haha, lol… whatever JACKASS fabricated this clearly made-up “response” obviously doesn’t realize that no company as large as marvel or dc would ever make an official response containing a threat like this, because they tend to hire pr reps who are smart enough NOT to include vague statements which could be easily and CONVENIENTLY misconstrued as whatever type of threat the receiving party feels would be beneficial. nice pathetic try, however smart people aren’t so easily swayed by horseshit propaganda like this. seriously, fucking jackasses.

Now, I do think the downloaders tend to fit into one of two categories: the first, those who would never pay a cent for a comic book, and the second, those who download in addition to buying print comics, whether for crossovers or to prevent damage to the physical medium. Neither group really leads to lost revenue, but one group creates potential revenue.

Comic companies don’t care about the first group, and they figure that the second will pay a low subscription price for the same service, thus gaining revenue where there was none. Further, they think that they will work out quality issues in the long run. So now they go after the pirates.

The corporate mindset will never care about pirates’ rights. Drawing attention to yourself if you’re not willing to pay fight and possibly lose in court is idiotic.

2 – When Radiohead ‘released’ “In Rainbows” it was _still_ using the ‘pay-what-you-want’ model. I have no doubt whatsoever that they’ve made more from it than they would have by using the antiquated method that pays the record company the _vast_ majority of the profits…

3 – You’re normally quite lucid. do NOT drink the bongwater! :P

Exactly what they need to hear, very maturely and correctly stated.

It might not be too late yet.[/quote]

Hear bloody hear!

You don’t ‘hate to be picky’ – you’re a pedantic prick who gets wood posting typing lames. Your response is no more constructive than the twat who replied thus: “What a fucking idiot, what does he expect?”

The content is excellent & I have no doubt whatsoever that the recipient of the emails knew _exactly_ what was being said…

I see your point about the In Rainbows CD. I know that half the people paid nothing, but that is the whole point I’m making, you can give things away for free and still make money.

I can see though the view that even though Radiohead made more money, less was spent overall. But if Marvel started distributing online, they would cut out their production, distribution and advertising costs.

Furthermore, yes, half the people choose to pay nothing, but three times as many of this CD ‘sold’ than their last CD, meaning -more- people paid than for “In Rainbows” than their last CD.

And finally, yes, people did download it ‘illegally’. But now, Radiohead doesn’t have to care (the whole point), because it doesn’t matter. In fact, downloading them from torrent files saved Radiohead on bandwidth costs, so if you were going to pay nothing anyway, you are helping the band by getting it elsewhere.

People keep spouting gibberish to prove that Radiohead’s attempt was a flop, like the fact that half the people paid nothing. That is completely misleading because, yes, half of the 1.2 million (first week) sales were for $0, which mean .6 million people paid. “Hail to the Thief” sold only .3 million first week. SO TWICE AS MANY PEOPLE PAID. Quit pretending like the people who paid nothing are hurting them. Now they get twice as much exposure and their next CD will do better.

Perfect example of how the system can work. Now Radiohead doesn’t have to sue downloaders, because they aren’t hurting anything and they get even -more- money than they used to.

Wise-up all you other companies and figure out how to follow suit before your artist’s figure it out for themselves and leave.

What countries are invulnerable, have unclear copyright laws, or have laws that in general, are likely to prohibit or inhibit takedown of trackers by the ‘Man’ aka, Anti-Piracy orginizations.?

Would the middle east be a viable solution? Say if you hosted in Iran or Saudi Arabia, Both of which have very good internet infrastructures (Censorship laws in the aft mentioned countries aside), Would A-P2P come after you or your tracker?

Swedish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden

“h33t.com where filesharing is an education”

As you describe it, that law still does not make it illegal to link to, or store hashes of, copyrighted material, which is all that torrent sites are doing.

Furthermore, a large proportion of Sweden’s public consists of educated, voting filesharers, and even if they are not exactly calling the shots, they hold substantial political power. (Check out the talks by the Pirate Party leader, Rick Falkvinge: http://questioncopyright.org/rick_falkvinge_visit_2007) This makes the outlook a lot better than many other countries. For example, in the United States, not only do we have somewhat draconian laws, but a lot of the filesharing public seems to feel ashamed or dirty about it. Not so in Sweden.

That said, The Pirate Bay WAS raided, and the guys do say in interviews that they have backup servers in four countries. They don’t consider Sweden a magic bullet and neither should we, but it is still one of the more hospitable places for torrents at the current time.

Anyway, back on topic.

dblack, excellent letter. I’m hoping Marvel listen, for their sake as well as the filesharers’.

Misleading statement. Over half of the downloaders paid 0$. With that, most people still went the traditional torrent / irc route for the album, even tho it was free.

