MIKE GOLD: Steve Niles’ Courageous Act
If you you’re inclined to keep an eye out, heroes pop up like Kleenex. Steve Niles just made the cut.
At the 2010 Baltimore Comic-Con Harvey Awards dinner, Mark Waid offered a courageous keynote address which offered a simple message: digital comics are here to stay, there is an international bootlegging community and we as creators and industry doyens must learn to deal with it. For this, Mark was roundly booed, hassled and harassed by his peers. Astonishingly, one of his tormentors was the otherwise quite gentlemanly Sergio Aragonés.
I don’t recall if Steve Niles was at the dinner, but if not, it’s likely he heard about it. Suggesting that any acknowledgement of those who pirate comics is akin to taking a dump on the bible. This is true throughout the media: records (yeah, it’s okay to call them “records;” look it up), movies and teevee shows, even books. And you thought nobody was reading.
The media industry’s response to this has been to advocate passage of the Stop Online Piracy Act, a.k.a. SOPA. Simply put, SOPA allows any intellectual property (IP) owner to legally compel any Internet Service Provider (a.k.a. ISP; we’re shooting for the entire alphabet this week) to kick off any website suspected of copyright infringement.
Well, here’s a clue for you. Well over 99% of the websites on the Internet infringe copyrights and trademarks. Pick-ups of news items, graphics used to illustrate anything, sound bytes and even some You Tube links – they are all infringing upon somebody’s IP. You rip off the Superman logo font because you’re artistic and just being cute? Well, that logo is a registered trademark, and you are now Lex Luthor.
So Steve, bless his 30 Days of Night heart, took a stand. “SOPA does more than go after so-called ‘piracy’ websites,” said he. “SOPA takes away all due process, shuts down any site it deems to be against the law without trial, without notification, without due process… Nobody seems to give a shit, or either they’re scared. Either way, very disappointing. I guess when it affects them they’ll get mad… I know folks are scared to speak out because a lot of us work for these companies, but we have to fight. Too much is at stake.”
He tweeted all these comments; I got them from our pals at Digital Spy, except they asterisked “shit.” We here at ComicMix are beneath that.
Here’s some facts. Every time somebody unlawfully downloads IP – and note I said “unlawfully” because it is unlawful – the media racket sees that as a lost sale. This is overwhelming bullshit. People sample, people are curious, people’s friends make a recommendation and said people check ‘em out. There’s plenty of stuff that you’d check out before laying down your plastic sight unseen. The actual number of downloads that defraud the owner (which is usually not the creator) is a fraction of the total. These downloads are still illegal, but IP moguls should pull the stick out of their ass and tell the truth when they are babbling about how much bootlegging is costing them. They are liars.
There are a great many services that allow you to legally purchase IP, and the largest of these is Apple’s iTunes, which offers music, television, movies, books, magazines, newspapers, software (a.k.a. “apps”) and probably jpg’s of papyrus scrolls. As of around October 2011 – the date varies by category – iTunes has sold over 16 billion songs, about one half-billion movies, videos and teevee shows, some 20 billion apps, and Crom knows how many books, magazines and newspapers.
Here’s the rub: in each and every one of these approximately 40,000,000,000 cases, the purchaser could have downloaded the damn thing for free. In most cases, it is far easier to illegally cop a boot than it is to purchase one. Let’s start with the fact that you don’t need to have a credit card or room left on your credit limit to procure your illegal bootie.
So. 40 billion downloads from just one – the biggest one – online merchant in a world that only houses seven billion people. That’s an average of four and one-half perfectly legal downloads for each and every person, including babies in the Amazon who don’t even have access to Amazon.
Hey! People are inherently good. Go know!
Of course SOPA is being supported by all the big IP companies, including Disney (Marvel) and Time Warner (DC). If only they were so moral about how they treat their creative talent, without whom both companies would constitute another real estate bust.
On the other side: Facebook, Google, Twitter and Wikipedia, the latter of which threatens to disappear should SOPA pass. Then students will actually have to do research, and we can’t have that.
Also standing proudly on the other side: Steve Niles. Good for you, pal.
Good grief. Now Mark Evanier is going to hate me.
Thursday: Dennis O’Neil
It’s a little scary to think something like this might go forward. I can understand the position of wanting to stop people from getting your creative material for free, but do we need this kind of overreaction to it? Hopefully cooler heads will prevail.
