comics on c-d rom

[ISPYSHHHGUY]

A lot of really good, varied responses, guys-----ideally, I'd love to walk into my local HMV and buy a 2-disc, officially-sanctioned, Complete Shiver and Shake 1973-74, for example, including SUMMER SPECIAL extras and biographies of Mike Lacey, Terry Bave, etc. on two seperate discs. [say for 20 quid a throw.]


Imagine being able to buy such an affordable package every week over 18 months, with different titles/genres every week : wow, you would have a great comics archive at very reasonable cost, in next to no time!

Sadly, I think we all agree that such an enterprize is not likely to sell enough 'units' for any serious businessman to actually kickstart such an operation, which has created a 'grey market' in which buyers and sellers are exchanging currency [at low cost, due to advances in technology] using home-made computer technology, at prices that are well below the going rate on e-bay for paper copy equivalents.....although these discs are completely illegal, I can understand why some comics fans are taking advantage of this system to bolster their collections.

't'aint legal, but the 'official' system ain't papering over all of the cracks......

[paw broon]

Phil, I'm also in the ever decreasing minority, I'm afraid. I have a mobile phone, somewhere; I can't text; I don't have a tablet but, I'm beginning to realise that I'll have to think about it as I have very little space left for comics, not that I buy that many new titles, it's the old stuff I obtain on paper that causes the problem. After considering the excellent posts on this subject, I now feel that I would be tempted to buy old pirated British comics on disc and when/if a legitimate, licensed version is issued, I'd purchase it. By the way, there are a number of excellent websites which feature non-pd British material and it's a simple matter to download it and make a nice cbr file to read on CDisplay. The sites have been up for years and not a dickie bird from m'learned friends, thank goodness.

[Phoenix]

To quote the 'Conditions of Sale and Supply' printed in every copy of Wham!
Quote:
"This periodical is sold subject to the following conditions, namely, that it shall not, without written consent of the publishers first given, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of Trade except at the full retail price of 6d., and that it shall not be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise disposed of in a mutilated condition or in any unauthorised cover by way of Trade; or affixed to or as part of any publication or advertising, literary or pictorial matter whatsoever."

I'm not a lawyer either, but it seems obvious to me that he problem term within these conditions is resold, and is one which I suspect would not stand up if challenged in court, on the grounds that it is unreasonable. Furthermore, what ways are there of disposing of a comic other than lending, hiring or reselling, apart from giving it away or throwing it away, neither of which would involve trade? I can understand permission being required for any kind of rental system because of the clear possibility of multiple rentals of the one comic in some sort of comic Blockbusters bringing in many times the face value of the comic, with none of these moneys going back to the publishers. However, as I look around my study where I am typing this post, I cannot see a single one of my many possessions that, if I were to sell it, that act would bring down the full force of the law on me. I firmly believe that I can sell anything I own for as much as I can get for it with impunity. I must close now as I am going to put some comics on eBay.

[chrisb]

Interesting topic this. Now I don't agree with selling disc's of scans on e-bay but i don't see what the problem is with scanning and sharing old comics for free. Is getting them digitally preserved a bad thing? I personally don't think so and if the scanner's don't do it, who will?

[Raven]

When you sell an item secondhand, you're selling the entire ownership of the product and you retain nothing yourself except what was paid for it, and that's what's legal. With scans you're just selling an unauthorised copy of the product (over and over again, probably) and keeping the original, which is a big difference and illegal.

I know it's a bit weirdly worded, but those Wham! conditions are aimed at the trade: the original seller (i.e. the shops), aren't they, rather than the actual kid who pays for it and takes it home?

[Digifiend]

Yeah, scans should either be free or unavailable. Charging for stuff you don't own is theft.

[ISPYSHHHGUY]

wow, I opened up a real hornet's nest here----I assure you it wasn't my intention to be so controversial-----I actually thought that a lot of the old companies like Fleetway were long-defunct, or at least in such a dissarray that it was difficult to legally pinpoint exactly who owned the rights to a lot of old comics stuff, leaving the 'door open' for others until order is restored.


I accept, however, that a title like WARLORD on el-cheapo disc would more than likely be contrary to the interests of one well-known publishing Empire.....



Regarding these actual comic-disks, I will state that although it's a minor miracle that so much visual info can be stored onto such a small object, when you hold one of these discs in your hand, it feels like you have an archive of comics, rather than a collection, which can only come about by having stacks of paper comics-------the 'real thing' will always be the items that really matter, and all else is secondary.



Scrolling through dvd-comics is still woefully less than satisfactory: even rolling through archaic microfilm of newspapers at the library is more natural and enjoyable than the computer equivalent: this technology will advance over time, and eventually onscreen computer imagery will respond to how your eyes naturally dart around subjects you are focusing on [like in the real world] ---but for the moment I want to make plain that I feel visual/computer technology is still in it's infancy on this score, and sticking with paper collections is the 'real deal'

Virtual comics are certainly readable, but are also too obviously- electronic, non-organic, sterile and awkwardly inhuman to ever supplant the paper item effectively or comfortably, at least at this point in computer history.

