Great grist for the mill! [img]http://209.198.111.165/ubb/smile.gif[/img]


[img]http://209.198.111.165/ubb/biggrin.gif[/img] Now come on, Nat, I'm not trying to be THAT blue-sky hyperbolic about it. Of course there are people being arrested for various criminal activity on the web, most notably unauthorized access to private or government systems, DoS zombie computer attacks, child porn rings and the like.

But the first two I listed involve a traceable signal path -- you can look at the server logs and trace the packets back through the different servers and routers that they traveled through on the way to their illicit destination -- and the target is a fixed point to work backwards from. The child porn deviants set up trading rings using alt.whatever news groups, IRC chat, and other such stuff; there are ways to sniff out the organization through undercover work, infiltrate and arrest, as well as agents posing as underage children, etc. There's either a "byte trail" or some way to access the activities.

Peer-to-peer makes that really difficult, though of course not impossible. In fact I'm sure the pedophiles are probably using Gnutella and suchlike to trade their stuff, and that will make catching them even tougher -- the only method left to FBI would be infiltration, since the byte trail would be very tough to pick up unless you have a location for one of the nodes.

When Metallica bitched out Napster, Napster obliged them by terminating the logons of over 250,000 people as I recall. Can you imagine trying to arrest and prosecute all 250K+? You might say (as was said before) that you only have to bust a few and the rest will calm down, and you may be right. But last I looked there were over 900,000 files available on Napster and there still seems to be plenty of Metallica there. Obviously we'll have to wait for the court decision before we say anything more on that.

I now remember the quote I was looking for from the Wired article, which I will paraphrase:

No law can be imposed on a huge population that does not morally support it and also possesses easy means of evading it.

This is why the War On Drugs isn't working: too many people want to get high (not to mention there's way too much money involved). This is why Prohibition didn't work: too many people want to get drunk. This is why the various laws against various sexual practices or orientations don't work: most people want to have sex. Even speed limit laws are ineffective, since people want to go faster, and seem to be willing to risk a ticket for it. Sure, they bust some dopers, they used to trash speakeasies and sex clubs... but none of that activity has abated much, even with the risks of imprisonment and societal censure. People wanna do it, they find a way to do it. Making a law and enforcing it are very different; a law may be a just one, but it may be impractically difficult to enforce.

So, if too many people want to get their music for free, it's not likely that any law enforcement agency will be able to prevent them from doing so in the face of a simple and very common way of doing so -- they don't stop people from making mix tapes, for example. Even if they do get rid of Napster and all the P2P stuff, there's still email, newsgroups, IRC, ICQ, CD-Rs, Zip disks, etc. Plus there doesn't seem to be any shortage of crafty programmers! Who knows what they'll come up with next?

The system-crackers who break into systems, the pedophiles, and other online criminals are (thankfully) a tiny, tiny percentage of Net users. However, Napster claims 28 million users (not the 80 million I erroneously stated before)-- note that not everyone who uses Napster for downloads shares their library for the rest of Napster to upload. This is not a tiny percentage of Net users, it's quite a significant percentage!

The issue of convenience is a big one, and may actually work to lessen the unauthorized copying -- if Napster disappears, and the other P2P stuff is unwieldy -- you're right Nat, Gnutella is more difficult to use and scaling up to attaching to more than a few servers slows it down a lot -- then it won't be as convenient to move these files around. I'm sure that will stem the tide somewhat; for instance, I have a perfectly good VCR, but I don't tape too many movies off TV. It's more convenient to rent something I want to see than to wait for HBO, rearrange my schedule to be home, or even set the damn VCR to tape it... and the same applies to pretty much everyone else, otherwise Blockbuster, Hollywood, West Coast, etc. would have a tough time doing business.

Interestingly, Barlow points out in the Wired article that the film industry fought hard against VCR technology for years, saying it would kill the movies -- and that it is now responsible for roughly half of Hollywood's business (and that's not counting porn, which the VCR made HUGE).