It was 160kbps mp3s, which is crap. The reason you can rightfully say RadioHead made more on this than previous albums is because the money from the sales went almost completely to the band, not a giant record label that would give them a pitiful 2% or some other retarded amount.

Besides, the online stunt was merely a promo for the CD which is either out now or soon to be out.

Waste of breath in your arugment and actually hurts it a little as it shows that the only way to really take advantage of file sharing online is for the big companies to lose money, which defeats the purpose of getting them to embrace file sharing.

Rather, use the article you can find from atleast 1 comic company praising torrents and allowing their comics to be scanned and distributed (after recanting the first threatening email of course)

Or how about the independant film writer / director that recently contact RLSLOG of all places, praising them for spreading the torrent of their movie. The guy explains very clearly, if not for an “illegal” copy floating around on torrents, no one would have seen his movie.

You can’t use examples that have the corps losing money, or cut out of the deal.

“On the 5th of October 2007, the Swiss law makers adopted a new law to comply with the WIPO treaties. Thanks to the entertainment lobbies, apart from criminalizing DRM circumvention devices, you can now win a one year visit in jail if you share a copyrighted file on a P2P network.”

http://www.ige.ch/E/jurinfo/j103.shtm

And if you are from Sweden, before you call me a liar, do a little digging, they passed this law right under your nose, and no one said a peep about it.

It’s only a matter of time before they fold on all the privacy protections and Sweden becomes no better than Canada or the US.

Canada is not the answer either, they jsut updated our copyright laws, and are actually enforcing them. The standard home use downloader is still protected, but the main seeds, uploaders and sites are no longer safe.

Recently, in the torrenting world’s news, I’ve been hearing about Marvel’s new, more aggressive campaign against sites torrenting their comics. I’ll try and keep this short, but I would just like to express my displeasure over your actions and lay out some reasons why you should reconsider them.

A)

Torrents and file sharing have increased the exposure of comics. While this might hurt other industries, the increased exposure has also brought increased exposure of the investment value of commics, which lead a large number to buy physical copies.

B)

Comics have always had a large base of collectors. A vast portion of this base have started collecting online as well as physically. Alienating this base cannot be a good idea. The consumer public has been upset and outraged by action of other anti piracy organization and are ripe to organize boycotts to assert their opinion. While this might not affect giant billion dollar companies to any great degree, a large number of your biggest buyers collect online, and might be able to affect a boycott of some power.

C)

If you would just openly promote the sharing of these comics and help in their collection quest, you would be the hero of these collectors and they would go far out of their way to support you. This may seem a gamble, but I would like to point you to Radiohead’s latest album “In Rainbows” which was released allowing customers to pay whatever they wanted for it, including $0. The stats are not all in, but even the most conservative estimates have Radiohead making up to 4 times more than their earlier albums.

D)

You will never stop the illegal downloads. The door has been opened and there are hundreds of ways for people to do it. All you can do is alienate your biggest fans by trying.

Thank you for your time, I know this probably won’t make a dent, but Marvel should think about what the future holds for comics and where it needs to go. If a company, any company, would be the champion of the future by allowing, promoting and helping these sites share, the file sharing would would flood that company with thanks, devotion and support, all of which would lead to monetary gain if that is all you care about. Since it cannot be stopped, you may as well embrace it and win the heart or an entire generation of people worldwide. Not just the comic readers, but the entire p2p community, which has proven itself vast, supportive, generous, organized and resilient.

Marvel has the perfect opportunity to set a new world precedent, one that will be hailed by all their fans as the right thing to do. How difficult is it to simply state that your fans may do whatever they want with the book that are theirs, including share them online? Comics are a collectors item, that is not going to change simply because people can read them online.

Thank you much[/quote]
Great letter! I’m with you on this. Hey Marvel and DC. Both of you are missing out on a great opportunity. Why not buy ‘ZCult FM’ and/or ‘ComicSearch’? Both of these sites are well established and have millions of fans that shop there. Everything is already set up. Also the most important factor here is that they also offer alot more choices than what Marvel/DC sites offer. People like to catch up on those comics that were released in the 60′s through today. You don’t offer a wide variety. And please keep your prices reasonable.

Now comic fans are a bit on edge from all this commotion about you threatening to shut down popular sites, but us comic fans maintain our humble attitudes as long as ZCult FM and ComicSearch are around. Do the right thing and keep your fans happy and the comic book industry alive and healthy.

But all of this is just wrong – Marvel needs to sort themselves out on this issue, or my collection ends right now. And neither of us would want that.

Recently, in the torrenting world’s news, I’ve been hearing about Marvel’s new, more aggressive campaign against sites torrenting their comics. I’ll try and keep this short, but I would just like to express my displeasure over your actions and lay out some reasons why you should reconsider them.

