Aaaarrrrr! – Avast Ye Comic Book Pirates!: “
Apparently yet another industry might soon get their panties in a new
bind about piracy, as though there were ever anything that could be done
about it. Piracy issues and complaints go back to the days of sheet
music publishers and the complaints have little changed. They’ve just
gone digital.
Fanning the flames of this yet-to-ignite
controversy comes Comic Book Resources doing everything they can to
start a panic. Having discovered the screenshot feature of the iPad
(same as the iPhone’s and iPod touch’s), they wasted no time in opening
various apps and taking high quality screenshots of digital comics. We
have to say, their shots are pretty sweet and make us want to read
comics pretty bad. They also did the same thing for books from the
iBookstore, though these were considerably less sexy.
Image Source: Comic Book Resources
The images
were all 1.3 MB in size and measured 768 x 1024. They rendered crisp and
clear, and the staff at Comic Books Resources informed readers that
they could easily be downloaded off the iPad and onto a computer. From
there, who knows where these could end up? Maybe even on CBR’s website.
But
will this lead to digital comics piracy? We took a brief tour through
the world of torrent sites and found that pirated versions of comics are
already very well established. There are even torrent sites devoted to
nothing more than comics, and RapidShare links proliferate on blogs and
other places. While pirates have had a variety of ways to go about
making this stolen booty, from hacking the DRM out of legitimately
obtained .cbr and .cbz files to taking paper comics and manually
scanning or photographing them, CBR is right to point out that the iPad
takes a couple steps out of the process.
Of course it doesn’t
take those interested in piracy long to figure out how to use new
gadgets, and we’re relatively sure that enterprising pirates are already
on to this trick. The question remains: what effect will this have on
comics sales, digital and otherwise? Our opinion? Probably not much.
While pirated comics is a growth industry (and would have continued
growing without the iPad screenshot feature), we sincerely doubt that
those who were already willing to download torrent files will be more
inclined to this because of an improvement in image quality. At the same
time, those who prefer to pay for their comics will also, we suspect,
continue to do so. And while a more efficient way of making images might
speed up pirates in their nefarious business, turnaround time on new
titles is pretty brisk already.
Even CBR’s proposed solution,
disabling the screenshot feature for certain apps, is unlikely to prove
any kind of hindrance. Do they really think that the dastardly villains
who pirate comic books would quail at something as small potatoes as
jailbreaking their iPads to do their dirty work? Screenshot comics
piracy is coming whether they like it or not, and much like music
piracy, there’s little the industry can do to stop it.
Consider
this: J.K. Rowling’s popular Harry Potter novels are not available
legally in any digital print format whatsoever, but after each book’s
release, pirates had scanned each and every page (some novels topping
800 pages) and uploaded PDFs of the titles. Within hours. If pirates are
willing to go to that trouble, for no profit at all to themselves, then
one little gadget’s screenshot feature is unlikely to encourage them
that much more.
Now if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got some songs we
want to record off the radio with our boombox.
“
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