The one or two people out there still thinking it might have been Photobucket can breathe a sigh of relief.

So by “special cases” do you mean most of Image’s line from its founding? Or do you mean the “special” like Marvel’s old Epic line?

Not quite. PAD has written both original novels (Sir Apropos of Nothing, for example) and creator-owned comic books (Fallen Angel). Not entirely sure where the licenced novels (he does a lot of Star Trek, and also does the novelisations of Marvel movies) fit in here.

Comics have always had the rights reside with the publishers (except in special cases), so he knew what he was getting into with that anyway.

Also, the idea that we should cease talking about future benefits accruing from unauthorized use…I don’t see why we should do that, at all. We understand these same future benefits to accrue from authorized use, don’t we? People do get paid when their song’s played on the radio (mostly), but the benefit of radio play to the artist is overwhelmingly to do with radio functioning as a PR channel. This stuff’s all getting too damn moral, for me…I don’t give a damn if Peter David complained about something that he’s got every right to complain about, and I wouldn’t even complain if Elton John wanted a piece of every time somebody gets money for playing Rocket Man or Crocodile Rock, either…it probably adds up to a pretty massive pile, so I wouldn’t lecture him about it! But that doesn’t mean I’m in the market for a big speech about Right and Wrong myself. These moral pronouncements are so loaded with certainty you would think we had some kind of magical, idealized marketing info and bill-collecting apparatus in place with which to uphold them…but we don’t, and we never will. There are lots of grey areas and fuzzy boundaries, not to mention incompletely-worked-out principles, at play in these fields…or at any rate I assume there must be, because I would NOT call the busker a thief. Would you?

It’s like police making up imaginary laws for the sake of harassing anybody walking around a public place taking pictures with their huge-ass, conspicuous $500+ camera, when what they’re really angry about is that everyone and their mother has a cell cam so there’s no chance of covering up public police brutality.

There is a difference between sloth and effective time management.

I read scans_daily fairly often, and occasionally contributed to the discussions there. It convinced me to buy very few comicbooks, so it didnt have a huge impact on the circulation of any comic from me. On the other hand it convinced me to buy a hell of a lot of trades! After all, if I saw something posted that I liked I was already home from buying my own comics, and I’m not going to go back to the shop for one book. On the other hand, I will remember that I read half an issue of something and enjoyed it when it comes to buying TPBs!

So without scans daily I personally would probably not have bought my Astro City trades, my PS 238 trades, Thunderbolts, Planet Hulk, Y: The last man, the JSA liberty files, Doctor 13, Aztek and I dont even know how many more. Those are just off the top of my head. Hell, the number of posts that would follow anything interesting that said some variation of “Wow, this is awesome… Is it in trade?” was impressive. Oh, actually when I think about it, the reason I started buying the Incredible Hercules issues was because I had enjoyed the Herc bits of World War Hulk, so when I saw that the hulk comic was switching to Herc I thought “Why not?”.

Which brings me to the other useful thing for me that actually probably DID keep me as a consumer for some of my comics. The big summer crossovers. I dropped Civil war after 2 issues, didnt buy any of secret invasion, final crisis made it to maybe issue 4 before being dropped. I wasnt enjoying them and I’m not going to shell out for something I’m not enjoying. But these comics intersected to greater or lesser extents with comics that I DID enjoy. If I hadnt read scans dailys precis of some of these events I would have dropped the comics that tied into it because they were continuing a story I didnt know.

The other thing I want to mention is the false idea that any person who read scans_daily and didnt ever buy a comic was a lost sale. Rubbish. I’m sure there were more than a few people who read a story they would have bought on the internet then didnt buy it (though I’d point out that I think they are more likely to go to bittorrent/newsgroups to get the whole issue rather than half an issue on livejournal). Whether they are balanced by the people who buy things they wouldnt otherwise no-one can say. But there are a lot of people (myself included) who are in the middle. I read a load of stuff I didnt buy on scans_daily, and yet I am still not a lost sale. I’ll explain:

There was no way I was going to buy an issue of (for example) Bendis’ Mighty Avengers. Didnt like the writing, didnt particularly like the characters, it span out of Civil War which I hated, I wasnt going to buy it. On the other hand, if I was bored and online, and saw someone had posted some Mighty Avengers, I might have a quick look. Whether scans daily existed or not made no difference to me not buying that comic. So while there are a lot of people who “Just want it for free” a lot of those people will not pay for it whatever you do. With a virtual product (such as Mp3s or a comic scan) it actually doesnt lose marvel any money for that person to read that scan, as they dont want it that badly, they just have idle curiousity or are bored.

As for whether PAD has shot himself in the foot, I know I personally will think twice before picking up a new comic with his name on it. I dont have a limitless supply of money for comics and I’d rather spend that on a writer who I dont have to mentally seperate the writing from the personality. I’ll echo a lot of others here; Technically, legally and arguably morally, PAD was in the right. But the way he goes about arguing it? He comes off as an unbelievable douche…

525 comments on his initial post, 105 on his follow-up post, 156 on someone else’s post about it on “Comics Should Be Good”, 87 and 34 on MGK’s post about it here, and it’s Peter David who’s incapable of shutting up about it?

If he hadn’t made the initial post, those people wouldn’t have commented. Same with the followup post. The “Comics Should Be Good” and MGK posts are out of his control, of course, but those were made in response to the shutdown of s_d, which people were obviously going to talk about because it’s kind of important.

“And there are plenty of post there from PAD himself. In fact, this is the most I’ve ever sen him respond to one of his own blog entries. At first it seemed like he was going to respond to each post! His regulars are also capable of wanking up a storm on even the most mundane of topics — you don’t think some of those are people defending him? It’s his blog, and of course he has fans there who want to defend him, so this isn’t exactly a dogpile here.”

Oh, I’m not saying that all the “thousands” are people attacking Peter David. I’m just pointing out that in any argument involving thousands of people taking both sides, the idea that you can point to any specific one of them and say, “He’s not moving on! That’s why this is dragging out!” is absurd.

No accusations of dogpiling were intended.

Given that, while Marvel was certainly popular on S_D, its not the ONLY comic book company that had its books routinely posted Marvel’s online “vault” isn’t really that useful as a legal, paid for replacement. It being standard for a comics company or their publisher to offer ways to download to customers for a nominal charge (the iTunes type thing) would be a more useful and legal alternative to piracy. Even piracy lite like S_D was…

You should correct your spelling! No lady likes to be referred to as a ‘wide’.

I recently paid for a years subscription to Marvel Digital Comics. It was only $60 ($5 if paid by the month) and worth the money, IMHO. Imagine if all those Scans_Daily scans had the whole issues! The most annoying thing was that I could take no screencaps or scans, and the mechanism for linking was only for email. It was terribly frustrating when I wanted to share my thoughts on it with somebody. Without a reference, I could only geek it with issue numbers. I visited the forum there, so I could maybe geek with other paid users but it wasn’t very user-friendly and I’m a bit of a Luddite.

It would be nice if we could get something like the personal blogs in Comicsblog with the ability to link the digital comics parts we wanted to talk about, with the caveat that only paid users could actually see the pictures. The whole S_D crowd would probably move in, and start paying each others subscriptions, like used to happen at Livejournal.

That’s almost exactly my experience as well*. Though statements to that effect remain anecdotal and statistically irrelevant, I’ve been really happy to be buying comics for the last few years.

* pre-s_d, the torrents used to be my barometer. They’ve fallen into disuse, and not for lack of sources.