Flipping, flipping, flipping...

Heh... sorry about the speed thing guys, that first page is 232 KB. I type too damn much. I'll try to keep it brief from here on out.



Hey, that's what insurance is for! Uh... (giggle) can you imagine it? Copyright infringement insurance? OMG... The HORROR!!!



Oh geez, I had no idea. Well, I'll publicly give great thanks to Phil Katz right here and mourn his passing. His contribution will last for a very very long time indeed, and will continue to benefit many of us. I hope that his heirs, if any, will reap the reward of his shareware gift to us geeks.



Well, I'm sure there was some arrangement there, didn't Mr. Katz develop the DCL as an outgrowth of PKZIP? I'm fuzzy on this I admit. In any event, the compression scheme and the old disk-spanning archive tools were and still are standard, and are used in a whole lot of apps. Maybe they aren't being licensed, but they're certainly being used with great efficacy all over the world. Perhaps my example of Windowshade is a better one.



Oh certainly, and this is why film file traders are a very small underground group. I'd guess that once bandwidth is up to speed and file portability is less of an issue, we'll see the same thing happen to film bootlegs as we've seen with MP3s. The compactness, quality, and easily downloadable portability of MP3 is what drove this explosion and what triggered off Napster in the first place.



ROFL Nat... heh, well I did say MOST of the time there's nothing on... you KNOW that when Battlebots comes on, the world STOPS at my house -- even more than for MNF and Trek shows LOL. [img]http://209.198.111.165/ubb/biggrin.gif[/img]

More tomorrow. Me jetlagged. Advice to all: Don't ever fly ATA Airlines if you can at all help it. You don't even get what you pay for. No fun.

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Jeff Zugale
Pagan City Comics
www.pagancity.com

Heh, Nat goes on his honeymoon and all of a sudden... CRICKETS!! (hollow echoing sound...)

Hey folks, this is going to be important to all of us. Let this not be the Zugale/Gertler Copyright Debate. Speak up! [img]http://209.198.111.165/ubb/smile.gif[/img]

Well, actually, I posted something back near the bottom of page one, and I'd be more than happy to hear your thoughts.

OK James, I'll take a whack at it... I'm not gonna quote the whole thing here, so for those interested it's the 3rd post from the bottom on page 1.



Yeah this is part of what I'm talking about for sure. It shows a business model for what happens when you both give your stuff away and DON'T give it away. See, I'm talking about different KINDS of giving away, as follows:

1. Giving away copies of your work to people in order to create demand for more of your work, while maintaining control over it.

2. Giving away control of your creations to others who market it, sell it, and (theoretically) pay you a percentage.

3. Giving away (more like giving up) on the concept of "copyright" in the presently defined sense, in the face of societal, technological, and economic forces that threaten it... and coming up with a different way to profit from one's creations.

So these folks were giving away their performances by letting people record them live; they were sacrificing some up-front profit potential to be sure, since the people were selling the tapes, but that sacrifice generated more value for the band, since more people would come see them -- and besides, they weren't paying for the recordings (hiring someone to bring a quality remote recording system to your gig costs a mint). It wound up helping the bands by generating interest, which brought more people to shows (who paid to get in I'm sure), which generates more interest, which leads to bigger shows in bigger places, and more "official" merchandise sales, and so on and so forth.

Note that doing things this way is exactly counter to the established "big business" method of marketing and selling, which works by generating or procuring an idea/product/entertainment property (like a band or a comic book); then spending an incredible amount of up-front money on advertising & promotion (often multimegabucks), in the hopes of generating a large amount of interest, and therefore demand, in a very short period of time; then hoping and praying that they actually sell enough of said widget/property within a certain period of time to make a profit.

In other words, it's basically betting a lot of money that you'll make even more money in a big hurry and get hugely rich almost instantly.

Now, I'll admit, this works, and it sometimes works very well! But it's certainly hit or miss, and no matter what any marketing firm will tell you, it's nearly impossible to predict what's going to sell and what isn't. So, out of every ten widgets/bands/comics/whatever that has that money bet on it, maybe ONE will actually generate the tall dollars; therefore a lot of money gets thrown away, and often is not compensated for by the successful sales of widget #10. Note that advertising and marketing companies make a big chunk of that big up-front money, and most of the rest goes to the media outlets through which the ad campaigns are projected. So they win whether the product sells well -- like, oh, Tide laundry detergent -- or if it sells poorly, like CarsDirect.com.

