Star Trek comics online

[mmtz]

A fellow named Steven Johnson has created a motion comic version of IDW's Star Trek: Countdown, in eight parts:

http://www.youtube.com/v/7BJBkzaLlUA
http://www.youtube.com/v/ajE8MdSD2i4
http://www.youtube.com/v/TLU61pkUzXE
http://www.youtube.com/v/xJanmM4iCR8
http://www.youtube.com/v/4ipl1i5XNAA
http://www.youtube.com/v/d1Xokpp2W8U
http://www.youtube.com/v/8hbCaV3cRH4
http://www.youtube.com/v/YOWZFftx5ok

and in a less original copyright infringement (I'm assuming this isn't authorized, but who knows?), a Florida company has put a bunch of comics online, including IDW Star Trek comics.

http://www.htmlcomics.com/

Use the index to display a page with links to titles beginning with S to see the list of Star Trek comics available.

 

[Steve Roby]

The htmlcomic people say they're a public library so they're allowed to let people read their copies of the comics. Interesting, but not likely to get past a judge.

 

[RookieBatman]

Wow, they've even got the newspaper strips. Where would they have gotten their hands on all of those?

 

[Christopher]

The newspaper strips have been available online for a while now.

 

[fleetcaptain]

Glad that you posted this cause Im missing quite a lot of comics that I haven't been able to find, so it helps me without having to go around the various comic shops and buying older issues.

 

[Steve Roby]

Don't expect it to be around for much longer.

Part of their argument about not violating copyright is their claim that "Download of any of the material is not possible through the website presentation. Code is written to prevent such." Well, you can't just right-click and save as, but you can in fact download the images pretty easily, and I'm sure they know that, so that's as wrong as their other arguments supporting their claim of legality.

 

[Christopher]

I don't know... the site has over 200,000 comics in its library. It would've taken a long time to upload that many, I'd think. So it must've been around for a while. If it were that illegal, I doubt it would've been allowed to get so big.

Besides, people can check books out of libraries and copy all their pages, or borrow CDs or DVDs from libraries and make bootleg copies of their contents, but that doesn't mean the libraries themselves are breaking the law.

What they seem to be saying is that yes, you can download a page, but downloading another page will overwrite the first one, so you can't get a full document. Maybe it's impossible to prevent a dedicated bootlegger from making illegal copies, but that's true of any distribution method. If (key word, if) they're making a good-faith effort to deter copying, doesn't that count for something?

I could be wrong about some of this, of course. It just seems to me there are two sides to consider. And I'm usually quite vehemently opposed to any kind of bootlegging or torrent or any of that stuff. My impression is that this is different, though I can't be sure.

 

[Defcon]

It would've taken a long time to upload that many, I'd think. So it must've been around for a while.

It's online for roughly a year. Quote from the front page:

This website has been active since December 19th, 2008

 

[Traveller]

Nice animation. It even had lensflares

 

[Christopher]

Okay, I did some Googling and found that apparently the site's owner has gotten angry letters from various comics companies' lawyers but has been disputing their claims:

http://www.backtype.com/url/www.htmlcomics.com

Since the creation of our library, we have been bombarded by the vendors and publishers of the comic books (i.e. … DC Comics, Marvel Comics, …) which make claim that our Library is an infringement of copyright laws, and must be taken down. We have resisted, and have expressed our position to them.

In an effort to reach fair and reasonable agreement, we have sent to their legal departments a letter which offers for us to make charge of a penny per page, and a maximum of 25 cents per total comic book, of which we also offered to share with them any profit they felt might be duly theirs. To this extent, we offered that, even if they felt they are entitled to 100% of the profit, that we would agree to such a relationship. Both companies rejected our proposal, and were extremely rude in their response.

We believe that the law supports our position and our interpretation of a “Library”, and; because we don’t require membership nor does our Library incur fees for late returns of rented literature, our Library is more of a pure form of non-profit than is a community Public Library, or even the Library of Congress. To this extent, it isn’t possible to make a donation to our Library, hence there are zero dollars transacted.

Additionally, our Library does not contain any material that would be interpreted as advertisement (i.e. … there does not exist links to other web sites nor any other medium to promote profit or any form of revenue for anyone, either directly or indirectly). Hence, there is no financial gain by its existence that would or could be appreciated by any person or organization or corporation or community. We feel that, if our presentation of literature is in conflict with copyright laws, then so too is every library in existence.