You're talking about airplay royalties. Those are administered by ASCAP and BMI (to which I belong), which are dedicated non-profit artists' rights organizations which were created for exactly this purpose. They collect royalties and fees on actual airplay and/or live performance of music by other than its originator (i.e. by cover bands), and pay those fees out to the artists based on how many times the music is performed. They use computers, radio station air logs, and fancy formulas to determine who owes what and who gets what. As far as I know this money goes to the "publisher" of the music, which is why you'll see "Written by Jeff Zugale, published by Molybdenum Music (BMI)." on my tunes. Some record co.'s ask for a chunk of this too, some don't. Mine didn't, so I would get all the airplay money if I had any airplay. [img]http://209.198.111.165/ubb/smile.gif[/img]

Look, I guess I've brought things into this discussion that maybe shouldn't be here. I've used my musical experiences really for illustrative or comparison purposes, but parts of what I've written are pulling us off into directions probably not germane to the core discussion. Ditto things about small contract points and most especially the ethics of media company contracts. While this stuff is important and certainly bears discussion, I'd like to apologize for introducing extraneous data, and try to focus more on the present and future difficulties of enforcing copyright and protecting creators.



I applaud your ethics, Nat, but you're (in my estimation) a highly ethical guy. However, I'm pretty sure you're in the minority here, to which you'd probably agree. I know a lot of mix-tape makers and music enthusiasts who have been trading tapes for years, in clear violation of the Fair Use rules -- which I read very carefully. Until the AHRA was passed, it's clear that it is NOT legal to tape stuff and pass it around, even for free. Yet it was never stopped, most likely due to the enforcement difficulties I mention above.



I find this to be very interesting, since by definition piracy is STEALING STUFF. If one hijacks a ship on the high seas, classic piracy, that's a criminal offense. If one absconds with a tractor trailer full of records and sells them, that's criminal... so why isn't printing copies of my comic book and selling it and not paying me any money not a criminal offense? You mean I have to SUE somebody for the money they owe me, and to stop them from continuing their work? No wonder it's so tough to truly protect your rights. How about we make copyright infringement a criminal offense with the possibility of arrest and imprisonment on top of having to pay damages?

Do you think even Metallica, or their label Elektra Records, or even the parent company WEA (and the W stands for Warner, kids) can afford to take 250,000+ (not to mention 28 million) people to civil court? (well... maybe) And even if you're certain someone is pirating the work of Nat Gertler, can you personally afford to take each one of them to court over it? If you lose, you have to pay all the legal fees. Can any of us individual creators afford that risk? I mean, I sure can't take my old management and record company to court over my disagreements with them; OK, theoretically I can, but it ain't likely I'll find a lawyer who'll do it for nothing. They don't owe me money (no sales) but I'd have to sue them to get my songs and the tape back. Again, theoretically possible, but certainly not practical.

It might be worth looking into as far as trying to make it a criminal offense... however, what with all the murderers, rapists, arsonists, drug dealers, and insider traders out there I doubt the resources exist to enforce it that way either. Maybe it could go under RICO or something. That might scare the media companies a bit, if they're routinely ripping creators off... I'd say that's a racket! Worth a look maybe.



Heh heh heh, you might be right. Cops in NJ seem to be more into dance music tho. They don't like that long haired hippie freak stuff.



And justly so. Nat, I want to get something absolutely straight here: are you of the opinion that the creator should get paid for EVERY SINGLE COPY made of their work, whether made for commercial purposes or not? Obviously, I'm not talking about promotional giveaways or donations to schools or libraries etc., but do you think that every time a copy is made of any copyrighted work (other than those I just mentioned and the like), the creator should get paid? Ideally? What are your personal criteria for determining if someone is pirating your work?

And before you answer, please understand that of course I'd support that position in an ideal sense. In a practical sense... less so.



(grin) Heh, yeah, you're right there. Maybe things are going better than I think they are. I'm not disguising my own unhappiness with my treatment in music, and it's definitely coloring how I look at comics. I've been treated well so far in comics (apart from trying to self-publish anyway), so I should probably lighten up some.


Quite true, and my views on this are mostly colored by my musical experiences. This comes under the contract ethics heading and isn't really to the point of the copyright question.

So from here on out in this discussion, let's go under the assumption that creators and publishers/distributors have reached equitable contract terms, and all that nasty work-for-hire business is sorted out. So if all that is perfect...

