Comixology 4.0 - not sounding good.

[Jim_Campbell]

It was Apple that strong-armed music companies into freeing up how music operated, first by splitting albums into optional individual track purchases, and then encouraging DRM-free (even if some companies cynically withheld DRM-free from Apple for a while, on realising how powerful the company had become).

That was Apple's entire argument over music, one which has been pretty much entirely vindicated and the lessons of which various media empires still haven't learned: if you make access to your media 1) cheap, and 2) easy then people will pay for it.

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

I would add that Apple also didn't make you buy all your albums again, you can easily rip your CDs onto itunes (LPs are a bit more of a ball-ache, you need a USB turntable and then split up the tracks manually et cetera and so forth). Their UI is a bit pants though.

[IndigoPrime]

Well, yes, although the law there is the issue. I can rip a CD or a DVD to a computer, but doing so is illegal in the UK, with very few exceptions that usually centre around accessibility. So Apple provided the means, but that was aligned very heavily with US law, where fair use at the time was far less restrictive. (Apple also, neatly, did iTunes Match, where it figured out what was in your local collection and made that available in the cloud. Although the execution was... less neat.)

The general principle was right, though, and people might recall the company attempted to shift things in media too. Before streaming took hold, Apple kicked off TV show rentals to make shows more readily accessible, but most companies freaked out about the prospect of consumers paying only $0.99 per episode rather than three bucks plus for the standard season download. Plus DRM-free died on the vine for telly/movies.

Again, it's all so short-sighted. Everything is out there. I can go online right now and download, for free, whatever I like. Quite why Taito won't sell me a DRM-free Bubble Bobble ROM that gives me indefinite rights to that game, wherever I want to play it, I don't know. Why most comics are wrapped in DRM, I don't know. I suppose it gives executives the illusion of control and looks good on their spreadsheets, but if any lesson has been learned in recent years it should be the one Jim pointed out: improve the UX and make things affordable and people will pay. But make things a massive ballache and meaningfully worse than just ripping things off and they won't. (Some won't pay anyway, but they're lost. No point worrying about them.)

[Jim_Campbell]

(Some won't pay anyway, but they're lost. No point worrying about them.)

And the thing is, these people have always existed. It's just now that piracy's digital, the content owners can see the piracy and continue to peddle the fallacy that 1 torrented movie/song/whatever = 1 lost sale. Most of these people were never going to pay for that stuff.

I knew people in the 80s, running into the 90s, who taped all their music — off the radio, off stuff they borrowed from their mates. I knew several people whose entire, extensive music collections consisted of stuff they'd home-taped and were proud to say that they'd never bought an album. I knew people in the 90s/early 00s whose entire movie collections consisted of bootlegged DVDs (quite often camcorder recordings from the frickin' cinema) because they could get three for a fiver off Jeff down the local car boot sale.

Again... there are people who'll pay for content, and people who won't. Beating up on the people who will because of entirely notional 'losses' caused by people who won't is just... bizarre.

[Tjm86]

I knew people in the 80s, [...] who taped all their music — off the radio, ...

That was almost a right of passage though, wasn't it?  Recording the Top 40 on a Sunday evening for the week.  Amazing how much you could fit onto a C90 with a bit of judicious editing.  Then they introduced dual speed recorders that doubled the length of time that could be recorded ....

Mind you, when you're at a boarding school access is limited ...

[Goosegash]

Again, it's all so short-sighted. Everything is out there. I can go online right now and download, for free, whatever I like. Quite why Taito won't sell me a DRM-free Bubble Bobble ROM that gives me indefinite rights to that game, wherever I want to play it, I don't know.

Nintendo in particular come across as dinosaurs in this regard, especially in their recent actions in suddenly deciding their priority is to shut down sites hosting NES roms, as if that horse hadn't already bolted over twenty-five years ago. It's a bit like record execs in 2022 turning to each other and declaring "Did you know people can actually ILLEGALLY copy records WE own onto tapes and share them without asking us?? We've got to clamp down on this right now!!"  They won't even sell these games on the Switch E-shop, but they expect you to pay a subscription in order to access NES Baseball and Balloon Fight.

They've even shut down youtube channels for hosting music from games, not even footage of the games themselves (although they once tried to shut down those as well, of course). Utterly absurd, heavy-handed behaviour.

The entire catalogue of NES games is so widely available they might as well be in the public domain in any case, the Big N thinking they can somehow put a lid on that or scare people into never sharing roms ever again is almost laughably futile.

[IndigoPrime]

Everything is on a hair trigger. A friend owns the rights to most C64 music, yet has had copyright strikes from YouTube from other companies erroneously claiming ownership. No-one really fully knows who owns what. Elsewhere, a quality comics YouTube channel recently got two strikes from a Manga publisher for having the audacity to show some of their books and a few of the internal pages. These books, without doubt, are available elsewhere to download in their entirety, but presumably some bot (or an idiot) decided that someone showing off a few pages of art on YouTube, in order to encourage people to, you know, actually download the books, was too much.

On games, I recently wrote about the problem for Wireframe: Game history needs to be preserved and made accessible to all. Naturally, I won't hold my breath that any of this will ever happen. (Folks here might also find Keza MacDonald's newsletter interesting this week, since it explores similar territory.

[wedgeski]

Everything is on a hair trigger. A friend owns the rights to most C64 music, yet has had copyright strikes from YouTube from other companies erroneously claiming ownership.

How did your friend manage that, do you know?

[I, Cosh]

Nintendo in particular come across as dinosaurs in this regard, especially in their recent actions in suddenly deciding their priority is to shut down sites hosting NES roms, as if that horse hadn't already bolted over twenty-five years ago.

