Peter David may (?) have killed Scans_Daily

Discussion in 'Science Fiction & Fantasy' started by shanejayell, Mar 15, 2009.

  1. LaxScrutiny

    LaxScrutiny Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    So because stuff is older and hard to find, it's OK to put it up on the internet?
     
  2. SiorX

    SiorX Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Lol. That's hilarious. No giving away spoilers on the net? G'luck with that, PAD.
     
  3. Admiral Buzzkill

    Admiral Buzzkill Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Is it difficult to imagine that he would have no reason to expect that Marvel would take some action? Yes, yes it is.
     
  4. Sci

    Sci Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Expectation is not intent; please do not move the goalposts.
     
  5. Admiral Buzzkill

    Admiral Buzzkill Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Please do not obfuscate by pretending that importan distinctions exist where none do.

    Old robot story by Asimov had one of the characters wondering whether the part of that Robot Law about harming humans - the part that said a robot "could not through inaction allow a human to come to harm" - was important. The other character pointed out that without it a robot could drop a heavy weight from height on to a human being fully knowing that it was fast enough to rescue the human - and then after dropping the weight just change its mind about the rescue. Of course, that's ridiculously compartmentalized reasoning...:lol:
     
  6. JoeZhang

    JoeZhang Vice Admiral Admiral

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    He wants to double the readership in a year and thinks this is how to do it. :lol:
     
  7. Jeyl

    Jeyl Commodore Commodore

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    I've actually bought more comics than I used to thanks to ScansDaily. The thing when it comes to Comics, there are so many iterations, reboots, sequels and prequels that go beyond any other medium it's hard to look for what you want.
     
  8. Sci

    Sci Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    I'm not.

    Let me put it this way:

    I'm a Resident Assistant at my university, and one of my jobs is, if I see any evidence that someone has been using alcohol or marijuana in my residence hall, to contact my university police department and report those students.

    Now, this does not mean that I have the intent of getting someone in trouble over that issue. If I'm walking down the hall on rounds and I smell alcohol and hear noise coming from Room 247, I'm going to call in the university police -- but I do not have the intent of causing the occupants of Room 247 to get in trouble. There is no desire to cause them problems on my part, and it's nothing personal; it's my job, and I'm morally obligated to do it because I made a promise to help uphold my university's right to control how residents behave on its property. I have no intent of getting a drinker in trouble -- in point of fact, if my university decided it no longer wished to have such a policy, I'd be pretty happy with that. But it's university property and no one has the right to do something on the university's property that the university doesn't want them to do.

    It's the same thing here. David probably thought it was likely that Marvel would send a cease and desist letter to those people who were, in its opinion, violating its copyright by scanning and posting large percentages of a given issue of a comic (and, no, Scans_Daily's 50% rule did not constitute fair use -- you'd have to have a smaller percentage of the issue posted than that). This does not mean that David did it with the intent of having Marvel do it. As David noted on his blog, if he were to inform Marvel about S_D and they were to reply, "Yeah, we know about that, and we don't want to do anything about it because we consider it free advertising," then he would have had no beef with that -- because it's their property.

    Further, neither David nor Marvel necessarily knew or thought likely that LiveJournal would just delete Scans_Daily en masse. There's a rumor going around that upon investigating the specific copyright violation that David reported, which was apparently yanked before Marvel got there, they found another copyright violation and sent a C&D about that specific set of images to LJ. In Marvel's mind, it's entirely possible that doing a C&D about a few specific sets of images didn't constitute grounds for deleting the entire community, and that they would not have minded Scans continuing so long as posters didn't put up such large percentages of an issue. LiveJournal being corporate actors with a larger abundance of caution than is necessary, their reaction to a C&D citing a specific set of images is to delete the entire community.

    It's not an unimportant distinction, bottom line. Reporting a copyright violation to the owner does not mean intent to have images deleted (since the owner could say, "It's cool by me") and seeking to have a set of images deleted does not constitute a desire to delete the entire Scans community.

    But, hey, if you'd rather just paint David as the villain instead of just acknowledging that if the community members and mods at Scans hadn't been blatantly violating the fair use principle the community would still be around, knock yourself out.
     