...there is still the looming problem of what happens if (or when, as I assert) the technology allows convenient copying of anything by nearly anyone for next to nothing? Even if we are in a golden heaven of harmony with the present distribution chain, this still presents a problem, which is now rearing its head as related to music -- which has presented the first instance in which the unauthorized reproduction of an "intellectual property" easily recreates the full experience of a legal copy, and can be distributed worldwide almost effortlessly. MP3 files are relatively small, of very high quality, and now many outlets (e.g. computer, certain CD players, and the Rio) are available for listening.

I make sure to say "reproduce the experience" because text files of books are far smaller and thus far more portable, but they do not offer a comparable experience to curling up on the couch with a good book -- and this has thus far spared the book industry. That will not last much longer, as the technology catches up and does duplicate the experience -- high-quality portable ebook reader + wireless networking + Internet connection = download any book you want and get reading anywhere in your house.

I think film is going to be next to experience what music is getting now. Movies make for pretty damn big files, so they're not portable, and certainly watching them on your computer is (for the most part) not faithful to the experience of even watching them on TV. However, there is a core underground of movie pirates out there with FTP servers, and they have digitized versions of just about every movie out there, made from promo screeners, and even shot with a camcorder inside a movie theater. Yeah, the quality ain't always great, sure. Yep, it takes a long time to download. But it's already being done. The Scour Exchange site is all about this (and is, of course, in trouble for it).

So the question remains, and I ask again: When/if it becomes next to impossible to enforce copyright, what will we do? Will Nat take everyone to court for downloading his Village People remix??? Will Jeff just plaster everything he does all over the web, while flipping burgers over at Carl's Jr.? Will Savage strangle the both of 'em for writing more in this thread than anyone should be allowed to???

STAY TUNED!!!

This is the crux of what I'm trying to get at with panelpusher.com. If you put out a reasonable reproduction digitally, it makes it more unlikely that somebody is going to go through all the trouble of scanning in a comic book. However, by keeping the printable images at a lower dpi and smaller page size you have also made the printable product a higher quality object than anything the digital file could reproduce.

You will still have some people who are happy to get it for free and won't "upgrade" but alot of those people probably wouldn't buy it in the first place.



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

Can I get some college course credits for reading this whole thread?

------------------
Ben Adams
Read PRISONOPOLIS online and learn about the celling of America at www.mediawarpcomics.com .

Actually, I am getting a lot out of reading this thread, and the perspective Jeff expressed in his initial post is extremely close to mine.

Unfortunately, I'm too busy to respond to all of this for at least a few days.

For what it's worth, keep up the good work, guys.

------------------
Ben Adams
Read PRISONOPOLIS online and learn about the celling of America at www.mediawarpcomics.com .

Not as much as you might think. After all, when you request something from Gnutella, your request gets passed around, with some form of return address attached. There are already folks recording internet addresses of people who pass requests for dirty pictures over Gnutella.
I wouldn't call that obliging them, since what Metallica wanted was for Napster to stop listing their commercial recordings. Napster refused.
This is more of a lawsuit thing than an arrest thing.
Perhaps some way to stop the copying?
Hold your praise; perhaps I didn't make mix tapes because I was too busy trying to give stolen heroin to 12 year old girls in return for sexual favors...
Actually, I suspect most people have never made a mix tape for distribution, due either to lack of equipment or lack of interest.
If memory serves (and I am a little fuzzy on this), there are possible criminal impact from willful copyright infringment. However, the matters of rights ownership and infringment tend to be a bit fuzzier than ownership of physical objects. Besides, which would you rather have happened to someone who stole from you -- seeing them spend 6 months in prison, or having them pay you $100,000 in punitive charges?
Hey, if suing them is profitable, they'll make the time!
Depends on what month you catch me, and how big the piracy is. Copyright infringment cases are potentially very lucrative, particularly with registered copyrights.
Depends on the case. Lucrative cases can be done on a contingency basis.