But if I want a facsimilie of the comic-reading experience, and the real items are prohibitively expensive, then a dvd will have to make do. But I will never properly own the real Mc Coy using this method, and neither will anyone else who does this-----this is the most carefully-worded way I can express this.



I will still be seeking out 60s/70s paper comics on e-bay. I will only be paying reasonable prices for them, though.......

[Digifiend]

Fleetway isn't technically defunct, it got bought out in 1991 by Egmont, who simply no longer use the brand. Odhams had earlier (in 1963) been taken over by IPC, who owned Fleetway at the time, so their copyright isn't lapsed either. Amalgamated Press simply rebranded as IPC, so those two are one and the same.

[ISPYSHHHGUY]

Thanks for helping to clarify this, Digi: for many years I have been confused as to who exactly owns some of the IPC/FLEETWAY/EGMONT rights: at one point, even Robert Maxwell was reputed to have been the keyholder!

On top of all this, there was ODHAMS comics in the 60s, which cross-fertilized a lot of the same cartoonists and styles, with IPC swallowing up some of these titles and /or merging them in the very late 60s.

To me, this has always been a chaotic, murky mess [that's why I assumed that official reprints of Fleetway material has all but ceased, at least in comparison to DCT] but I suppose this chaos is part of the appeal and mystery-----

[Phoenix]

I've been thinking about the question of whether selling one issue of Wham from your collection can be looked at in a wider evasion-of-copyright context. My thoughts meandered back to my first year at university when I bought a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and it struck me that, from that moment, I was about to acquire what turned out to be a significant collection of music for nothing, simply by borrowing LPs from friends and recording them. Not exactly for nothing, of course, because I had to buy the tapes, but you could easily get three or four albums on a 7'' reel, and radio programmes could also be saved for the future by this method. Inevitably, the cassette recorder eventually enabled large numbers of people who couldn't afford the reel-to-reels to do the same thing.

What the above did for sound, VHS recorders did for vision. Immediately people were able to acquire collections of films and TV series, again for nothing apart from the cost of the blank tapes. I rented a colour TV from Granada, a VHS recorder from somewhere else, and became a member of a local video rental store. I now have hundreds of these tapes, many of which I'm sure I will never watch again, but I did record the programmes and films without paying anybody a single penny. Inevitably, progress produced DVDs, so I moved into that area as well. The quality was better.

The fact that many people now think that buying the DVD Roms of whole runs of a comic title is acceptable, has its basis in the above. I doubt whether there are that many people in the country who have not, at some time or other, made, bought or accepted as a gift, copies of LPs or films created by one or other of the above methods. Even I bought a DVD Rom of the first zillion issues of The Eagle without ever thinking about the copyright issue that is currently being ventilated on this thread.

Whose fault is it that the issue of copyright is routinely ignored in these matters? The finger must be pointed at those commercial enterprises that brought the reel-to-reel recorder, the cassette recorder, the VHS recorder and the DVD recorder into existence and then persuaded us that we must have them. We were clearly denying ourselves unnecessarily by not buying them.

This evasion has increased exponentially in recent years, to the point now where any computer, an iPod, an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy 3 are merely logical extensions of and developments of the aims of the creators of the reel-to-reel sound recorder. Now we can record more or less anything from anywhere, upload to the web, download from YouTube, put it on Facebook, send it to your friends, who will send it on automatically to their friends, all of whom will send......you get the picture. Almost before you can blink, what you sent will be being watched in Calcutta, Melbourne, Baffin Island and all orbiting space stations.

Is it any wonder that copyright issues are barely being taken into consideration by the perpetrators, if at all, or that the copyright owners appear to have no stomach for the fight to reestablish their rights? Is it any wonder that major firms such as HMV, for example, are facing such difficult trading conditions, even without taking into consideration firms like Amazon that undercut them? The problem is so entrenched in the system that a modern-day Alan Turing will be required to find any kind of solution. We have been living in a something-for-nothing culture for much longer than we think, so long indeed that we need to remove the beams from our own eyes before we have any right to tackle the motes in our children's.

[ISPYSHHHGUY]

Interesting topic this. Now I don't agree with selling disc's of scans on e-bay but i don't see what the problem is with scanning and sharing old comics for free. Is getting them digitally preserved a bad thing? I personally don't think so and if the scanner's don't do it, who will?

God preserve WW3 ever rearing it's ugly head, but if it does, then it's more than likely 'ta-ta' to all paper comics I'm afraid.I guess a dvd-rom would stand more chance of surviving nuclear fall-out, than my old Sparky comics would.



