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Comic Book Pirate Interviewed on CBC’s Search Engine Podcast

comic piracy
One of my favourite radio-shows podcasts, CBC’s Search Engine interviews a real-life Comic Book Pirate this week (interview starts at 13:20).

This is one of those guys who scans issues of comics every week and seeds them on torrent sites. His responses were very thoughtful and he makes a good case for how comic book piracy actually helps the comic book industry.

The smaller publishing houses seem to be more okay with this because they’ve learned the lesson of the music industry – that you don’t want to alienate your potential customers by making them feel like criminals. I look forward to a time when there’s a legal digital distribution model in place and I can wake up on Wednesday morning, download my DC and Marvel comics, but it will be an incredibly painful transition until we get there.

In a nice twist, they also interview Fantagraphics head cheese, Gary Groth on the subject.

  • crunchy

    has anyone seen the new Cold Wars yet??

  • crunchy

    has anyone seen the new Cold Wars yet??

  • Oluseyi

    Sad to say, I regard tights-and-flight comics the same way Warner Bros. regards DC as a division: as a loss leading character/story generator for television and film adaptations, so it was difficult to work up the appropriate amount of interest in comic book piracy.

    I feel much the same about music piracy: I can do without music, or with just what I (over)hear on radio, tv, in movies and live. Consequently, I can’t go to the effort necessary to find and download large numbers of songs – and I really can’t understand people who can.

    Not that I don’t love music, or comics as an artform. It’s just the commerce around them that I don’t quite care for. I dunno; my opinions here are largely underdeveloped due to my lack of personal investment.

  • Oluseyi

    Sad to say, I regard tights-and-flight comics the same way Warner Bros. regards DC as a division: as a loss leading character/story generator for television and film adaptations, so it was difficult to work up the appropriate amount of interest in comic book piracy.

    I feel much the same about music piracy: I can do without music, or with just what I (over)hear on radio, tv, in movies and live. Consequently, I can’t go to the effort necessary to find and download large numbers of songs – and I really can’t understand people who can.

    Not that I don’t love music, or comics as an artform. It’s just the commerce around them that I don’t quite care for. I dunno; my opinions here are largely underdeveloped due to my lack of personal investment.