For complete copies of works of reasonable length transfered into the hands of a non-purchaser, yes.
So far in my pro career, I've only had to deal with pretty blatant cases (in term of copyright) -- someone reprints an entire article of mine on their website, for example, or a publisher reprints a work that I did for another publisher on which I had not signed a Work For Hire agreement.
I think you have to question what "convenient" means in this context. To download an MP3, you first have to find it on the Net, and count on a reliable and fast connection... which is hard to maintain when there is no commercial interest involved. Let's say (just for example) that for $10/month, you could tap into a legal commercial database of every song ever recorded, and stream them to any appropriate device anytime you want. Sure, you could try to keep on the illegal end of things, and hope to find all the files you want when you want them, and hope that the servers are reliable and that the folks putting the signal out aren't playing games with you (such as putting out their own songs under false names)... but the $10/month would be worth it for the convenience, so you'd likely skip the illegal stuff.
First instance? Hardly. Software crackers were doing online distribution like that more than a decade before MP3 really hit.
Video, perhaps, but not true projection film. We're still a long way from recreating the theater experience at home. And when we do get to video on demand (and I think that's sooner than people realize; TiVo is a big step), the all-you-can-eat subscription model becomes possible. (And when reasonable video-on-demand does come about, basically everything you know about TV program goes out the window, instantly.)
Haven't been to their site, but I have a t-shirt they were giving out. Oh yes, and a packet of personal lube.

As always, Nat comes back with the good stuff!



Good! Assuming those dirty pics are of the illegal type, someone SHOULD be after those freaks!



I put to you that there are just as many programmers working on ways to defeat any such scheme as there are programmers involved in creating it. And even if not, it only takes one good dedicated programmer to do so. Viz: DeCSS. I think it's highly likely that there will be escalating software "wars," with this bunch coming up with protection measures and that bunch hacking them.



Both, and I'd like to get to beat the crap out of them with a blunt object too. I think that the possibility of prison time might at least turn some potential thieves away from such activity. Certainly those at the top of big corporations that engage in such questionable business wouldn't want to be locked away because some underling screwed over an artist and left a paper trail... the prospect of time in a state pen MIGHT lead them to consider more ethical practices.



Do you agree with me that at this point, it's very hard to assure that this happens? In fact, aren't we depending on humans being inherently honest as a whole to make such compensation possible?



Nat, this is PRECISELY what I think the RIAA and Napster, etc. should do. I for one think that this would be a grand solution to the problem that exists right now, and also a great ground-laying for how this can work in the future. The media publishers could work out a deal with our ISPs -- who DO have the capability of excluding certain types of traffic thru their servers to our nodes -- whereby such a monthly fee could be added to our online bill. You only get access to the database server if you pay. If the payment isn't that much, and the download is convenient and reliable, people will pay the money. I personally would be quite happy to pay $120/year for easy instant unlimited access to all the music in the world, wouldn't you?? They could then split that money between direct income to the publishers, maintenance fee to the ISPs, and maybe, just maybe, DIRECT payment (without the media company as an intermediary - they're already getting their cut) to the creators based on how many times their file is transferred, which is easily trackable. THAT idea would make PERFECT sense.

So why the hell are the music companies not just doing this? Are they so bloody-mindedly ignorant that they can't see that this would guarantee them boatloads of money? Why are they, rather than working out an equitable compromise, attacking the people they should be working closely with in order to develop the new (hate this word... anybody got a thesaurus handy?) paradigm? (Urrgh, tinny, tinny. Needs more wood.) I think they're being silly, they're creating serious bad blood, and setting themselves up either for major damage or to force the government to lend a heavy hand -- which is NEVER productive. They're just thrashing about like a scared elephant does, and they've got such towering egos they won't for a moment consider something sensible.

I mean, 28 million Napster users. $10/month. That's $280 megabucks PER MONTH. $3,360,000,000 per year. Yeah: THREE point THREE GIGABUCKS PER YEAR, GUARANTEED -- and you can press fewer CDs, thus cutting your overhead. And there are one HELL of a lot more potential users than that -- how'd ya like to collect $10/month from every computer user on the planet???. If you like music, and you currently spent more than $120/year on CDs (which is easy, it's only like 9 CDs), this is to your benefit.

