Posted in: Comics, Digital | Tagged: Comics, digital, piracy, pirate

Another Comic Book Pirate Writes

Published Mon, 16 Apr 2012 18:00:06 -0500

Bleeding Cool does not condone comic book piracy. I do find the thought processes behind those that facilitate it fascinating, however. We ran a piece last week, interviewing the semi-retired pirate Archangel. As a result, a current operating pirate, going by the name CCA_Scanner, wrote the following;.

I happened to be hanging out with some folks online in a chat room back then and we started discussing our comic collections. On one such occasion, someone had commented about how they hadn't bought a series of books when they came out and when they came out and now the comic shops wants too much for them. So one of the guys offered to scan the books for the other so they could read them. Honestly I think it was the Death In The Family story arc in Batman that was being referred to at the time. Anyways, the scans were rough, and I mean rough, but it was readable.

It was at this point I started scouting out others that might be into scanning their comics. I found someone that has scanned some comics and posted them to Usenet and found him on an IRC chat server. I quickly joined the server and we started talking about the books he had scanned. I had a pretty decent collection of comics myself at the time, many of them were independents and decided I too wanted to start scanning my books. I went out the next day and bought a scanner, hooked it up and went to town. The tools we used at the time were crude by today's scanning and editing standards. Of course as time went on our methods improved and so did the quality of our scans. For the longest time it was just the two of us. We would scan our books, do some auto-leveling and auto-color balancing in ACDSee 2.43 and zip them up with an .nfo file. We would both then post the scans to the usenet as well as host the files on fservs via mIRC. People would drop in from time to time to chat and download books from us. You have to remember this was LONG before bit torrent. Although napstar was still pretty new at the time, the whole P2P aspect hadn't really taken off yet. Eventually were were joined by a few other scanners that we recruited from the Usenet. I remember we had a rule of no new books being released until they had been out for at least two months. Another scanning group into being shortly after, HaScA I believe it was. They had a similar rule, but their's was not to release books until they had been out for 12 months or something like that. Now that doesn't mean that we didn't go out and buy our comics weekly and scan them as soon as we got home, we just didn't share them for a while. And we always put a note in our nfo files to support the comic book industry by continuing to purchase comics.

I stayed with that group for 4 or 5 years and then real life kicked in and diverted my attention, and funds, elsewhere. And then about 12 months later I came across Z-Cult. It was then that I learned about bit torrents and other places to get digital comics. I figured I would give it a shot again and joined DCP very briefly under another nickname. Some of the people were nice and helpful with new techniques for editing and such. But there were a few with GOD complex egos. It quickly soured my experience and I decided it wasn't for me.

Fast forward about ten years.

I got bored one day and decided to see how the scanned comics were looking these days. I went to one of the more popular BT sites and saw that comics was one of the main categories and that there were tons of them on there. So I started searching for books that I had enjoyed. This was when I learned that books were now being stored in .cbz and .cbr files so that they could be easily associated with digital comicbook readers. One series that I liked had a collected torrent of all the books from that series. So I download the lot and began checking them out. Some of the scans looked good, but many of them looked like poop to be honest. And they isn't meant as a dig on the original scanners of those books, just my opinion compared to other books in the collection. So I decided I could do new scans of the books that didn't live up to the quality of the others so that the set would be that much more enjoyable.

I started doing some research to see if any of the modern groups had done up a tutorial on scanning and editing comics with more modern tools, like we had at one time. (I think our old scanning guide is still online somewhere) Without having any luck finding one online, I decided to try to find someone from one of the groups to see if they had an editing guide put together so that I might be able to start using new methods to make the scans look even better. I met someone from one of the groups and was eventually shown their methods and tools used. So I started scanning and eventually I released a few books using that group's tag since I was now a "member". But please don't misunderstand that last sentence. Yes, the groups are private for the most part and the individuals are paranoid, but it's not without merit. Especially in today's world.

But I will tell you that in the last 18 months of being part of the "scene" again, there have been quite a few surprises along the way. Things like how some people actually make a pretty penny off of the distribution of digital comics, and I don't mean the comic book companies themselves. How there are nasty security issues with official digitally hosted comic sites and yes even companies themselves. I will also tell you that while yes there are some that still thrive off of their own egos, there are plenty of nice and very helpful people in the scene as well.

Are we a gift as well as a curse to the comic industry? Of course we are. But I think we are also providing one of those new buzz phrases right now, a "teaching moment" to the industry. This is something any entertainment industry companies would do well to pay attention to, YOU WILL NEVER DEFEAT PIRACY! Archangel was right in that there will always be a security issue as long as humans are involved in the process at any point, you're going to have security leaks. And while I don't think they should take an apathetic approach to piracy, I personally don't think they need to spin their wheels so hard trying to defeat piracy but rather they should pay attention to why piracy works. Entertainment products are great because people need distractions. And like a drug, if you enjoy it and it distracts you from the hum-drum part of life, you will want it more. But like any addiction, you can't have it all without great cost. And yes that also mean financially. So look at the product the pirates put out compared to yours AND look at the distribution methods pirates use compared to yours. The pirates product is as good as if not better than yours in many cases, especially so in digital comics, and ease of acquisition of said pirated product is better than your method of distribution. We live in the zero second age. I want it and I want it now. And many times I can get it NOW.

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