Yours chillingly [and hopefully non-prophetically]


by jove, these recent posts of mines are getting bleak in my old age!

[ISPYSHHHGUY]

Some good points there Phoenix----I recorded music from the radio from 1976 until almost 20 years later [though I still bought vinyl and cds as well]. I absolutely loved making up my own blank music tapes, and later I tried downloading music from the internet, but I found it cold and removed from humanity, so I doubt if I'll be going down this route---this is for a younger generation, not for me.


Totally agree that communications have totally exploded since the internet went ballistic--this is probably a good thing [I've even tracked down rare films on youtube after decades of fruitless searching elsewhere ] however entertainment has been devalued as a result------every Tom, Dick and Harry [including me, with my own blog] is putting stuff out to 'entertain' the world------however the upside is that entertainment is getting cheaper to access, and it's a sorely missed opportunity that DCT and other publisher rights-holders are not putting out official cyber-collections of vintage comics.


If the dvd-rom pirates can put out 170 issues of TV 21 and charge under a fiver for this [and presumably break even] then why can't big business get it's act together and put the complete BEANO 1960-1969 dvd-rom set out there, in a deluxe set, for say, 30 quid or something------the cost of producing dvds is miniscule compared to putting out printed books/magazines, and copies of disks are dirt-cheap to strike up massive amounts of copies at low cost. If they're worried about piracy I'm sure a copy-control restriction option could be installed.

[Digifiend]

Thanks for helping to clarify this, Digi: for many years I have been confused as to who exactly owns some of the IPC/FLEETWAY/EGMONT rights: at one point, even Robert Maxwell was reputed to have been the keyholder!

Only between 1987-91, and even then only for the stuff now owned by Egmont (so the only major actions under his watch were the revamp of Whizzer and Chips and it's merger with Buster a few months later, in 1990).

Anyway, no problem, I just collated the info from the Fleetway, IPC, and Amalgamated Press articles on Wikipedia.

[paw broon]

Some of you involved in this conversation might like to have a look at the responses on CB+. I thought the subject would be of interest to members there so I raised it and was surprised at the strength of feeling in some quarters. A couple of us felt we should close it before it got a bit out of hand. See what you started!
http://comicbookplus.com/forum/index.ph ... 672.0.html

[swirlythingy]

My thoughts meandered back to my first year at university when I bought a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and it struck me that, from that moment, I was about to acquire what turned out to be a significant collection of music for nothing, simply by borrowing LPs from friends and recording them. Not exactly for nothing, of course, because I had to buy the tapes, but you could easily get three or four albums on a 7'' reel, and radio programmes could also be saved for the future by this method. Inevitably, the cassette recorder eventually enabled large numbers of people who couldn't afford the reel-to-reels to do the same thing.

Copyright holders have been sounding the sirens for much longer than that - and the interesting thing is that, in every single case, they have been wrong, and the real enemies of the music and film industries have been their own entrenched conservatism, technophobia and inertia.

In a country where the British Phonographic Institute is now a vociferous and deeply irritating voice lobbying ceaselessly for the retention of the status quo and the outlawing of all technology invented after 1987 (which is simply when they most recently lost their ongoing generic argument against progress), it's very easy to forget that, in 1906, John Philip Sousa wrote of the gramophone:

Do they not realize that if the accredited composers who have come into vogue by reason of merit and labor are refused a just reward for their efforts a condition is almost sure to arise where all incentive to further creative work is lacking and compositions will no longer flow from their pens or where they will be compelled to refrain from publishing their compositions at all and control them in manuscript? What, then, of the playing and talking machines?

Similar uproar from those with vested interests in the technology of the day greeted the invention of the player-piano. (If you're not familiar with these fascinating and now obscure devices, I recommend a visit to the Musical Museum in Kew.) For a hundred years, the argument has been ever-present and never-changing: technological progress is killing music.

There's a wonderful article which puts all the industry scaremongering around digital formats into truly epic amounts of context here:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009 ... own-words/

And even that's not the end of the story. It hasn't just affected music or movies. To go back on topic, many have objected above to how DVDs of scans of paper comics are destroying the market for paper comics. The printing press was fiercely resisted by those it threatened to displace, way back in the 15th century.

If you really want to go the whole hog about how those defending the status quo from the onward march of technology are always, constantly, completely, utterly in the wrong, I refer you to Socrates' arguments against the written word.

So you'll forgive me if I don't take those who say we should all suck it up, accept that old comics are never going to be reissued by their publishers, and not even think of ignoring the shrill doom-mongers and committing the ludicrously broadly-defined (thanks to centuries of industry lobbying) crime of 'piracy' terribly seriously.

(For the record, I have never torrented a TV show or nefariously obtained a comic. But that's not to say I am going to unconditionally condemn those who are forced to resort to such measures.)