Sev (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} tropism) wrote,@ 2008-01-01 23:02:00 |
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Seriously...
...What the fuck was Marvel thinking with all of the cross-connecting between series in the '90s? I tried reading the X-Men series that started in 1991, and by the time I got about 16 issues in, I'd already encountered not just references to other series (which are fine,) but entire plotlines that started or finished in other magazine lines. I know from what I've heard that DC was doing about the same thing at the same time -- no fucking wonder that Marvel and DC got into such horrible financial problems in this time-period. To keep up with your favotire story you'd have to buy all these other godamned comics.
...Thank goodness for Bittorrent, but even with that, I'm afraid that I may not be able to stomach reading that particular X-Men series.
Right now I'm reading the Uncanny X-Men, having started with the reboot that happened in issue 96 or so, where the old team was dropped and the new team was formed -- with Wolverine, Colossus, etc. And at this point -- the late 1970s -- Marvel had it right. I don't get the weird, disconnected "what the fuck is going on?" feeling that I've been getting with the 1991 X-Men and even with Ultimate X-Men. Yeah, there're references to things that happen in other series and such, but the core plotline is pretty self-contained, or else you're given a quick rundown of things that're happening in the world. That's the way you do it, folks. Sheesh.
Seriously, this is what's kept me from reading normal superhero comics for all these years -- because when I was interested in these comics, it was the 90s when they were pulling all of this crap. So, not only would I feel the need to get caught up-to-date on the series I'd like to read, but then I'd also have to go out and buy issues from entirely different series in order to actually follow the plots. At the time, this was, frankly, impossible, unless you had thousands of dollars to throw down on back-issues and collections and such. Being po' as I was, yeah, the barrier to entry was entirely too high -- particularly when, for about two to four times the price of a comic, I could get an actual book that would entertain me for far longer than it would take me to consume the contents of your average comic book.
Now, a decade later, with the advent of high-speed internet connections, bittorrent, and a blatant disregard for intellectual property laws, I actually -can- start reading these things. Then again, it's not like I could go out and buy these back-issues, and the compilations from the era are, AFAIK, entirely in black-and-white and greyscale, which has zero appeal for me for a comic which was originally rendered in color.
Companies need to learn the following:
1: You shouldn't make the reader go out and buy more crap just to enjoy the basic experience of a product.
2: You should keep your barriers to entry low, particularly when you're in a market which is largely made up of kids who don't have jobs, or at least was.
3: You should make your past products available in ways that're easy to acquire, won't break the bank, and aren't substantially inferior to the original product, particularly if you're asking me to pay money for it.
See, the latter point is one of the best justifications for 'illegal' file-sharing that there is. There is so much material out there which simply -can't- be purchased for love or money -- well, for lots and lots of money, yes, but I ain't gonna spend the money to get X-Men #1 from 1960-something just so I can read it. No. And I'm not going to spend money for a no-color version of a visual artform which originally included and depended upon color. Once something becomes a 'collector's item' because it is no longer being produced, there's no loss to anyone if you acquire an illegal copy of it. It doesn't lower demand for surviving originals, because true collectors -- the only people who would buy the stuff at the prices it's available for -- will do so anyway. I think that this is one of the core problems with current copyright laws -- they allow stuff to disappear into the dustbin of history, unless people are willing to break the law to distribute it. No, we'll never lose the data on Marvel comics, but what about minor bands and other short-run things that were fantastic -- or at least, that _I_ thought where fantastic, but were originally released in limited amounts and haven't been published for 20 years? This is one of the things that makes it a true bitch to collect old filk music; it's not in publication, and, because of the fucked-up trail of "who owns the rights," some of it probably never -will- be published again. However, if I'm lucky, I may be able to find a copy of whatever-it-is online.
Also, there's the simple issue of a perceived unfairness inherent in charging new-release prices for something that was published before I was alive and has been in perpetual publication since. Pink Floyd's great, but, goddamn, why do their CDs tend to cost more than the average new release? That's simply unfair.
In short, this little screed is just airing my feelings about how the current copyright system just doesn't work in this day and age. I -want- to give money to the people whose works I enjoy, but sometimes it's either impossible, overpriced, or unavailable in unadulterated form.
You want to get money from me? Look at the way people like Tom Smith and Phil Foglio operate. I can read the entire Girl Genius comic online, but I've bought three of the print books that're out and will probably buy the rest next I-CON. I've bought many filk CDs from the artists -- directly, mind you -- when I've already got all of the tracks from the album downloaded to my machine. Sometimes I'll re-rip at better quality than the MP3s I downloaded, but generally I just toss the album into my Bin 'O CDs as insurance against a disk-crash. Look at the Baen Free Library, a fantastic marketing tool that came about as the result of a bet. Basically, you can download a few hundred novels that've been published by various authors -- full text, no DRM, etc. They're often the first (or first few) books in a series, older novels, etc. Who cares? The point is that it gets people to try out an author, and gets them to buy that author's stuff. They've actually tracked increases in sales based on authors releasing works to the BFL, even if the actual works released are no longer in publication.
Why do people 'steal' all of this stuff online? Because the perceived value is lower than the price of the product, by a significant factor. Fix that, and people will 'steal' less.
(Side note: Downloading IP without a license is not theft, damn it, it's copyright infringement. Theft deprives another person of actual property. Copyright infringement may deny them a potential sale, but in reality, the owner of the product isn't out any money or product. I'd argue that most of the time, it hasn't even denied them a sale, since the people who're infringing wouldn't buy the product anyway. College students, for example, are too poor to go out and buy every album they want, so they buy the albums of the bands they truly love, and just DL the rest of the stuff.)
