2000 AD Online Forum

Interesting article here on the ethics of comics scanning

Link: fool britannia

Ha!

Already posted!

Good points raised though. If it's not for profit then I think it's acceptable. If someone refuses people the right to display ancient comics they have no intention of reprinting then they cant expect people to take them seriously.

A fine article that asked a couple of important questions.

Marbles has been scanning the prog for a good while now, purely for his own benefit. That is harmless, as he's paid for his prog and then passes it on.

To the best of my knowledge it stops there. Marbles isn't pimping collections of Dredd stories to the newbies is he?

Is what Marbles is doing technically illegal? I'd think not.

It is a similar thing to the Metro Dredd stuff I do. I've got a pair of Yahoo groups running where you can go and read all the strips that have appeared to date. The quality is variable (of the scans as well as the stroies) but it costs nothing, but I'm not doing it for money. As far as I'm concerned the strips are worth collecting and reading. If you don't like them, fine, they aren't being charged for.

Bolt-01

Lost property Blog

Metro Dredds

A fine article that asked a couple of important questions.

Marbles has been scanning the prog for a good while now, purely for his own benefit. That is harmless, as he's paid for his prog and then passes it on.

To the best of my knowledge it stops there. Marbles isn't pimping collections of Dredd stories to the newbies is he?

Is what Marbles is doing technically illegal? I'd think not.

It is a similar thing to the Metro Dredd stuff I do. I've got a pair of Yahoo groups running where you can go and read all the strips that have appeared to date. The quality is variable (of the scans as well as the stroies) but it costs nothing, but I'm not doing it for money. As far as I'm concerned the strips are worth collecting and reading. If you don't like them, fine, they aren't being charged for.

Bolt-01

Lost property Blog

Metro Dredds

Rebellion allows a user to scan a limited portion of each story (although I can't remember the exact figure). Any form of duplication beyond that point is technically illegal. The real question is whether it's immoral and to the detriment of Rebellion. What Marbles is doing does not harm Rebellion in any way, so even though he's committing an illegal act, there's no point in taking any action. However, if he were to suddenly place copies of his CDRs on eBay, that's a whole different kettle of monkeys.

The Metro Dredd stuff, again, isn't legal, but probably neither affects Rebellion nor Metro (after all, I doubt anyone buys the Megazine purely for the Metro strips). However, just because you're not doing something for profit, that doesn't make it legal.

"just because you're not doing something for profit, that doesn't make it legal."

But that doesn't necessarily make it unethical. So long as the person isn't profiting from the work of others then there shouldn't be any guilt involved.

Or so I think anyway...

I'm sure what Watcher does is legal. There is nothing wrong with making back-up copies of anything you own.

The Metro copies go into a grey area. But seeing as the Metro is a free paper, and not available to the majority of the population...

I've scanned & sent someone an episode of Button Man 3 - because they missed that prog. Again, technically a no-no, but I don't doubt for a minute that it will effect the sales of any future Button Man collection.

Is it illegal to read a book in the shop? It's pretty much the same thing.

So long as the person isn't profiting from the work of others then there shouldn't be any guilt involved.
Well, that's another grey area -
Regardless of profit, by distributing copies, you're diminishing it's 'saleability' - therefore are guilty of allowing the creators (including the publishers) the profit they deserve.

Well. House of Usher sent me a cd with an entire Wolfsheim cd on it, along with other songs. Now when I have got all their other cd's i'll buy that one. Just so I can have an original. So though what he did is riskay it woun't effect Wolfeheim's sale of that disk in the long run. And I am now more likely to pick up one of their other cds.

PS. Usher could you send me track listing for the two cds? i sent you an email monday/tuesday. Whenever I got them.

Max - yes, in a lot of cases upright individuals of society will use copied material as a 'sample' before deciding on if to buy the original or not.
But there are unscupulous anti-social ruffians out there who aren't made of the same moral fibre as us. (Paupers, drug addicts, the French, etc.)

If the question is purely on the profits made by creators and publishers, then where exactly does that leave the back issue market? Is someone buying the old progs that contain The Apocalypse War, rather than the trade also doing as much damage to Rebellion as someone scanning the saga?

Personally i'm in the camp of "scanning but not for profit". I also think that if you are a scanner, you do have an ethical responsibility to not scan complete books, although stuff that isn't available (and never will be) is an area I would go into.

Does the same hold true for one Dredd or Dan Dare story that will appear in a collection tho? Could this not actually be good (and free) advertising for Rebellion or Titan or whomever?

Legally there is no grey area in this but that doesn't neccesserilly make it wrong ethically. It depends on what you're doing and how you're doing it.

The likes of Hook Jaw and most of Action, and Misty are available online. Legally they shouldn't be, but that's the only place these strips can be seen. Should they get a reprinting then yes, they will have to come down, but until that time I can't see anything wrong in it. It's actually keeping those stories in the public eye until a time when they are released.

