The decision came down yesterday that the estate of Jerry Siegel has won the copyright to Superman – specifically, “all Superman material in Action Comics #1.” I’ve already seen in a few places people worrying about how this may BANKRUPT THE COMICS INDUSTRY BY SETTING A PRECEDENT!!!!one!!1! Or, more amusingly, the legion of retards commenting on the Newsarama blog getting indignant that the Siegel estate is trying to “destroy Superman” and that Siegel and Shuster’s estates are simply greedy bastards trying to steal money rightfully not theirs.

(Inevitably, whenever Newsrama posts a legal story, it gets a shitload of comments. Equally inevitably, the level of ignorance from people who think the law is just as simple to define as a Green Lantern power ring’s weakness is displayed in full force.)

Don’t worry. The implications are smaller than you think. The decision – which, incidentally, is really quite readable for non-lawyers – can be found here.

The core of the Siegel lawsuit is that Siegel and Shuster created Superman before they began working for DC. (He was originally intended for a comic strip, but they decided to sell him to DC for publication later.) Changes to the United States Copyright Act in the mid-70s gave creators one-time rights to request control of copyrighted works they sold in the years prior (on the basis that, given the change in copyright law – notably the extension for which works remained in private domain – they might have chosen not to sell). The Siegel case has been an example of this sort of attempted recursion.

The Superboy and Superman lawsuits over the past twenty-plus years have been (and this is personal opinion, having studied the case previously) basically one long case of DC Comics being moneygrubbing assholes, because on the merits of the case Siegel had this one in the bag (Shuster has a tougher case due to some contractual issues), and DC/Time-Warner have simply been fighting a stall game for as long as possible on the basis that the $1 billion (yes, billion) per year Superman franchise generated more money than it cost them to pay lawyers to stall.

In terms of implications for the comic industry as a whole – not much, because this isn’t a landmark decision or anything. Most of the major contentious or potentially contentious work-for-hire properties have been settled by contract or established in caselaw – Joe Simon on Captain America, Bill Kane on Batman, etc. (Maybe Steve Gerber’s estate can make a case for Howard the Duck, as I’ve heard he invented the concept independently of Marvel, but for most properties in comics it will generally be very hard to prove that the work was not created on a work-for-hire basis, if not contractually invalidated right from the get-go.)

In terms of the implications for Superman, they too are less than you think. Yes, the Siegel estates now control, to an extent, the copyright of Superman, but copyright for most of Superman’s fellow-concepts – such as Jimmy Olsen, Lex Luthor, Metropolis, The Daily Planet, et cetera – rest firmly in DC’s hands. (Copyright in this regard is a bitch to navigate – Superman’s copyright covers his relationships with the aforementioned, but not necessarily the aforementioned. Lois Lane, who unlike most of the Superman mythos first appeared in that fateful first issue of Action Comics, may fall to the Siegels.) More importantly, DC Comics completely controls and owns the trademarks for Superman – the big red S, the curvy-text Superman logo, the costume, and so forth. Siegel’s estate is not going to take Superman away from DC; it’s functionally impossible to do so until Big Blue passes into the public domain, which won’t be for about another twenty years (barring another corporate-inspired extension of private domain rights, of course).

The major point is that Siegel’s estate will now be owed back pay, I believe, on their rights as owners of the Superman copyright – the amount of which, of course, be contested by DC as well, and on reasonable grounds (namely the “look, we did all the work for all those years” argument, which is not invalid). Also note that DC retains exclusive control of Superman’s international copyright – the Siegel decision merely reflects domestic copyright.

However, DC will have to start forking over monies generated by Superman, most notably those from Smallville – prior to this decision, DC was holding out that Smallville was a show about a “young Superman” rather than “Superboy,” to evade paying the Siegels their share of profits from the show in the wake of the decision that put the rights to Superboy in the hands of the Siegels last year. The point, obviously, is now moot. Of course, they won’t fork over everything, because DC is responsible for producing the show and the Siegel estate doesn’t want to bother with that work. It’ll be a straight-up profit-sharing deal.

Of course, maybe DC will just change his costume. Then again, we know how well that worked out the last time they tried it.

After discussing the Adbusters case previously mentioned here in class, my constitutional law professor sent me an email elaborating on the subject, and since I thought it was interesting (and since said professor is one of the top constitutional law scholars in Canada), I thought I’d pass along the relevant parts.