  9. Sci

    Sci Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    For the sake of fairness, here are some posts on the issue from David's blog:

     
  10. melancholymecha

    melancholymecha Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    no, Im just pointing out one of the reasons why the site was so popular & why its demise is causing such a big fuss. :borg:
     
  11. sidious618

    sidious618 Admiral Admiral

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    I can't really see how PAD can be blamed for this. did anyone really think that putting up ten pages of a comic book for free online, accompanied by a panel by panel synopsis, would be a good idea?
     
  12. OmahaStar

    OmahaStar Disrespectful of his betters Admiral

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    Why not? These are the same people who download full-length movies and cds, because they don't feel like paying for them. There are communities in live journal for that, too. Then, when they get caught, they play victim. It's sickening. And anyone who has a bad word to say at Peter, as though he did ANYTHING wrong can fuck off.
     
  13. Spaceman Spiff

    Spaceman Spiff Intrepid Explorer Administrator

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    That's unfair. I used to read Scans Daily all the time, not to download comics without paying for them, but just to use panels for avatars, etc. It wasn't a means to get comics for free. Nor do I download full-length movies or CDs.

    It was also useful for spreading the word about webcomics to a large community. For that alone, I'm saddened by its loss.
     
  14. Sci

    Sci Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    I was a member of Scans_Daily who used it for the same reasons. (And also to post of my love for Ultimateverse Gwen Stacy. Le sigh.)

    And I'm sad at its loss, too. If everyone had used Scans_Daily responsibly -- in other words, not posting significant portions of a given comic -- then it's unlikely it would have been shut down.

    But, simply put, the mods didn't do their jobs well enough, and enough of the posters violating US copyright law to ruin everything for those of us who did follow the law.
     
  15. SiorX

    SiorX Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    I don't think they necessarily are 'the same people'. I mean, probably there's some overlap, but I don't think it's the same philosophy necessarily. People who want full comics for free can, presumably, get them from the same kinds of places as people get free movies and cds. That's not really the desire to which s_d catered. Like Spaceman Spiff, I read s_d a fair bit. I went for the fan commentary and reviews though. If something came up that I liked, I'd go out and buy the comic. I love s_d, and I'm the embarrassing square who even paid for her copy of Photoshop and feels guilty about borrowing the same book too often from the library.

    There are entitled jerks everywhere, of course. But there are also plenty of fans who are fastidious about paying creators for their canon fixes, while also wanting to muck around with other fans in spaces like s_d.
     
  16. CaptJimboJones

    CaptJimboJones Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Unfortunately an entire generation of people have come to believe that you have every right to download anything you want from the Internet, whether you own it or not, and seem utterly incapable of understanding why copyright infringement is akin to theft.

    Most of these same folks would never, of course, have the cojones to walk into a 7-11 and steal a candy bar, because then they might get caught. But stealing copyrighted material online is just fine, because they know the chances of being caught are extremely low.
     
  17. grabmygoblin

    grabmygoblin Commodore Commodore

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    PAD's behavior is pissing me off more and more... if it were just this one incident, I wouldn't mind, (scans_daily is already up and running on InsaneJournal), but he keeps saying one abrasive thing after another. I'll still buy X-Factor in trade paperbacks (which I understand he hates). :lol:
     
  18. Sci

    Sci Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    PAD can be abrasive. But he's usually also right.
     
  19. coolghoul

    coolghoul Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    He hates hit & runs too.

    And this is kind of a hit & run post. I used to go often to scans_daily (maybe 3-4 times a month) to check up on what people are posting about, have a laugh at some of the genuinely funny stuff people found, ogle at the 'b00bs don't work that way' threads and so on and learn about the latest comics.

    I rarely buy comics. I mostly read TPBs. And except for the rare buys, most of them are from the neighborhood library. However, scans_daily has exposed me to more of the things and made me aware of several comics "events" that I would otherwise have not been aware of.

    And I enjoyed the (more culpable) detailed threads that took a particular character and gave a detailed writeup with scans on everything related to that. eg. I remember reading one about Ferdinand (a Wonder woman character) which was very detailed and well-researched. There's no way that I would have gotten that even if I bought those comics. I would have had to manually scan them and create individual stories myself using internal webpages or something.

    And I liked having it. And I miss it.

    Where has it moved to?
     
  20. the_wildcard

    the_wildcard Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Sorry to ask, but for somebody who just jumped into this forum...what was Scans_daily?