Listen up booksellers! You should start working this out NOW. Collaborate on a database of every book ever, and prepare to sit back and watch DEPENDABLE income click in month after month. And Nat gets paid on time, too. Yay!



I hang my head in red-faced shame and flog myself in abasement. You are of course correct, and I should know better. However... the software industry, uh, well, it seems to be doing, uh, well, fine... uh, actually, quite well... uh, well really PRETTY GODDAMN AMAZINGLY FANTASTICALLY WELL, don't you think?!? Despite all the cracking?

Ya really need to read the Wired article. It will be on the Wired website Oct 10 so I'll link to it then. In the meantime, one of the things Barlow points out is that the software industry pretty much stopped bothering with robust copy protection -- things like hardware dongles and key disks as opposed to serial numbers -- quite a while ago, but it's quite obvious that software is doing very well as a business. He posits that this is because in the long run, it's better to have the relationship with the software company, since you get better support, upgrades, etc., plus paying for the software allows the creators to improve it with a bigger budget. If you don't have a serial #, you're SOL if you've got a sticky technical problem. And, if you use a piece of software all the time for your work, and suddenly the company goes under, you get no more support or improvements. It's worth it to pay up to support a useful, productive tool. That's why I pay for all my software -- really, I actually do -- and shell out for the upgrades. I'd have to shell out a LOT LESS if you pukes out there who pirate Photoshop would pony up and buy copies too!! If you're making money with it -- PAY FOR IT!! You can write it off on your taxes fachrissake!! (oops, I'm ranting. Ahem.)

For instance, I do some support for some of my clients, they call me up and ask me how to do something in Illustrator or whatever. I don't care if they have a serial number -- but I charge them $60/hr in 5-minute chunks for such support. If you buy Adobe's support option, you'd get the same support for much less, although you pay Adobe up front for support option, and you pay me as you go. Heh... convenience works in my favor in this case -- plus the relationship of trust I build with my client. They might not like talking to a support rep on the phone, they know me.

By the way, I think it stinks that everyone charges for tech support these days; they could avoid having to charge completely if they could WRITE SOFTWARE THAT PEOPLE COULD UNDERSTAND HOW TO USE EASILY!!! Poorly-engineered software, as well as difficult-to-read manuals, cost everyone more in the long run. And Nat makes out on this, because he writes "Complete Idiot's Guides"! Hey Nat, we're both making out well taking up slack for lousy software engineers! How about that! [img]http://209.198.111.165/ubb/biggrin.gif[/img]

Barlow also states that the more any piece of software is pirated, the more likely it is to become a standard. Good example: PKZIP. While people have been downloading that shareware ever since I can remember, and also the more recent WinZIP, most of them don't pay for it. However, the ZIP compression scheme has been licensed -- paid for -- by dozens of commercial software developers for inclusion in their products. Aladdin Stuffit Deluxe is one app that uses a licensed version; I bought it for 49.99 for my Mac. Part of that cash goes to pay the people who created PKZIP. Now, whoever they are, they didn't get big cash right up front with their shareware release, but I bet they get fat checks now.

Another good example: Mac users might remember Windowshade, which was a $10-15 shareware app that, when you double-clicked a window's title bar, rolled that window up so only the bar was visible. A very handy and useful item! Well, guess what... all you OS 8.x and later users know that Windowshade is now BUILT IN to the Mac OS (I use it daily) -- and Apple pays the creators a license fee for it plus royalties on EVERY sold copy of the Mac OS, probably forever (or at least until the "window" model is superseded). Many of the little tools that are now standard in Photoshop and Illustrator were once little shareware plugins too, and are similarly licensed.

Again, no big cash up front, but 10 years down the road... TALL DOLLARS.



Well yeah, but in terms of "intellectual property" and compensation therefor, the "theater experience" is not a relevant issue; a copy of a film is a copy, no matter where it's viewed.

I hope the theater experience never dies; myself, I don't think it will be challenged until "Strange Days/Matrix"-like full-sensory-immersion becomes possible.