The relationship between s.2(b) of the Charter and broadcasting law/policy is a fraught one; optimists would say it is largely unexplored territory, pessimists would say that s.2(b) is going to have little impact in the area.

It is clear that the CRTC is part of the executive branch of government and is thus subject to the Charter pursuant to s.32 (the Adbusters ruling did not address this issue; it did address the question of whether the CRTC could be added as a party to the claim, which is a different issue having more do with [civil procedure rather] than constitutional law).

Even though the CRTC is subject to the Charter, the federal court has tended to say, on appeals of decisions dealing with licensing restrictions or cancellations, that s.2(b) is not violated when the CRTC imposes negative consequences on broadcasters who have failed to comply with the terms of their licences or Canadian broadcasting policy. A good example is the Federal Court ruling in the case challenging the cancellation of the CHOI FM licence a few years ago: see Genex Comm Inc v. Canada 2005 (leave to
appeal to SCC denied)…

The reasoning re s.2(b) in cases like Genex is, to put it charitably, unsatisfying, yet the SCC has shown no inclination yet to try to articulate the scope of freedom of expression on the airwaves. It will have to someday. The approach in the US is far more tolerant of restrictions on expression in broadcast media (think Janet Jackson) than in other contexts.

Melodyne’s Direct Note Access system changes absolutely everything about music production. No, really, it changes everything.

The greatest upside is that transformative use just became completely unstoppable. Of course, this will leads to bold new worlds in copyright litigation as artists go to court to claim that a minor-chord variation of, say, “Hot In Herrre” by Nellt isn’t transformative use. But take mashup technology and multiply it by one thousand, and that’s what Celemony have done here: created the ability to create new music out of the shards of shattered old music, completely unrecognizable and distinctive from the original.

Not, of course, that this will stop lawsuits from flying, which is why most countries desperately need to add a transformative use clause to the fair dealing exemptions of their copyright law, and have for some time. (Of course, Canada still doesn’t have legislative protection for parody, time shifting and format shifting, so I suppose we have to manage one thing at a time.)

The big downside of the Melodyne system which I think has gone mostly unnoticed is that it removes the requirement for actual musical skill from, say, an attractive-looking young band. Granted, this requirement was mostly gone anyway, as audio engineers and producers can turn a bunch of untalented shits into the next U2 given enough time and the opportunity to maybe play a few of the band’s instruments in the studio for them – but Melodyne makes it even easier and simpler.

The legal decision for Adbusters v. CBC just became available to read, and it’s… interesting.

The case, in brief, is thus: Adbusters, which for those not aware is a public advocacy organization with an anti-consumerist bent, tried to buy advertising time on Global Television and the CBC for their “buy nothing” ads. CBC aired one of them once; Global refused to air any of them. Adbusters then sued both of them, saying that the two had violated their Charter right of freedom of expression by not airing the ads. (Press release here.)

“But wait,” you say, “only the governments of Canada and the provinces and their various creatures of law, such as territories and municipalities, are bound by the Charter.” And in this you are correct. Adbusters attempted to argue that the CBC is a governmental body by virtue of the fact that it’s a crown corporation, but that one fails the smell test pretty quickly; simply being funded by the government doesn’t automatically qualify an organization as a creature of government. Universities are publicly funded, and they’re not subject to the Charter either – the Charter‘s primary purpose of existence is to define the protections Canadian citizens have from the government. (Which, incidentally, for those not well-versed in Canadian constitutional law, is a huge topic of debate – the argument over the worthiness of negative freedoms versus positive freedoms is continual and ongoing. And loud, at least within a law school.)

So that argument was bad, and it probably tainted Adbusters’ (IMO) better argument: that since the airwaves are public, broadcasters are de facto maintaining a public resource. If Adbusters had gotten the judge to agree on this point, it wouldn’t be inconsistent with existing law either; Canadian jurisprudence recognizes that private organizations performing governmental duties are subject to the Charter. (Hospitals are an excellent example: most are privately maintained corporate bodies, but as the primary deliverers of government-funded health care in Canada, they’ve voluntarily undertaken a statutory duty and are thus agents of the government. Witness the difference between this and the CBC – there’s no legislation saying there has to be a CBC, after all, as any number of right-wing media watchdogs will complain repatedly.)