Blargh.
...What the fuck was Marvel thinking with all of the cross-connecting between series in the '90s? I tried reading the X-Men series that started in 1991, and by the time I got about 16 issues in, I'd already encountered not just references to other series (which are fine,) but entire plotlines that started or finished in other magazine lines. I know from what I've heard that DC was doing about the same thing at the same time -- no fucking wonder that Marvel and DC got into such horrible financial problems in this time-period. To keep up with your favotire story you'd have to buy all these other godamned comics.
...Thank goodness for Bittorrent, but even with that, I'm afraid that I may not be able to stomach reading that particular X-Men series.
Right now I'm reading the Uncanny X-Men, having started with the reboot that happened in issue 96 or so, where the old team was dropped and the new team was formed -- with Wolverine, Colossus, etc. And at this point -- the late 1970s -- Marvel had it right. I don't get the weird, disconnected "what the fuck is going on?" feeling that I've been getting with the 1991 X-Men and even with Ultimate X-Men. Yeah, there're references to things that happen in other series and such, but the core plotline is pretty self-contained, or else you're given a quick rundown of things that're happening in the world. That's the way you do it, folks. Sheesh.
Seriously, this is what's kept me from reading normal superhero comics for all these years -- because when I was interested in these comics, it was the 90s when they were pulling all of this crap. So, not only would I feel the need to get caught up-to-date on the series I'd like to read, but then I'd also have to go out and buy issues from entirely different series in order to actually follow the plots. At the time, this was, frankly, impossible, unless you had thousands of dollars to throw down on back-issues and collections and such. Being po' as I was, yeah, the barrier to entry was entirely too high -- particularly when, for about two to four times the price of a comic, I could get an actual book that would entertain me for far longer than it would take me to consume the contents of your average comic book.
Now, a decade later, with the advent of high-speed internet connections, bittorrent, and a blatant disregard for intellectual property laws, I actually -can- start reading these things. Then again, it's not like I could go out and buy these back-issues, and the compilations from the era are, AFAIK, entirely in black-and-white and greyscale, which has zero appeal for me for a comic which was originally rendered in color.
Companies need to learn the following:
1: You shouldn't make the reader go out and buy more crap just to enjoy the basic experience of a product.
2: You should keep your barriers to entry low, particularly when you're in a market which is largely made up of kids who don't have jobs, or at least was.
3: You should make your past products available in ways that're easy to acquire, won't break the bank, and aren't substantially inferior to the original product, particularly if you're asking me to pay money for it.
See, the latter point is one of the best justifications for 'illegal' file-sharing that there is. There is so much material out there which simply -can't- be purchased for love or money -- well, for lots and lots of money, yes, but I ain't gonna spend the money to get X-Men #1 from 1960-something just so I can read it. No. And I'm not going to spend money for a no-color version of a visual artform which originally included and depended upon color. Once something becomes a 'collector's item' because it is no longer being produced, there's no loss to anyone if you acquire an illegal copy of it. It doesn't lower demand for surviving originals, because true collectors -- the only people who would buy the stuff at the prices it's available for -- will do so anyway. I think that this is one of the core problems with current copyright laws -- they allow stuff to disappear into the dustbin of history, unless people are willing to break the law to distribute it. No, we'll never lose the data on Marvel comics, but what about minor bands and other short-run things that were fantastic -- or at least, that _I_ thought where fantastic, but were originally released in limited amounts and haven't been published for 20 years? This is one of the things that makes it a true bitch to collect old filk music; it's not in publication, and, because of the fucked-up trail of "who owns the rights," some of it probably never -will- be published again. However, if I'm lucky, I may be able to find a copy of whatever-it-is online.
Also, there's the simple issue of a perceived unfairness inherent in charging new-release prices for something that was published before I was alive and has been in perpetual publication since. Pink Floyd's great, but, goddamn, why do their CDs tend to cost more than the average new release? That's simply unfair.
In short, this little screed is just airing my feelings about how the current copyright system just doesn't work in this day and age. I -want- to give money to the people whose works I enjoy, but sometimes it's either impossible, overpriced, or unavailable in unadulterated form.
You want to get money from me? Look at the way people like Tom Smith and Phil Foglio operate. I can read the entire Girl Genius comic online, but I've bought three of the print books that're out and will probably buy the rest next I-CON. I've bought many filk CDs from the artists -- directly, mind you -- when I've already got all of the tracks from the album downloaded to my machine. Sometimes I'll re-rip at better quality than the MP3s I downloaded, but generally I just toss the album into my Bin 'O CDs as insurance against a disk-crash. Look at the Baen Free Library, a fantastic marketing tool that came about as the result of a bet. Basically, you can download a few hundred novels that've been published by various authors -- full text, no DRM, etc. They're often the first (or first few) books in a series, older novels, etc. Who cares? The point is that it gets people to try out an author, and gets them to buy that author's stuff. They've actually tracked increases in sales based on authors releasing works to the BFL, even if the actual works released are no longer in publication.
Why do people 'steal' all of this stuff online? Because the perceived value is lower than the price of the product, by a significant factor. Fix that, and people will 'steal' less.
(Side note: Downloading IP without a license is not theft, damn it, it's copyright infringement. Theft deprives another person of actual property. Copyright infringement may deny them a potential sale, but in reality, the owner of the product isn't out any money or product. I'd argue that most of the time, it hasn't even denied them a sale, since the people who're infringing wouldn't buy the product anyway. College students, for example, are too poor to go out and buy every album they want, so they buy the albums of the bands they truly love, and just DL the rest of the stuff.)
Blargh.