It speaks of a mindset of "cash in quick."

When a media company like Marvel or DC or Warner or Atlantic records offers you a contract for your creation, they ask that you hand over your copyright to them in most cases, as we've discussed. The "positive" reason why they do this is that they want to have full control over the property, in order to apply their "expertise" in marketing, their "connection" with their consumer base, their extensive market research, in order to most effectively exploit the property in as many forms as they can in order to (hopefully) maximize profits. It sounds good, right? Makes sense.

I'd believe it if they were hitting 5 or more out of 10. But, obviously hitting 1 out of 10 (or maybe 20 or 100) works somewhat because money is being made. So, if you want to go for that fast buck, and sell a million whatevers and retire early, great. It may work for you. Then again, it may not. My personal opinion is that this business model works on the principle of "Well, we don't really know what's going to work here, so we'll buy a whole bunch of stuff, spend a lot of money trying to develop it and market it, and hope to hell that once we throw it up against the wall, a couple of things will stick and sell enough to pay for all the rest of it and make us a profit."

That's like going to Vegas and sticking $100 in quarters into every slot machine in a row, hoping that one will pay out enough to recover all that and then some. Okay, okay, it's an exaggeration, marketing research DOES work because people aren't as random as slot machines, they're psychologically predictable and you can push their buttons to make them want to buy stuff -- at least stuff like antibacterial soap (button: fear of germs) or Old Navy clothes (button: fear of being ostracized for unfashionable wardrobe) or Scope and BMWs (button: fear of not getting girls because your breath stinks or you drive a crappy car).

But "art," like comics or music or even (shudder) TV shows & movies... well, there's really no predicting what people will like, since appreciation of "art" is not something that's motivated by primal, predictable human motivations like fear and sex and hunger. (Note how well porn sells.) So no matter how much market research and how many focus groups you run (and pay for), there really is no assurance that if you spend, for example, $35 million on a movie and another $25 million on its promotion, that you're going to get it back. I guarantee that the studio that paid for "Titanic" to be made was CRAPPING THEIR PANTS as they watched the price tag climb during production. Fortunately it did very well for them -- but it might have failed utterly. (It speaks volumes about Cameron's personal clout and persuasiveness that he was able to actually finish the movie, btw, but I digress)

BTW Dead fans who had tapes did sell them, but not for a lot of money. The product was priced well within the market's range, just like the CDs that you mention on MP3.com and elsewhere.

So, the first question to the artist is, are you trying to get rich quick? If so, sell your stuff and cross your fingers that (a) whomever you sell it to does a good job with it, since all control is likely to be removed from you, and (b) that they pay you if it does well.

If you're more concerned with retaining control of your creations and getting it out there in the way you see fit -- and also keeping the lion's share of whatever profit it generates -- and you're NOT so concerned with getting rich in a hurry, then you can work with this different model, where you create, give away, generate interest and demand, sell something, give away more, generate more interest, sell more things, and eventually evolve your work into a valuable property that (hopefully) others will approach YOU for the privelege of joining in your success. This is what Steve Conley is doing, and doing well.

And it occurs to me that the possibility of being an overnight success doing that may be similar to the chances of doing it the big-biz way, but I can't be sure. More likely it involves an extended period of word-of-mouth getting out there and bringing people in. I think the advantages of this method are many; for instance, it costs next to nothing, which is good for us average schmoes with day jobs -- we don't have to go beg for money for promotion; also, I think this way encourages the creation of more unique, higher-quality stuff, since you'd have to stand out among the masses to do well. Mediocre work would be weeded out naturally, and creators would be able to judge audience reactions more immediately, and make improvements as they see fit. The creators can set the level of "acceptance" they are comfortable with, as opposed to a conglomerate who will try to maximize potential audience ($$) by making the property as "accessible" as possible.

The upshot of all this related to the copyright issue is that if copyright can no longer be effectively enforced, the big-biz way of doing things will no longer work, and this other method may turn out to be the way creative business gets done. It won't pay to lay out $30 million in development and promotion if the property can't generate income immediately when it's released -- the demand might be there but if as soon as you sell one widget, it gets duplicated and sent around for free, the up-front money goes poof. In that case, in the face of the inability to keep that copying from happening, then a different business model would have to be implemented. IMHO the different model would be more favorable to the creators -- provided they're not trying to get rich quick.