Of course, the judge struck down that argument too – I won’t get into the details, but suffice it to say Adbusters didn’t have a good argument for suing private entities, and the judge was referring to Canadian caselaw that I’ve studied in a first-year constitutional law course, so you know this wasn’t exactly advanced legal reasoning here.

However, there’s probably a case to be made for suing the government, because the government’s the one putting this policy (or lack thereof) in place which restricts public expression on the airwaves. The problem here is that Adbusters asked to add the CRTC as a defendant, and the CRTC isn’t a crown agency. It’s an unincorporated commission. In Canada, if you want to sue the federal government, you’re suing the Crown (or, well, Parliament really, but you get the gist) or an agency it’s created under statute and given power (the Army, the RCMP, et cetera). The CRTC isn’t a creature of statute, hence you can’t sue it. This was honestly kind of a dumb mistake (and in the writeup of the decision, I note that Adbusters withdrew the motion to add the CRTC as a defendant when the judge pointed this out, which is as close as the legal world gets to an admission of having fucked up).

So, moral of story: Adbusters is currently trying to portray the failure of their relatively weak (and in at least one respect pretty stupid) line of legal attack as a victory for the status quo. They’re obviously going to appeal the decision; if they’re smart, they’ll attempt to add Parliament or the Ministry of Heritage as a defendant, because that’s who they should be suing. However, the problem with Adbusters is that although I happen to agree with a great deal of their politics, they are sadly a bunch of self-righteous schmucks who think they’re a lot more clever than they really are.

Breaking news: New Jersey has banned the death penalty.

Unfortunately for criminals, this means now instead of death they will get life in New Jersey.

THANKYEW THANKYEW I’M HERE ALL WEEK TRY THE VEAL LADIES AND GENNELMEN IT’S DELISH

SUPERMAN: …maybe I’m not explaining this properly.
WONDER WOMAN: No, you’re explaining it quite well. I just don’t agree with the concept.
SUPERMAN: How can you believe that writers don’t deserve compensation for creating intellectual property?
WONDER WOMAN: Because they don’t create it. Artistic inspiration flows from Apollo.
FLASH: The guy over on Earth-50 who’s in the Authority?
WONDER WOMAN: Very funny, Wally. The god Apollo. Music, poetry and literature are his province.
BATMAN: I’m Batman.
SUPERMAN: Uh huh – look, Diana, even if I conceded that all artists owe a debt to Apollo for being able to create art – and I don’t, I’d like to stress that – then the residual fee for screenwriters is akin to royalties for novelists or playwrights, and an expression of consideration for allowing the work to be created.
WONDER WOMAN: But Apollo –
SUPERMAN: All right, for allowing humans access to the work that sprung from Apollo’s noble brow, okay?
WONDER WOMAN: Regardless of quality, it seems.
SUPERMAN: What’s that supposed to mean?
BLACK CANARY: I think she’s talking about the way Barry always used to bitch about that television show.
WONDER WOMAN: Precisely.
FLASH: You know, he really hated that they got Mark Hamill to play Trickster instead of him.
SUPERMAN: Regardless of the other qualities of that television show, you have to admit that it did poorly in the ratings and was cancelled, which means that, if you think the writers wrote a bad show, that they were thus compensated appropriately.
BATMAN: I am the night.
WONDER WOMAN: Sure – but why not simply allow these writers to negotiate individually? I see no need for a union in this instance. We are not speaking of workers toiling for a single corporate entity. There exists a market.
SUPERMAN: An extremely limited one. There are only six production studios in America, and they control just about all the production and all of the distribution of entertainment media in the country and the majority of it internationally.
WONDER WOMAN: But nothing stops these writers from attempting to leverage one studio against another for their own gain.
SUPERMAN: The self-interest of the studios keeps that from happening. Say I’m a writer. Why would Sony seek to give me a larger share of the profits than Fox?
WONDER WOMAN: To attract the best talent.
SUPERMAN: Writers will come work for me anyway, because people with an innately creative bent, as much as they want fair compensation, want to create more. If I discourage one in five writers from ever working for me, that still leaves eighty percent of them willing to work for me at the rates that I set.
WONDER WOMAN: But then quality will out, and the public –
SUPERMAN: Remember how much you complained about 300?
FLASH: Oh, god, don’t get her started again.
WONDER WOMAN: It was not historically accurate! Leonidas was not an honourable man, and the Spartans were resolute pederasts, and –
SUPERMAN: My point is that the public’s tastes are both fickle and often ignore excellent work.
BLACK CANARY: Somebody’s still not over their novel selling poorly.
SUPERMAN: I’m not saying The Janus Contract was a masterpiece, Dinah. I’m just saying it was better than The Da Vinci Code. I mean, we’ve gone back in time. I’ve met Da Vinci, for Pete’s sake…
BATMAN: The city calls to me.
FLASH: That reminds me, when is J’onn going to get back so we can swap Batman’s mind out of that chimp and into his own body?