I agree totally. Some primary steps are being made there with cable TV. Even excepting Pay-Per-View, which IS indeed a subset of video-on-demand, the cable TV model of offering hundreds of available channels for a paid subscription is the first step at video-on-demand. Remember back in the 70's when, if the President was speaking on TV, that's all you could watch??? Now there are so many channels running you can tune in to anything else... the non-on-demand part is that most of the time there STILL isn't anything GOOD on, LOL.

The big difference with cable is that there's an end-to-end controllable hard-wire infrastructure attached to it, as opposed to the Net which is not controllable from end-to-end; you can only really control the data source and the reception point. Once them packets start flying it's pretty hard to keep track of them. However, as we've discussed, making it more convenient and sensible to stay legal than to break the law would certainly go a long way in terms of reducing unauthorized copying and distribution.

With that, I am going to bid y'all adieu until Monday; I'm going back east for the weekend and (thankfully) won't be NEAR ANY COMPUTERS!!!! YAY!!!!! Oye, I'm feeling verklempt, so talk amongst yourselves.

Nat, have a wonderful wedding and honeymoon!

Yes; I should have said "inappropriate" pictures. They're keying off of words like "Lolita".
Yes. It's also very hard to assure that no cars will be stolen, but that doesn't mean we need to give up on the concept of car ownership.
Napster would be a horrible engine for this. If you're paying for the service, you want something better than peer-to-peer.
I don't think you have to be ignorant to be wary of tossing your economic model out for another which may not work--and which, if it succeeds, may well marginalize your company.
I don't think you can assume that so many people who used something once, for free, would be willing to pay month after month for it. And while setting it up as a legit system may make it more attractive for some, the commercial nature of it will likely scare away some of the very folks who have been making their files accessible.
You'll need a lot more than book sellers to get that. You'd need just about every author out there to agree to it as well. I know authors. They can't even agree where to go to lunch.
Largely, I suspect, because they moved from small floppy-based products (everyone has a copier tool, and downloading the file is quick) to CD-oriented bloatware (most folks don't yet have a CD-writer, and downloads are prohibitively large for people with most forms of access.) And yet, piracy continues to be rampant.
Yes, because they were discouraging legit sales by making items complex to use. Much as SDMA seems stillborn in the music realm.
Would you? Increased demand doesn't automatically lower prices. Prices tend to be lowered due to competitive pressure, and Photoshop is such a standard it seems largely resistant to such pressure. A tool like Paint Shop Pro, for example, while it has established a strong enough base for itself, ends up looking small in the market compared to Photoshop. (And price/sales connections don't always work as you think; Visicalc, the first spreadsheet, found that sales increased each time they raised prices.
I expect our success is derived more from user fear than from the actual difficulty of the software. We've gotten passed the days where computers are inherently intimidating to much of the populace, but powerful software still tends to look intimidating.
Only if they burn it and send it to the next world. Phil Katz passed away early this year, 37 years old.
Not sure that's true. You seem to be refering to their Data Compression Library, which is a separate product. To quote their website, "Data produced and readable by the PKWARE Data Compression Library is not related to the PKZIP file format."
Yes, but I'd assume that the less quality the copy provides the viewer with, the less likely it is to be copied or viewed.
I'd argue against the definition of video-on-demand. You get to see the fixed product being offered at a fixed time. If that's video-on-demand, then so is all TV.
Luckily, I live in a world with West Wing, Battlebots, and Malcolm In The Middle. You should try moving here!

Um, here's an interesting take on the copyright issue I'm not sure you'll be aware of. In Washington DC, there's a form of homegrown music, go-go. It used to be heavily jazz-influenced, but now is more hip hop in feel and most bands' sets are about 90% covers of current hits. Yuck. Anyway, the first official go-go album came out when I was in college, even though the music started not too long after I was born. The music got around by people coming to shows, recording stuff and selling it on the street. This is different from the Grateful Dead situation because deadheads don't charge for the stuff (or am I mistaken?). And the bands didn't mind, in fact tapes started to get really good because they'd let people plug into the board, or bring really hi-quality gear, because it got their music out there. And then more people would come to the shows. Successful shows meant more shows, etc. And some of these people had minor national recognition, but no one was getting rich. This sounds to me like what Jeff is talking about, and I think is a very good idea. Give stuff away and people will be more interested in checking you out. Then give them a higher-quality version for a small price and they'll buy it. And the price can be smaller because you're not going through Diamond or Warner Bros or whomever. Like the CDs you can buy from artists on MP3.com are usually 6 bucks, only occassionally 10. CDs in stores are closing in on 20.

