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Title: Aaaarrrrr! – Avast Ye Comic Book Pirates! Post by: HCK on April 23, 2010, 11:00:09 am Aaaarrrrr! – Avast Ye Comic Book Pirates!
Byline: J Keirn-Swanson Byline: J Keirn-Swanson Enhanced Teaser: 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. 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. Related Articles: Can I take screenshots as PDF files (as I used to be able to) and not PNG files? DC Comics Artist Shows Potential of iPad Marvel Comics on iPhone, Can DC Be Far Behind? http://www.maclife.com/article/news/aaaarrrrr_%E2%80%93_avast_ye_comic_book_pirates |