There is a case, universally known to all law school students, called Carlill v. Carbolic Smoke Ball, which is a case that absolutely every introductory contracts teacher uses for two reasons:

1.) It’s a good example of a case that shows how to distinguish an offer from an invitation to treat, and also sets the precedent for formation of a unilateral contract.

2.) It is called Carlill v. Carbolic Smoke Ball. It is about a small ball that smoked, which you were supposed to stick up your nose as a medical aid against the flu. Indeed, a reasonable Web fascimile of the original advertisement (with an animated GIF and everything!) can be found here. You quickly understand why this is such a popular teaching case – it has a silly name and the invention is downright stupid. (In fact, the Carbolic Smoke Ball would have probably increased your chances of getting sick.)

So when I found out that there was an online store named after the infamous Carbolic Smoke Ball, I was enthused! Surely there would be tons of nifty lawyer-themed crap on there than I would want to own!

Sadly, this is not the case. The crap at carbolicsmokeball.com is not fun crap. It is, at best, mediocre crap. A surfeit of standard lame catchphrases (of the “I can only please one person per day and today is not your day” variety), a few vanity items for the lawyer’s office, and… yeah, that’s more or less it.

There is no “Lawyers Do It In The Standard Befitting A Reasonable Person” T-shirt. There is no “I Drank A Ginger Beer With A Snail In It And All I Got Was A Legal Precedent For Punishing Negligent Behaviour” beer cozy. There is no “What You Know About Tax” musical keychain.

There is not even a replica Carbolic Smoke Ball, for crissake! The site is named Carbolic Smoke Ball and there is no Carbolic Smoke Ball!

Honestly, there has to be a way to get the name away from these people and make a decent law-themed-crap-for-sale site. It would make dozens of dollars. Maybe even ten dozens.

What’s that, you say? A comic that moralizes against illegal downloading featuring Disney characters? Why, it’s almost as if Disney is an enormous corporation with a vested interest in maximizing its intellectual property rights and getting public opinion on its side!

I, personally, am waiting for the day when Batman beats up a nest of villainous music pirates.

MUSIC PIRATE: Music needs to be free!
BATMAN: You need to be in jail.

I am totally stealing Scott Keith’s old bit there, but it’s thematic. Bear with me.

So Rob Brown sent me this email after reading this statement by Chris Kanyon, professional wrestler (and, having had the opportunity to meet him at a fan weekend once, let me say that like most professional wrestlers, a genuinely nice person) about the death of Chris Benoit and the WWE’s denial of knowledge about his cranial health:

continue reading "I Get Letters"

The Canadian judicial system is held in high esteem for its fairness and dedication to good justice. Other countries often look to our judiciary, particularly our Supreme Court, and wonder what the secret of good Canadian jurisprudence is.

It is really quite simple. One of the strictest requirements for membership in the Supreme Court of Canada is that you must be a direct blood descendant of Santa Claus.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “But isn’t this a horribly elitist standard? How many direct descendants of Santa Claus can there be?” However, you would be greatly surprised. Much as eleven percent of the world’s population can claim blood descent from Genghis Khan, about five and three-quarters percent can claim blood descent from Santa Claus. You see, on Christmas Eve, Santa Claus does not just visit every house in the world, eating milk and cookies, and leaving toys. He also has a great deal of sex.

Now, one might reasonably ask why Genghis Khan has nearly double the number of blood descendants that Santa Claus does, considering that Santa Claus is immortal and Genghis Khan died the better part of a millennium ago. The answer is simple: with the exception of certain Northern countries, Santa only gets his freak with anonymous lady strangers one night per year. Furthermore, Genghis Khan received a bit of an advantage in the genetic-spread competition by committing a lot of rape, whereas Santa, being an embodiment of good things upon this earth, only has sex with consenting partners.