This is a bit more legal than the djs (and there are lot of them) who make and sell mix-tapes. This is illegal. Many rappers beat the hell out of these guys. A member of Fishbone got stabbed by a bootlegger in Italy trying to prevent the illegal sale of his stuff. And they're getting peanuts for this stuff, while the record companies get the loot.

The *best* piece of software I use is a music program (FruityLoops) that is small, very stable, very sophisticated for something so young, and only cost $170. And I get free upgrades for life, and access to a help board on their site where they definitely will answer your questions (even if they're a little surly). The trick is that they have no intention of getting rich off this stuff. Compatability? They've made a strong effort to connect with other music programs and incorporate their file formats into FruityLoops, making it increasingly versatile. This is the coolest software development model I've seen, and raises the anti-capitalist hackles on my neck when I think of how much a shitty, bloated program like MSWord costs.

As far as catching people on-line, have any of you heard of Carnivore? This is a program developed by the FBI which will sit somewhere on the data stream, like at the ISP, and record email. They claim it'll only look a the headers, but, even if that's true, what would stop them from deciding 5 years from now they need to look at the entire email? They're doing this to crack down on political protesters, presumably. No reason to believe they won't aim it at people infringing on the freaking Disney copyright. Will ISPs allow them to attach said black box to their lines? Why not? I used to get free samples of copyright-free music from a site which got closed down by the ISP because they THOUGHT the samples could be illegal. The Metallica thing scared them and they just reacted. Fear is a powerful weapon when it infringes on people making money. Conversely, when money is your goal, fear will not stop you from making it.

That RIAA/Napster deal sounds like it could be cool (Nat, why is P2P a bad idea?). But I can immediately picture them setting up an exclusivity model, effectively keeping independent artists out, or restricting their access. Like the difficulty independent comic creators have with Diamond. I'm not attacking Diamond, I've heard a few people say they're doing the best they can, but the fact remains that it's hard to get in, because Diamond has to pay its employees. When you start putting more employees in the situation, prices go up and access becomes restricted.

I'm not as knowledgeable as you guys, but I think all of what I'm pointing to here goes back to what Jeff mentioned in his first post (remember that?): motivation. I think you can be quite a successful artist if you're not trying to get more than the experience out of it. Dave Sim, Ani DiFranco, Todd Solondz would be very unhappy if they wanted to be rich. I wish I could name a prose writer in that group, but my experience in publishing is that independent writers are looked down upon, so everyone goes to a publisher. Hey, Nat, why is that anyway?

Quick reply while trying to take the edge off myself, so I can get to sleep soon, get up in the morn and get married.
It's unreliable. If someone tells me about this great song they found on Napster yesterday, there's no guarantee that it will be there today, or that it will be available from a server that can put it out at a reasonable speed. If I'm paying money for access to something, I want to know I can get access. Contrast the P2P model with the MP3.com model -- the songs are always there unless the artist takes them down, the servers are maintained with reasonable speed access. There is someone actually responsible for things being available, instead of a profiteering company counting on thousands of folks providing their service for free.
My take on it is that there has generally been a large number of publishers interested in a pretty broad array of matter... if you can't find a publisher for something (and at least not lose money), then its quality comes into question. The visible version of self-publishing in the book world is the vanity press system, which has clearly involved unscrupulous companies who try to get folks to believe that any lame manuscript they have has great potential and will be promoted, and that the money they spend is an investment in themselves.
Think of it this way: the self-published comics scene's most visible elements have been things that were marked by being different from what traditional comics publishers have been publishing. The self-published prose book field is better marked by inferior equivalents of the fare of mainstream publishers.

--Nat (who may be self-publishing a reference book next year.)

Don't mind me but comicon is slowing down for some reason, too mouch cgi maybe, and I'm just trying to flip this page over to a new one. It loads like a dog.

Everybody help if you see this and we aren't on page 2 yet...post a one liner to flip it.

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