“Hey! People are inherently good. Go know!”
I feel good about humanity again.
GREAT column, Mike!
And let Steve know that I’m with him, 100%!!!
Mindy
P.S.: Surprise, surprise…it’s all about the money. *sigh* SHOW ME THE MONEEEEEEEEEEY! (Tom Cruise as Jerry McGuire.)
If SOPA could be enforced exclusively to combat piracy, I doubt there would be much of a squall against it. We rightly fear the misuse of it.
Both SOPA and PIP can be used handily to not just shut down any possibly infringing sites without due process, they can be used to crush competition and destroy any sign of criticism (Universal Music Group gave us a taste of this recently when they used their take-down rights on YouTube to remove the anti-SOPA video that was produced for Megaupload.)
Within six months of passage, the Internet will look like a wasteland from within US borders — while one of the corporate backers of this travesty has said, “It’ll work for us just fine; after all, it’s worked out for China” I’d guess that it’ll actually be more devastating here. It’ll be chum in the shark pool, and a lot of people and businesses on both sides of the divie will end up paying for what will quickly become excesses.
Fun world.
Good point, Steven. The motivation behind SOPA well could be to crush the individuals and cockroach capitalists so the Big Six can control all the media once again.
You’d think we’d be hearing enormous outrage from the Free Market community.
Laws shouldn’t be misusable. They should be carefully and narrowly crafted to make sure they can be used only for the purpose actually intended.
It’s the “Well, sure. It could be misused. But it won’t be. Trust us.” that is rightly feared. Obama signed the law doing away with due process for all citizens, but then offers a signing statement that says “Sure, we could lock you up forever without trial for essentially any reason we want. But I wouldn’t do that.”
Riiiight.
If the intent of SOPA is to “exclusively to combat piracy: then it should be very carefully crafted so that that is all it can do.
Sean, even if it’s narrowly defined there should still be due process of law. And, in fact, we ALREADY have this. You go to court, make your case to the judge and ask for a temporary injunction, and the other side — if they show — refutes it to the best of their ability. The temporary injunction would last until the end of the trial.
Already on the books. There is no need for a new law unless you’re some fat ass megacorporation that thinks due process is for suckers.
Actually, the Superman logo font is not trademarked – the logo is, the font is not and cannot be.
Theoretically, it can be copyrighted, but someone can produce a font with a different name that duplicates it, and that’s okay.
That’s why Apple’s primary font is (or was – they may have changed it) called “Geneva” – it’s a near-duplicate of “Helvetica”, which is named after “Helvetia” – Switzerland.
With very little effort, i could find completely free and completely legal knockoffs of almost any existing typeface online – there are at least five (that i’ve run across) that duplicate the face used in the original “Prisoner” series. There’s even a site that will accept a sample of scanned text and find not only the name of the original font but of any free duplicates.
Technically, I misspoke. It’s complicated. The sort of original, classic squared off version of the logo was registered with the patent office (Reg. US Pat. Off, a phrase Mike Grell later turned into a villain’s name for Bar Sinister). It’s been held that the style is unique and any adaptation of it using that style but in other words is still an infringement. By way of example, when the Air Force wanted to use that style in one of their recruitment ads in the early 1970s, they had to license it from DC, then National Periodical Publications, and credit NPP accordingly. Like I said, it’s complicated and predates current copyright/patent/trademark laws. If the style hadn’t been abandoned, it would have been grandfathered under ex post facto precedents. Whew.
Yeah, I studied copyright and trademark law in J-school.
I don’t hate you, Mike. I don’t really hate anyone and I certainly don’t hate you.
But I also don’t think you understand my viewpoint on this at all…and that by suggesting I hate you for yours, you’re suggesting to people that mine is the opposite of yours.
So let’s just say I’m very annoyed at your misrepresentation of my views.
I wasn’t trying to misrepresent your views, Mark, as I didn’t establish them at all. What I was doing was making a cheap and convenient joke and it did not occur to me that I could be offending you, and I apologize.
To the extent that we have discussed this (long ago) and I have read your comments, I would most certainly like to know your views on these matters. I believe that digital publishing is the only profitable business model for the future — and I don’t mean comics, I mean publishing. It’s a bit late for me to say that “with digital publishing comes bootlegging,” as we had bootlegging of comics long before we had digital publishing.
So, again, I’d love to see your viewpoint.