{"id":114,"date":"2010-04-22T19:02:51","date_gmt":"2010-04-23T02:02:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mclasen.com\/wordpress\/?p=114"},"modified":"2010-04-22T19:03:26","modified_gmt":"2010-04-23T02:03:26","slug":"aaaarrrrr-%e2%80%93-avast-ye-comic-book-pirates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mclasen.com\/wordpress\/2010\/04\/aaaarrrrr-%e2%80%93-avast-ye-comic-book-pirates\/","title":{"rendered":"Aaaarrrrr! \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Avast Ye Comic Book Pirates!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aaaarrrrr! \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Avast Ye Comic Book Pirates!<\/a>: “<\/p>\n

Apparently yet another industry might soon get their panties in a new
\nbind about piracy, as though there were ever anything that could be done
\n about it. Piracy issues and complaints go back to the days of sheet
\nmusic publishers and the complaints have little changed. They’ve just
\ngone digital.<\/p>\n

Fanning the flames of this yet-to-ignite
\ncontroversy comes Comic Book Resources<\/a> doing everything they can to
\nstart a panic. Having discovered the screenshot feature of the iPad
\n(same as the iPhone’s and iPod touch’s), they wasted no time in opening
\nvarious apps and taking high quality screenshots of digital comics. We
\nhave to say, their shots are pretty sweet and make us want to read
\ncomics pretty bad. They also did the same thing for books from the
\niBookstore, though these were considerably less sexy.<\/p>\n

\"lovely<\/p>\n

Image Source: Comic Book Resources<\/strong> <\/p>\n

The images
\nwere all 1.3 MB in size and measured 768 x 1024. They rendered crisp and
\n clear, and the staff at Comic Books Resources informed readers that
\nthey could easily be downloaded off the iPad and onto a computer. From
\nthere, who knows where these could end up? Maybe even on CBR’s website. <\/p>\n

But
\n will this lead to digital comics piracy? We took a brief tour through
\nthe world of torrent sites and found that pirated versions of comics are
\n already very well established. There are even torrent sites devoted to
\nnothing more than comics, and RapidShare links proliferate on blogs and
\nother places. While pirates have had a variety of ways to go about
\nmaking this stolen booty, from hacking the DRM out of legitimately
\nobtained .cbr and .cbz files to taking paper comics and manually
\nscanning or photographing them, CBR is right to point out that the iPad
\ntakes a couple steps out of the process. <\/p>\n

Of course it doesn’t
\ntake those interested in piracy long to figure out how to use new
\ngadgets, and we’re relatively sure that enterprising pirates are already
\n on to this trick. The question remains: what effect will this have on
\ncomics sales, digital and otherwise? Our opinion? Probably not much.
\nWhile pirated comics is a growth industry (and would have continued
\ngrowing without the iPad screenshot feature), we sincerely doubt that
\nthose who were already willing to download torrent files will be more
\ninclined to this because of an improvement in image quality. At the same
\n time, those who prefer to pay for their comics will also, we suspect,
\ncontinue to do so. And while a more efficient way of making images might
\n speed up pirates in their nefarious business, turnaround time on new
\ntitles is pretty brisk already.<\/p>\n

Even CBR’s proposed solution,
\ndisabling the screenshot feature for certain apps, is unlikely to prove
\nany kind of hindrance. Do they really think that the dastardly villains
\nwho pirate comic books would quail at something as small potatoes as
\njailbreaking their iPads to do their dirty work? Screenshot comics
\npiracy is coming whether they like it or not, and much like music
\npiracy, there’s little the industry can do to stop it.<\/p>\n

Consider
\nthis: J.K. Rowling’s popular Harry Potter novels are not available
\nlegally in any digital print format whatsoever, but after each book’s
\nrelease, pirates had scanned each and every page (some novels topping
\n800 pages) and uploaded PDFs of the titles. Within hours<\/em>. If pirates are
\n willing to go to that trouble, for no profit at all to themselves, then
\n one little gadget’s screenshot feature is unlikely to encourage them
\nthat much more.<\/p>\n

Now if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got some songs we
\nwant to record off the radio with our boombox.<\/p>\n

“<\/p>\n

(Via Mac|Life all RSS Feed<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Aaaarrrrr! \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,12,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-maccconsulting","category-personal","category-whimsical"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p834Wu-1Q","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mclasen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mclasen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mclasen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mclasen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mclasen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mclasen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":117,"href":"https:\/\/mclasen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions\/117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mclasen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mclasen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mclasen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}