And that's really the crux of the matter. You have to look in the mirror and be honest with yourself: Do you think being rich will make you happy, or do you think that creating the best thing you can and being in charge of it will make you happy? Are you greedy? Do you just not want to have to work for a living? Are you concerned about your artistic integrity? Or do you not really care as long as you're making money? Do you want to be famous and have lots of people admire you? Or are you content to be more obscure, but making an honest and comfortable living?

You may have to ask yourself these difficult questions, and deal with some potentially ugly things inside you.

For me, I had to ask these questions of myself. The answer was, I'm NOT comfortable with handing over control of my creations to some big company, hoping they can sell it and pay me a lot of money. I'm not a greedy guy, I just want to be able to live well, cover the necessities, and have a bit o' fun here and there. Fame doesn't hold all that much attraction for me (since I've seen what it does to people from up close). All I want to do, ideally, is to do something productive that I like to do, and make a living doing it. I'd like that to be my art of some kind.

And for me, not worrying about getting rich and famous is, well, really very relaxing. I'm gonna do my thing, and if it pays off, great. If not I'm doing fine otherwise.

If you are of the mind that if you are not working on your creation full-time, it's not worth doing, then this might not work for you, and you will need to solicit your ideas to someone with money so you can develop them full-time on their dime. I used to be of that mind; then I realized that my best work was being done when I was NOT on their dime, but when I was struggling to make ends meet -- the jeopardy I was in was stirring my creative energy to a fever pitch. Once the record company started paying me I didn't do as well creatively. No immediate crisis, you see. Just a look at it from my side.



Of course, if such a deal were worked out, the parties involved would certainly put the available merchandise on reliable servers that were available all the time, just like any web server. Napster is unreliable because not everyone has their machine on all the time, or Napster running all the time, nor do they necessarily have reliable internet connections. If the record companies got into it, they would set up their own servers to guarantee the availability of the music.



Yes I've heard of it. This is serious Big Brother technology. Is anyone here comfortable with the FBI checking the headers of every email sent on the web? That would be akin to them listening to the first few minutes of every telephone conversation. (Of course they are theoretically able to do that right now, as a result of that wiretap law that they passed a bunch of years ago... am I right about that?) Doing so would definitely violate some of our Constitutional rights, not that they're not being eroded anyway... but that's another argument. I don't know if the people will stand for that kind of monitoring, nor do I know how truly effective it is. Carnivore introduces variables into this equation that cannot easily be understood.

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Jeff Zugale
Pagan City Comics
www.pagancity.com

All right. Here's a toughie: what's going to become of copyright?

Obviously, people aren't expecting it to go anywhere. Disney's recent, successful push to get it extended to (I believe) 75 years after the holder's death seems to suggest they think holding a copyright will still be worth something in 50 years' time.

Lots of people are mad about this. Why? Obviously, Mickey Mouse in the public domain would have been a sight to see (just imagine R. Crumb with that friggin mouse), but Disney doesn't owe us anything. Except the return of our souls. And Mickey in a leather bustier wouldn't provide that. So, what is it about the continuation of the copyright that gets people heated?

This beg's the question, does your work deserve any sort of protection once you're gone and won't see it raped and abused by the industry? Is your work important beyond the initial experience of reading it? I mean, if you do it because you love it, not to get rich or put your kids through college, and you get the chance to do that and die content (on a lawnchair, in the sun, just after sex, with your family and friends around, having a barbecue), then does it matter if 5 years down the road Mystic For Hire is shilling for Burger King?

Here's a problem: a redefinition of what copyright is requires a redefinition of ownership, and a sea change (neatly avoiding the "p" word) in the way we see ourselves as creators. We have to stop even conceiving of the idea that we can get paid comfortably for the work we do.

What do you think, your grandkids' lifetimes?

OK correct me if I'm wrong here. I'm not really clear on this. But it's my understanding that even if the copyright on a Mickey Mouse movie (which seems to be the case with some of the first ones that people sell on video cassette collections) is lapsed, that doesn't put the character in the public domain as long as Disney keeps using it and keeps thier Trademark for the character registered.

Sure you could sell old movies that contained the character, but if you started doing sex films of The Mouse thier lawyers could still nail you for infringement of the Trademark.

I think...


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Justin Savage
President/Editor/Web-bozo
www.sabresedge.com

Well, I originally thought your idea strange. Seemed to me like it would be the other way around; people would have access to the character, not the films.