A)

Torrents and file sharing have increased the exposure of comics. While this might hurt other industries, the increased exposure has also brought increased exposure of the investment value of commics, which lead a large number to buy physical copies.

B)

Comics have always had a large base of collectors. A vast portion of this base have started collecting online as well as physically. Alienating this base cannot be a good idea. The consumer public has been upset and outraged by action of other anti piracy organization and are ripe to organize boycotts to assert their opinion. While this might not affect giant billion dollar companies to any great degree, a large number of your biggest buyers collect online, and might be able to affect a boycott of some power.

C)

If you would just openly promote the sharing of these comics and help in their collection quest, you would be the hero of these collectors and they would go far out of their way to support you. This may seem a gamble, but I would like to point you to Radiohead’s latest album “In Rainbows” which was released allowing customers to pay whatever they wanted for it, including $0. The stats are not all in, but even the most conservative estimates have Radiohead making up to 4 times more than their earlier albums.

D)

You will never stop the illegal downloads. The door has been opened and there are hundreds of ways for people to do it. All you can do is alienate your biggest fans by trying.

Thank you for your time, I know this probably won’t make a dent, but Marvel should think about what the future holds for comics and where it needs to go. If a company, any company, would be the champion of the future by allowing, promoting and helping these sites share, the file sharing would would flood that company with thanks, devotion and support, all of which would lead to monetary gain if that is all you care about. Since it cannot be stopped, you may as well embrace it and win the heart or an entire generation of people worldwide. Not just the comic readers, but the entire p2p community, which has proven itself vast, supportive, generous, organized and resilient.

Marvel has the perfect opportunity to set a new world precedent, one that will be hailed by all their fans as the right thing to do. How difficult is it to simply state that your fans may do whatever they want with the book that are theirs, including share them online? Comics are a collectors item, that is not going to change simply because people can read them online.

Thank you much

@ComicSearch when are you guys gonna be done educating the enemy? they are not interested, they have their own agendas according to their own world view. no matter how you dress it up you are not a friend to them, you are direct competition to their distribution organization. given enough time those monkeys would invent filesharing to publicize their products, but they cannot do that while you are there holding the market

@ComicSearch how stupid have you been? Marvel and DC are afraid of you (at least they were) because your penetration of their market is deep. you hold (at least you did) the public attention of a large proportion of the comic buying public. Marvel and DC were experimenting with ZCult FM to see how far they could push them and discover the weight of reaction from the comic buying public. by fighting with them you are teaching your enemy how to defeat you

@Marvel and DC the comic buying public is not the same as the mp3 or movie filesharers. the comic guys are literate, they are political, they are articulate, you are playing a dangerous game attacking fans sites and fan culture. you do not have the grace of the RIAA whose market are poptarts listening to mp3 players, your market will radicalize very very quickly and you already know how it feels to be frozen out of culture before the filesharing communities breathed new cult life into your products

Everyone does, because it is cheap, easy and freeeee.

none of the private trackers will fight in court, they always settle outside of court, they do not want to try the copyright laws in court even though they could win.

torrents are jsut meta data, they dont contain copyrighted material, content lies with the users.

Im very doubtfull sweden is the only country that allows linking to copyrighted material, any country where you can link to stuff you can also have a tracker in. AND even if you cant link, you can still have a tracker as torrents are meta data and not links, content cannot be illigal untill a full download, in witch case the users would be responcible and the site would still be up and running.

If more torrent sites had balls like TPB and tested/fought against the copyright laws there would be many places where trackers would be safe.

Google is safe, Rapidshare is safe, a ton of download sites are safe, because they cannot varify the content, and since a torrent can be named anything the content cannot be varified without downloading it completely.

Anti-pirates will not go and download every torrent to varify its content, they will breech copyright laws if they did, and be so called “criminals” and “terrorist supporters”..

Its a shame that torrent sites dont FIGHT against copyright laws, how will the future evolve is copyright is never fought? One day copyright might need changing, but since theres noone to fight it it will remain as is for hundreds of years…

One big change to copyright law would be to adapt it to digital age, movies gets protection for 2 years and music/other media gets 1 year protection from copyright laws. That is more then enough time to bring profits from their product, it will be adapted to digital age, development and creatism will skyrocket aswell as markets will expand.

Fight copyright, if you dont you cant whine about sites shutting down or a movie being protected for your whole lifetime…[/quote]
Very interesting comments you make. I definitly agree about the length of time a copyrighted product should be entitled to. As of now all copyrighted material get a lifetime of protection. The owner made their share of profits and now they just want to continue to receive extra royalties for their retirement. How much more do you want? Too much greed in the world. Maybe the world would be a better place without money.