Alan!

The problem I find myself in, is that I agree with both sides...
The only way to reconcile this to myself is to buy the stuff that I like, if I can.

I occasionally download songs from the internet. Last time I did that, I ended up ordering PWEI's best of album from Amazon before I'd even finished downloading all the songs I intended to.


And do I feel at all guilty if I make a compilation tape for a friend? Heck no.

Or when I borrowed The Grudge DVD off a friend (okay, she accidently left it in our flat so I watched it before sending it back to her...) - I'm probably not going to buy the film now, good as it was.

I am just a mess of contradiction.

:: I'm sure what Watcher does is legal. There is nothing wrong
:: with making back-up copies of anything you own.

Well, no, apart from it not being legal. There is NO general fair-use law with regards to duplication in the UK, apart from for software (largely contradicted by more modern legislation) and for education purposes (where some photocopying for personal use may be permitted).

And, no, reading in a bookshop is not the same thing, because the law is largely dealing with duplication and ownership. It's legal to take a book or CD out of the library, but it's not legal to copy it.

I'm generally more concerned with the ethics side of this, then the legal (although: is it ethical to break the law - that's another argument altogether...).

Ah... there's two sides to this, which I've not seperated in my previous posts, which all adds to my confused state:

1) the duplicator

2) the user


My bookshop analogy is only relevant to the user - there's no difference between reading a scanned comic online, or reading a book in the shop. You are getting the story without paying for it. You can go back whenever you want to read it again.
If anything: the reader will feel more guilt reading it 'legally' in a bookshop, because the staff will see you doing it and give you dirty looks.

...though what he did is riskay

Not really. Unless, of course, someone blabbed what he'd done all over a public messageboard. ;)

Well, I have scanned copies of a lot of the older Marvel stuff because I refuse to pay what they're charging for the Masterworks reprints (?35 for 10 issues!), and I don't want the black & white reprints. If they could do something in between that was about ?15 for 10 colour issues, I'd start buying them though.

I've also got Zenith, Miracleman and the old Marvel Zoids comics as scans because they haven't been reprinted.

And with all of those, I still manage to spend about ?75 a month on comics/gns

   Steve

Did anyone else win a cruise when they clicked on the link?

I think it depends on the publisher, and it's not resricted solely to scanning. Any unauthorised use of a publisher's IP can get you into hot water.

Fox, for example, are notoriously precious about their intellectual property, regularly setting their lawyers on owners of Simpsons or Aliens fan sites, demanding they remove any images/sound clips.

Marvel can be difficult, too. Users of 3D modelling site Polycount were banned from posting models of Marvel characters after the site's owners were warned off by the house of ideas'legal department.

Luckily, Rebellion seem to take a more enlightened point of view on the whole thing. Probably comes from the Kingsleys starting off as fans of the comic before they bought it. They didn't seem to have an issue with me posting a few scans on my Strontium Dog site. Mind you, there were no full stories, mostly single panels and a few pin-ups.

My own view is that it shouldn't really be an issue, as long as the person doing the scanning isn't out to make a quick buck off someone else's IP.

if I scanned progs so that people could read them at my hypothetical comic cafe without damaging the progs, would that be a problem, hypothetically speaking?

yours didn`t win a cruise, Floyd

ps where are you cruising Krusti? Kings Cross? The mediterranean?

Cor dear wrongly accused again! Wasnt it you, Oddboy, who accused me of scanning comics last time??  It's a vendetta I tells you... :)

I'm a 1000% paper and ink man - put something on the internet and I'll print it off and stick it in a folder! :)

Blamn & dast it!
Sorry to Watcher & Marbles - but what with your murky brown icons I'm forever mixing you two up.

Apologies.

perhaps if the sites like mine which contain scanned comics called themselves e-libraries, then anybody could read the stuff that was on there, provided they had a e-library card....

just a thought...

How do regular libraries work - do they have to pay a fee to publishers to get the books in the library?

Regular libraries can only lend one copy of each book (unless they own multiple copies of it). There is no possibility of two people borrowing the same copy at the same time.

Wake

Byron V can probably fill in a lot of blanks here, but basically the author gets paid every time their book is borrowed from any public library.  

Link: http://www.plr.uk.com/enhancedindex.htm

the situtation I`m imagining is like this. I have a busy comics cafe. I want my customers to be able to read my progs without damaging them. I can`t buy GNs of everything in the progs, so I scan them onto disk and let the customers read them in the cafe (no they can`t make copies).
  I imagine whoever has the Book of Kels does the same thing (not that I`m suggesting that Spice Girls or Silo are as valuable as the Book of Kels.
  Would that be wrong in some way?