Speaking with a guy at work who's dealt with copyright in a number of ways, I've been made to understand that you would get access to Mickey himself, but not the Disney films, which would still be under copyright as works by them. However, you probably wouldn't be able to screw with MM too much. If Disney felt you were harming the image of their character in any way (like, say, giving him a moustache or something), they could sue you. And they would.

Well the concept of "who owns the idea" isn't going anywhere, of course. However the concept of the owner having legal rights to keep other people from making copies and distributing the work -- a perfectly valid and worthy concept -- is what's in jeopardy.

Notice I did not include anything in there about making a profit. That's because in the case of the Napster thing and the other "pirates" with their FTP servers and newsgroup binaries etc., there's little (if any) or no profit being generated by the file exchangers (let's leave the Napster company out of it for the sake of this discussion). The info is being shared around for free -- it's a non-commercial phenomenon.

See, while the law at this time does not, I differentiate between (a) people making copies of something that they enjoy and handing it out to friends (or others they feel would be interested) for free (or at least no profit; you gimme a tape/CDR I make you the copy) as opposed to (b) people making copies of something they think they can sell lots of and doing so to their direct profit -- and not paying the owner anything.

Believe me, I understand the position that every copy made of a copyrighted work should be paid for at the time of duplication or end-user acquisition. And when we're talking about physical widgets, it's relatively easy to ensure that this happens -- you no pay? We no deliver!

However it's pretty clear that with bits and bytes this isn't feasible. As we've discussed above, the software industry has found it very difficult to keep people from illegally copying software and using it. There is a wide range of such activity, from Bobby lending Joey his Quake III CD so Joey can install it and play against Bobby over the Net, all the way to people buying a Microsoft Office 2000 CD, taking it to Southeast Asia, hacking out the serial number, and burning it (and 10 or 12 other high-end packages, totaling in the $1000's) to CDs and selling them in Hong Kong for $10 each, and pocketing the money. Now of course the software industry is combating this to the greatest extent they can. They can restrict Bobby and Joey somewhat by making it so at least ONE person who's playing Quake III in any particular group of twelve MUST have the CD inserted in their CD drive; many other games also require that the CD be present. Obviously this can be circumvented by either making copies of the CD with a burner, or by hacking the code so the game doesn't look for the CD. But not everyone does this, and lots of people actually DO go buy the game, so id makes money. Yay! The other end of the scale, well that's a lot more difficult. There you've got people deliberately stealing the software and selling bootleg copies of it. That's difficult to stop even with extensive law-enforcement resources. I read a few years ago that someone estimated that 90% of all the software in mainland China was pirated! Yikes...

Yet still the software industry is healthy -- not talking dot-coms with fuzzy bizplans and questionable profit potential, but real, useful software tools like Office and Illustrator and Oracle and Dreamweaver. The companies that make these tools are doing fine -- Adobe's stock has climbed up to $150 while so many others have been falling! If pirating is so easy, how can these companies make money? Well... I see a couple of basic reasons:

First, since a company is a legal entity subject to law-enforcement scrutiny of how it spends its money, it's most prudent that it actually PAYS for the software it uses. In this instance, the copyright law WORKS and will continue to do so. As long as companies need to be able to show the IRS where their money comes from and goes, this will keep them on good behavior for the most part. Software expenditures are a legitimate cost of doing business, and of course you can write it off! Besides, it pays for itself pretty quickly if you have work to do. It's an investment in your business, especially if it helps you work faster and more efficiently.

Second, and possibly more importantly, there is the question of support. If you have pirated software, you cannot call up the manufacturer and ask for help if you have a problem. If you put together a database in an unauthorized copy of Access, and somehow it gets screwed up, you can't call Microsoft and ask them how to fix it -- you don't have a serial number. Now, that database may represent thousands of dollars worth of work by your employees, and even more thousands of dollars of customer-related information and service issues... and now it's useless to you because you can't detangle it. Without being able to call Microsoft, you have two choices: redo the database from scratch, which will cost you $1000s, or hire an indie consultant to come in and fix it, which may also cost the same.

If you had shelled out the $500 for a legal copy of Office Pro, you could call up MS for $35 and get your database fixed today. Much cheaper, no? (And lets not get into little details about how MS runs their support, please, they are not relevant.)

For enterprise software like Oracle or SAP, support is even more of a key issue -- you're running your whole company on it, you need to be able to go to the source for many issues and for help with critical applications.

