new music in recent years because of this (legal) download resource than I have since my student days and I’m loving it – couldn’t this work for comics too? I’m not personally interested in reading whole works on a screen, but plenty of creators have caught my attention via a few pages of previews online, PDFs and so on and I’m sure there is a chance to try and reach some more potential readers this way.
I’m also thinking about a closely related topic from the world of prose publishing – novels too are being pirated, of course, but there is another aspect at work here which some – especially in the science fiction community – have been using and that is the Creative Commons license. Put very simply this is where a creator tries to avoid the stifling legalese of full copyright law by declaring that their work is free to be copied and disseminated as long as it is for personal and not commercial use. Some even allow and encourage fans to ‘remix’ the creator’s material to make their own new work – Howard Webster’s Many Worlds of Jonas Moore mixed-media comic is a recent good example of this, so was last year’s Machinima Bloodspell.
(Charlie Stross’ recent Glasshouse from Orbit – if you’re off on holiday stick this in your flight bag, top reading)
Does this sort of flexible approach which partly embraces the nature of the web and easy swapping of data actually help an artist or just wave a white flag to the illegal copiers? Well, it is early days of course, but two highly-regarded and award-winning SF authors I know, Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, have both made their stories available to readers via Creative Commons in text and also in audio format. In fact I recall Charlie getting his publishers to agree to him posting a CC version of the full text of one of his novels online just as it was being printed physically. It is very interesting to note that a lot of people took up Charlie’s offer of a free CC online version of the book and yet, I’m pleased to say, the novel sold extremely well in both the UK and US. There’s no way to tell if it sold more than it may have because of interest generated by the free online version or if it sold less because some just read it free online, but it certainly didn’t seem to hurt sales and I suspect strongly it generated more awareness of the book and subsequent interest in Charlie’s work, which is a good thing (I also suspect many, like me, hate reading a whole book online and probably read a chunk, liked it and bought the physical book). Cory recently put a free PDF CC version of a mini-comic based on his own work up for people to download and enjoy. Perhaps the comics biz shouldn’t just be borrowing writing talent from the SF&F world, perhaps they should be speaking to some of these authors who are also very web-savvy about new ways to exploit the online world to create a larger interest in their work? Who needs pirates when you have buccaneering authors?
In point of fact we may get to see exactly this since, as I mentioned here a while back, Cory is working with IDW to create comics adaptations of his own short stories which IDW will have the right to publish and sell commercially, but they still remain under Creative Commons so fans can remix the work to make their own new forms for non-commercial use – compare this attitude to only a few years ago when Fox told fans running Simpsons and X-Files site to stop using images from their copyrighted shows, even though they were not-for-profit fan sites generating fresh interest in their product for free; afraid of the tech, embracing the tech, two sides of the coin, neither perfect but one perhaps more flexible and evolutionary, accepting change and looking for ways to use it positively. It will be fascinating to see how this approach works for comics.
Leave a Reply