Laws and regulations will need some changing in the future. Otherwise customers will just become disgruntled and continue using torrents from one place to another. This seems to be the usual pattern that will continue for many years until big corporations start to embrace and understand how the torrents are actually helping market their products without the use of advertisements. Maybe one day they will understand.

Well….its that time again. Jellybaby time! Yummy![/quote]

Their is the problem in it… While the none “Star” has to build up a retirement plan by taking little bits out of their check each month all their life killing them selfs mind and body… The “Star” continues to collect insane amounts of money for doing something that took about 1 month to create. were in most cases leaves them set for life. But it’s not just the “Stars” as they do deserve credit for doing such, the middle men that handle everything are the ones that expect to continue receiving as well. its a vicious cycle that will only end when we come together and stop it ourselfs.

Don’t know.. I think it’s all about greed and fear.

They want control over the product. Without control they just can’t see what will happen, even though we all know they won’t go broke because of filesharing.

Yeah, this does sound familiar. The music distributors (not artists) did it. The movie creators (not actors) did it. And now the comic book distributors (not artists) are doing it.

Pathetic. If these guys could just make one simple “Do we sell the people what they want to buy”, yes/no choice correctly, they would be rolling in more dough than they ever thought possible.

These are only from the first two paragraphs:

“. . . Marvels recent launch. . .” (Marvel’s recent lauch)

“. . . the industry as a whole is due to, not in despite of this policy.” (. . . is due to, not in spite of, this policy)

“. . . with it’s cease and desist letter. . .” (. . . with its cease and desist letter. . .)

Rant over thanks for reading.

That kind of free advertising and market development would be worth a fortune in any other business. Only in this business the companies attack the very people whose grass-roots promotion developed their market from scratch, and thereby made them a fortune when the companies finally decided to exploit that market knowing ahead of time that demand for their products had already been firmly established.

Had it not been for internet “piracy”, the current fortune being reaped by the anime and manga industry — and we can’t leave out Hentai — would today likely be at the level during the pre-internet era when their market was strictly limited to within Japan.

Exactly what they need to hear, very maturely and correctly stated.

It might not be too late yet.

none of the private trackers will fight in court, they always settle outside of court, they do not want to try the copyright laws in court even though they could win.

torrents are jsut meta data, they dont contain copyrighted material, content lies with the users.

Im very doubtfull sweden is the only country that allows linking to copyrighted material, any country where you can link to stuff you can also have a tracker in. AND even if you cant link, you can still have a tracker as torrents are meta data and not links, content cannot be illigal untill a full download, in witch case the users would be responcible and the site would still be up and running.

If more torrent sites had balls like TPB and tested/fought against the copyright laws there would be many places where trackers would be safe.

Google is safe, Rapidshare is safe, a ton of download sites are safe, because they cannot varify the content, and since a torrent can be named anything the content cannot be varified without downloading it completely.

Anti-pirates will not go and download every torrent to varify its content, they will breech copyright laws if they did, and be so called “criminals” and “terrorist supporters”..

Its a shame that torrent sites dont FIGHT against copyright laws, how will the future evolve is copyright is never fought? One day copyright might need changing, but since theres noone to fight it it will remain as is for hundreds of years…

One big change to copyright law would be to adapt it to digital age, movies gets protection for 2 years and music/other media gets 1 year protection from copyright laws. That is more then enough time to bring profits from their product, it will be adapted to digital age, development and creatism will skyrocket aswell as markets will expand.

Fight copyright, if you dont you cant whine about sites shutting down or a movie being protected for your whole lifetime…[/quote]
Very interesting comments you make. I definitly agree about the length of time a copyrighted product should be entitled to. As of now all copyrighted material get a lifetime of protection. The owner made their share of profits and now they just want to continue to receive extra royalties for their retirement. How much more do you want? Too much greed in the world. Maybe the world would be a better place without money.

Laws and regulations will need some changing in the future. Otherwise customers will just become disgruntled and continue using torrents from one place to another. This seems to be the usual pattern that will continue for many years until big corporations start to embrace and understand how the torrents are actually helping market their products without the use of advertisements. Maybe one day they will understand.

Well….its that time again. Jellybaby time! Yummy!

Move all site servers to Sweden, eventually laws will change there, ALL sites go down like dominoes.

I do believe someone needs to come up with more the one place as a “safe-haven”, its getting a bit ridiculous…

Or the entire BT community is DOOMED.[/quote]
I highly doubt they will change the law in at least 5 years time..

think its around 26 % of all the computers in sweden download via torrents.. soon their will be a new protocall new safe haven[/quote]

99% of all teenagers in Sweden downloads pirated material. If they don’t, it’s either because they don’t have a pc (very unusal for a swede) or that they have been sleeping under a rock.

The majority of the swedish population supports piracy so it’s hard for the politians to decide anything, hence the debate of including an extra fee on ISPs so downloading will be legal.