So maybe software isn't making as much from single private users; someone who just wants to tinker with Photoshop can maybe borrow it from a buddy or download it from a warez site. They get no manual, no support, no install disk; then again, they're not doing anything serious with it; they're below the radar so to speak. If you have a pirate copy of Photoshop and you're making visible money with it, well, you better hope you don't get audited.

But legitimate, visible businesses who use software tools have great incentive to buy them, so they do... and the software companies who make these now-indispensable business and creative tools are doing very, very well.

As far as games go, apparently enough people pay for them to make them profitable, even though they're easy to pirate. id even found another way to make money; they license their game engines to other game companies. I just bought Voyager: Elite Force, and it uses the Quake III engine. It's great too! So id makes $ on every copy, while Raven and Activision save a MINT on development costs, thus increasing their own profit margin.

In any event, the software industry has found ways to survive, and in fact to be wildly profitable, even in the face of endemic unauthorized duplication.

OK... so how does this apply to music and comics and books, which are NOT tools that require support and financial legitimacy? Uh, well... I don't have an answer to that. We're not talking about tools that people use to create income for themselves, we're talking about entertainment. These things generate enjoyment for the end-user, and that's it. Up til now, people have paid for that enjoyment by buying/renting/subscribing (to) the medium on which the entertaining stuff is transcribed, be it a CD or a DVD or a book or a cable TV network. Part of that price (ideally) gets back to the creator of the entertainment, and everyone's happy.

Now that whole back end, the buying/renting/subscribing business model, is being threatened by the Net. I personally think that this is going to change the whole deal, and in FAVOR of creators rather than to their detriment. While I don't think creators are going to be able to cash in quickly anymore, I think we're going to become more valuable in the long run for our uniqueness and for our ability to maintain a good work relationship with our audience. WE will be the ones who sell advertising -- once we've built up our own audiences. We probably won't get paid for each copy of our comics that people download; however we WILL get paid for the collected graphic novel, the mug, the t-shirt... at the same time as we get paid for the ads we include in the graphic novel and on our website. We will be selling neat stuff to our viewers, and we will be selling our viewers' viewing to others. Also, we will get approached by folks who want our distinctive style or characters to help THEM sell neat stuff.

It is not going to be a cash-in-quick thing. We creators will have to work VERY hard to create demand for our work and ourselves, and it will take years to build that audience. BUT, we won't have to slaver and beg at the feet of people with lots of money -- who LOVE that by the way -- to ask them PLEASE will you put out my work and make me rich and famous? I guess you can if you want to... but why would you want to? You can work a regular job, and carefully craft your work in your off time -- JUST LIKE YOU'RE DOING RIGHT NOW. Even Nat, who writes for a living, is doing that; I'm sure that much of his work is NOT what he'd really like to be writing.

I feel that although the Net may destroy the ability to make money from selling copies of our work (thus mangling copyright law), it is NOT going to destroy our ability to make a living being creators and being valued as creators. In fact I think it will enhance our value as creators. A lot of the stuff I'm talking about is intended to demonstrate that we're not going to suddenly be unable to protect our "intellectual property" if it's getting distributed all over the place outside of our control, but that having it flying all over the place will actually HELP us make MORE money from it by creating demand for it and for us personally. In other words, giving it away may in fact make us all much more comfortable and able to make a living doing what we LOVE to do... assuming we're GOOD at it! [img]http://209.198.111.165/ubb/biggrin.gif[/img]

[This message has been edited by Jeff Zugale (edited 10-17-2000).]

Don't people have to pay for Internet access now? If an artist can't provide that access, then they're still beholden to the provider. What's to stop Warner Bros from becoming a provider? Isn't that what the intended merger with AOL would have allowed? Would certainly grease the path toward forcing artists to go through them. Okay, it doesn't matter who the end-user's ISP is, I can use any old ISP I want. But, just as banks charge for non-members to use their ATMs, TimeWarner/AOL could charge Joe ISP a fee for sending data through their servers. Or am I mistaken?



Wouldn't that be analgous to all the designers out there creating really fancy Flash-driven websites? This is how they get work. Makes sense.

Do you think this path could be useful in terms of getting a work-for-hire gig? I mean, suppose you just really had a jones for doing a Batman story? In my case, I think I need to work like a dog under a deadline just to develop the discipline I'd need to be able to work efficiently on my own. I see working at Marvel and DC as tantamount to working on the assembly lines at Ford. Your job is to turn out product, no matter what it is. If you can hack it, you learn how to work and work hard. Useful skills and the only benefit I can comfortably attribute to sleeping with the devil (no South Park jokes, please).