Now, the five-and-three-quarters percentage is much higher in Canada (and also Alaska, Iceland, the Nordic countries, and the Baltics – but, strangely, not Russia) because its proximity to the North Pole makes it easier for randy old Saint Nick to go out and get some action on nights other than Christmas Eve. Indeed, almost eighty percent of Canada’s population can trace blood lineage back to Santa at some point in their genealogy, so the requirement of a blood tie to him is not horribly onerous to achieve membership upon the Supreme Court, and it is because of this that Canada has the holliest-jolliest high court in the entire world.

If you want to read one of the most startlingly bullshit interviews I have seen in ages, go here and read Marvel publisher Dan Buckley’s comments on their new online initiative and illegal downloading.

It’s almost infuriating. The level at which Buckley flatly refuses to engage perfectly valid questions and concerns about Marvel’s digital model is just insane. A perfectly fair comparison to Rhapsody is mentioned, and Buckley says “no, it’s not like that” without even bothering to explain why. (The answer, incidentally, as to why Marvel’s online comic movement isn’t quite like Rhapsody is that culturally we’re used to paying to listen to music we don’t own, but we’re not used to paying for books we don’t own and want to read. Of course, that particular difference is one that actually makes Marvel’s digital position worse rather than better.)

And, of course, Marvel’s strategy towards illegal downloading is kept deliberately vague. Questions as to how the torrent model that exists – which is blatantly superior to Marvel’s in a large variety of ways for the consumer – will be dealt with are left unanswered, except to say that Marvel is going to be taking its cues from how the music industry has handled illegal downloading, which is like taking tips from a caveman on how to beat Gary Kasparov in a game of chess.

But it gets worse! Explaining the choice of initial selection and how new comics will be added each week, Buckley says: “This will include providing marketing support for our publishing and entertainment initiatives…”

No shit. Here is the list of comics currently available via Marvel’s digital delivery system. The majority of these comics can be summed up as follows:

1.) Failed miniseries and ongoings which didn’t particularly impact the market and which have no serious sales value (Gambit, District X, Jubilee, Doc Samson, et cetera), including whole runs of series that you can now get at remaindered bookstores (Spider-Man’s Tangled Web).

2.) One-shots not easily collected in trade format or elsewhere (Civil War: Choosing Sides, for example).

3.) …and first issues of things Marvel wants you to buy in trade or single issues (Moon Knight, Civil War, Runaways, Captain America, Immortal Iron Fist, Annihilation, et cetera). For longer-running titles, Marvel’s pretty blatant about this, giving you the chance to read the first issue in each trade.

There is a name for small teaser portions. It is called advertising. This is what Marvel’s entire digital initiative amounts to: you are encouraged to pay money to buy the real comics. They’re not even particularly shy about it, because when you read the first issue of any given comic that you’ve paid to read, they remind you to buy the collection.

Granted, Marvel’s strategy is to use the digital model to encourage new readers. That’s fine. I am down with encouraging new readers. But last I checked, not many people were horribly encouraged by the prospect of paying to read the same fucking comic twice.

And of course there’s a model they could have used. Amazon’s putting it out there right now with their Kindle reader: “you buy the book for a very low price, and anytime you need to download it from us, we let you.” It’s a fantastic model for a publisher to adopt, because it essentially lends control of a person’s library to the publisher. (I’m of two minds about it, personally, but there’s no question that it would be good for Marvel.) Use some proprietary software to keep illegal trading of the comics to a minimum and Marvel could be raking in bucketloads.

Sweet Jesus, how is it possible for a company to fuck up this badly?

Very quietly, just before Thanksgiving so nobody would notice, Marvel and DC sent cease-and-desist letters to zcultfm.com. For those of you who do not know, zcultfm is – or, rather, was – the comic book torrents site, with an immense library of torrents, many of which even worked.

It is also how I have first read most of the new comics published over the last three years. Every single comic parody I’ve done had its origins in DCP scans. (I have a scanner, but it’s not a very good one.) For those wondering, I generally delete most of my downloaded comics after a single read. With the exception of Legion of Super-Heroes, I have not purchased a single issue of a comic book since about 2002 or so.

So I must be a downloading leech, only costing DC and Marvel money. Right?

Well, let me put it this way. This is most of my collection of trade paperbacks and comic hardcovers.

Now, the top right shelf actually doesn’t really have any comics on it, it’s just books that mostly fit in that space nicely, so ignore that shelf, but the rest, pretty much all trade collections of comics and the occasional original hardcover.Now here is my collection again, except that this time, everything I’ve bought as a result of reading the issues first after downloading them (almost always from zcult) and giving them a try? Is highlighted.