Maybe, but they're the ones still selling boatloads of Mario Kart 8 and a remake of a thirty year old Zelda game at full price so they probably don't really care how they come across.

[IndigoPrime]

How did your friend manage that, do you know?

I don't recall. I think quite a lot of proof of ownership via counterstrikes. But even then, the attacks are all automated and so keep coming back. YouTube will merrily remove a channel if it gets three copyright strikes. A gamer I know had that happen to her, from a game supplied to her for review. It's insane.

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

How did your friend manage that, do you know?

I don't recall. I think quite a lot of proof of ownership via counterstrikes. But even then, the attacks are all automated and so keep coming back. YouTube will merrily remove a channel if it gets three copyright strikes. A gamer I know had that happen to her, from a game supplied to her for review. It's insane.

[dubious thing I think I heard in a pub]
I've heard if you run a youtube channel for profit, you should get the rights to a piece of music, even if it's a random sequence of notes/noises you made up yourself. Then you set up a secondary channel as the rights holder of that music. Then every time you upload a video to your primary channel, include your music, even if it's barely audible, and instantly copyright claim from your secondary channel. Then demonitize the video on your primary channel. It can stay up, no one else can copyright claim it now, and any associated revenue goes to the secondary channel, allowing you to continue earning from your content.
[/dubious thing I think I heard in a pub]

Disclaimer: I do not now, nor have I ever had a youtube channel. That could all be bollocks. I'm just continuing the internet's grand tradition of chipping in on subjects I know nothing about with second/third hand unreliable information.

Tom Scott made a good video about the youtube's strained relationship with copyright.

TL;DW: The copyright boobery isn't really youtube's fault. Copyright laws were written when only big media companies could produce and distribute content, and technologically illiterate politicians mistakenly believe DMCA has solved the problems caused by the internet's democratization of media production.

TL;DR: Copyright law needs a complete rebuild.

[IndigoPrime]

This isn't YouTube's fault, sure. But what is: YouTube not giving a fuck about it, and not providing creators with avenues to people who can fix problems. Apple's the same with its App Store. It tells devs to not run to the press, when that's usually the one way they can get things done.

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

This isn't YouTube's fault, sure. But what is: YouTube not giving a fuck about it

You're quite right IP, but in my defense I was trying to be brief. They'll only give a fuck if they're losing money or getting bad (mainstream) press. The thing you have to remember about youtube, more specifically, it's parent company Google, is they are ultimately an advertising platform. Advertisers are their customers and clients, not the creators. The creators are an expense. Hosting videos isn't free. The culmulative running time of all the videos on youtube is probably bordering on cosmological scales. I would suggest it's impossible to design an unexploitable system to police all that data. The system will never be perfect, but you get what you pay for, and in youtube's case, you pay nothing.

[AlexF]

Apologies for getting back on topic, thought I'd chip in that my Comixology update went pretty smoothly, although it helps that I only had a few comics downloaded so it didn't take long to re-download them.
Agree that the new interface is not as good, and am appalled that they don't care about making their views accessible, even enough to reply properly to a customer asking a question! Haven't dared visit the new wesbite to buy any new digital comics lately, good for my wallet, that.

I confess I'm all in on Amazon - fully-paid up Prime member, I even pay the top end music subscription serivce (so that I and my kids can listen to different music at the same time). Their main shopping website, the music website and the Prime Video channels are all very intuitive to navigate, frustrating that comics are treated as the bastard media offshoot.

BUT in general I gather that Amazon's business model is 'do whatever the customer wants', which boils down to 'cheap and fast' - hance my main guilt with using Amazon is the exploitation of warehouse and delivery staff. I hold out hope that the new Comixology or comics bit of Kindle or whatever it'll end up being callled WILL sort itself out and get easier to use, although I'm sure it'll take a few months.

Has any App ever done a major upgrade and not annoyed its customers for the next 2-3 weeks after?

I'm amused by the discussion of folk being annoyed that digital products are more like 'rentals' that we might have to re-purchase in future, on the same site where we regularly boast about how many hard copies of e.g. Nemesis the Warlock we've knowingly shelled out for 

[IndigoPrime]

I hold out hope that the new Comixology or comics bit of Kindle or whatever it'll end up being callled WILL sort itself out and get easier to use, although I'm sure it'll take a few months.

I doubt it will change. I've written to Amazon regarding Kindle accessibility numerous times. They don't give a shit. Nor does Marvel. Whatever people might have to say about Apple, at least that company does care about inclusivity, and I know full well that specific requests I've made have been integrated into its software, which has had the rather lovely knock-on effect of making things potentially slightly better for millions of people. Amazon? Too much effort to do anything when enough people just won't care.

Has any App ever done a major upgrade and not annoyed its customers for the next 2-3 weeks after?

Yes. Many, many have. Plenty obviously haven't. The issue with the latter is willingness to do anything about it. Given what I've heard about the beta for Comixology 4, I have no faith whatsoever Amazon has any plans to fix what's broken.

I'm amused by the discussion of folk being annoyed that digital products are more like 'rentals' that we might have to re-purchase in future, on the same site where we regularly boast about how many hard copies of e.g. Nemesis the Warlock we've knowingly shelled out for

Although there's a world of difference between buying the same content in a shiny new physical format (and being to offload the older ones should you so wish) and something you have the assumption of ownership with just vanishing because, technically, you never did actually 'own' anything. (Again, this is why DRM-free matters. I buy something from 2000 AD and I can download that file and do whatever the hell I like with it, in terms of personal use. It's not gated behind some app or other that might one day suddenly no longer exist.)