Apparently a similar legal battle is underway involving Google Book Search, and that's being waged in federal courts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Book_Search_Settlement_Agreement

But that proposed settlement pertains to out-of-print books and grants royalties to the copyright owners. So even if it passed, I doubt it would cover the free online publication of in-print comics. Still, it seems to be a grey area in copyright law, at least at the moment.

 

[Steve Roby]

If a library wants to make copyrighted materials available to its user base, it buys them and uses them in accordance with copyright law and any relevant contractual terms. When buying a print book, the library can let people borrow it but it cannot copy it or allow people to copy it, for basic copyright reasons. When buying an electronic resource, there'll often be a licence agreement that strictly defines how the material can be used, how many people can access it, which people can access it, and so on, and copyright still applies beyond that. That's not the case here.

The person who wrote their little "we can do this because we're a library" argument wasn't a librarian.

 

[Marie1]

Yeah, just because they've been around a long time doesn't mean uploading copyrighted content is legal, and that the wheels aren't in motion to shut it down. There have been shows uploaded to Youtube for + 1 year, the mods will find them eventually, or the companies will. Comic book artists (most artists, really) don't even like people putting up the covers of their work on DA- there was a huge fight there about it recently. Let's face it, lot of people who DL aren't going to go buy the stuff when they can, even if they really like it... and the "library" excuse can only go so far.

I can't see TPTB liking it...

 

[Christopher]

^Good arguments. Thanks for clarifying.

I tried it out, when I thought it might be legal, and I found it an awkward and uncomfortable format anyway. The pages are very slow to load on DSL, making it a real time sink. And when double-page spreads are reproduced as a single image, the resolution is low, making the text difficult to read. So I wouldn't recommend it anyway.

Still, it would be nice if there were a way to make an online library like this available legally.

 

[rahullak]

I suppose one way of making an online library like this legal would be for the library to buy a certain number of copies of each comic, and have only that many number available for viewing by anyone at a time. This way, there aren't an unlimited number of people able to access the same copy of the comic, making it more of a real library.

And of course, relevant protections (in good-faith) to prevent copying of a page (perhaps with the help of future browser/OS developments?), would go a long way toward making it legal.

And Christopher makes good points in that no system is perfect. If a person wants to break the law and make copies, s/he will find a way.

 

[Thrawn]

^ My younger sister, for a while there, would get comics from our library and scan them all into her computer routinely.

 

[Marie1]

Still, it would be nice if there were a way to make an online library like this available legally.

NP, it's something I've had to deal with often.

Articles that people write, say reports for scientific journals, are copy-protected, I read them "for free" (well, paid for by my tuition) online via the university library legally. And legal downloads are available.

So, one way would be for a library to do it, you'd need your card + pin to access it. It would need some protection vs. copying, but if it's free, few would bother stealing it for the sake of piracy, I'd think... Maybe there'd be a subscription fee of some kind. But for decent quality images for reading- you'd need quite a lot of server space + bandwidth...

Digital has merit imo- they won't tear, get coffee spilled on them, lose pages etc. It's just such a tricky issue (especially since some comics are expensive) because many people want everything for free, and artists need to eat... for now...

 

[Kelso]

I'd like to point out that the comics they have listed as Star Trek (The Animated Series) are actually swiped from Kail Tescar's startrekanimated.com and can be read for free on his site.

 

[RookieBatman]

The newspaper strips have been available online for a while now.

That makes me happy. It's definitely the type of thing that I'd like to read for curiosity's sake, but wouldn't really want to spend money on.

 

[ryan123450]

Just glancing threw those newspaper strips, I see the first one contains a person who appears to be Ilia, and by the last strip the crew is wearing the red uniforms. When do these take place? How can Ilia be in any of them?

 

[Christopher]

^The newspaper comics began to be released before TMP came out, and so they initially included Ilia because that character's fate wasn't yet known. Ilia was soon dropped without explanation.

These comics were released over the course of several years. The ones that were published between TMP & TWOK were set in that period, of course, and after TWOK came out, the strip jumped forward to that timeframe.