My, that’s a lot of highlighting. And since the resolution is a little low, let me just point out that the vast, vast majority of the highlighted content gets published by – wait for it – DC and Marvel.zcultfm – along with scans_daily, which more or less exists as a fan community for the downloads propogated mainly by zcult and Demonoid (also recently shut down) is responsible for me buying the hardcover of The Immortal Iron Fist. It’s responsible for me buying NextWave and the Garth Ennis Punisher and the JMS/JRJr Amazing Spider-Man and the Milligan/Allred X-Force (and then X-Statix) and Runaways and the Brubaker Captain America and getting me finally turned on to the Fantastic Four.

DC? It’s responsible for me buying All Star Superman and Seven Soldiers of Victory and Fables (all of it) and Y The Last Man (all of it) and The Losers (all of it) and Pride of Baghdad and War Stories (which I never would have even known existed were it not for a Garth Ennis megatorrent I downloaded mostly to reread the issues of Hitman I sold in anticipation of collecting the trade paperbacks which were halted mid-run – and incidentally, DC, fuck you very much for that) and Light Brigade and Formerly Known As The Justice League and Gotham Central.

Oh, and if any smaller/indie publisher feels like getting in a snit, I’ll tack on Queen and Country and .303 and the Busiek Conan and The Five Fists Of Science and… well, I could go on.

Comic downloads transformed me from being a guy who bought one comic book per month and the very occasional graphic novel or trade collection, and into a guy who buys two to four trades a month (and sometimes more). I wasn’t going to go back to investing in single issues, because single issues are a terrible value for money and a horrible pain in the ass to store and I can’t lend them out easily when I tell somebody “hey, you should totally read this.” And if you go to zcult and read the postings from the fanboys there, it’s quite obvious that I represent the norm for comic downloaders, despite the fact that our doing so irritates Dan Slott terribly. (PS: Dan Slott, She-Hulk is on my trade to-buy list, although right now I’m steadily working my way through the Bendis/Maleev Daredevil books.)

And the important thing to note here is that DC and Marvel, unlike the incredibly backward music companies they’re trying to imitate here with their painfully stupid legal action, do not have a realistic competing model to offer. Marvel’s pay-for-comic service, despite my kind words previously, has a clunky interface, is slow, doesn’t display the comic work as well as a basic .cbr or .cbz file, doesn’t have a good selection… with a lot of improvements it could be a realistic model, but since I wrote my approving post, everything I’ve heard indicates that Marvel considers their currently mediocre-at-best offering to be a finished, final-stage product, which only earns them a “what the fuck?”

I mean, at least the record companies, when they shut down Oink, could point to iTunes and say “look, we offer mp3s for sale for money, please use that.” And despite the fact that iTunes is kind of a ripoff, at least it’s an option. DC and Marvel don’t even have that. If I want to read the old Roy Thomas Infinity, Inc. run, or the original Speedball ongoing, I have three options: 1.) Wait around for them to collect it in trade, 2.) Spend a small fortune on back issues I don’t want to store in the first place, or 3.) Download the comics torrents. Quick, which one do you think I’m going to pick?

How sad is this?

What’s worse is that they’re just antagonizing people to no good end, because everybody knows how torrent filesharing works now. Here’s the short version:

MAJOR MEDIA COMPANY: Hey, you! You’re downloading the product I made without paying money! Stop that at once!
INDIVIDUAL DOWNLOADERS: Uh, no.
COMPANY: Oh, that’s how it is, is it? Well, I’m going to shut down your torrent-sharing website!
DOWNLOADERS: Fine. We’ll just go over to a different site which will take you three to six months to find out about and shut down.
(Repeat until heat-death of universe or The Rapture, whichever comes first.)

I simply can’t stress enough how shortsighted, how ignorant, how goddamned lunkheaded DC and Marvel are being right now. They aren’t just shooting themselves in the foot like other media companies; they’re shooting themselves in the head. Internet downloading and the word-of-mouth generated by it has been quietly driving their business for the last couple of years now and they want to kill it. It’s just staggering.

I keep getting email about my banning and the subsequent fandom issues on Livejournal, so I figured I should probably address it all in one fell swoop.

continue reading "On Livejournal and SixApart And All That, For Once And For All"