Comic Book Resources

Someone needs to issue a “cease and desist” notice to Marvel over that terrible Noh-Varr costume, ugh.

I dont understand how posting a few pages of a comic and having people discuss them is worthy of a take down notice. They arent the people scanning entire issues and hosting torrents of comics the day of and sometimes earlier (say when Diamond is delayed or what have you). They’re just fans talking about comics they love (and sometimes hate). You see the same scans in some form on other forums.

It should be noted that for newly released comics, a maximum of four pages may be posted in a single post.

Even if the community’s detractors manage to get it shut down, it will be a symbolic victory, but a pyrrhic one. Scans Daily members can easily set up shop somewhere else. And heck, there are tons of pirate/torrent sites that scan and distribute hundreds of comics every day. Scans Daily isn’t one of them. Going after it won’t stop downloaders. In fact it will accomplish exactly nothing.

Grammar fail in the above comment, but the point stands: pyrrhic victory.

@Meg: Agreed. Taking that community down would only mean that a discussion community is closed. (Yes, even though it’s image-heavy.) It would accomplish absolutely nothing in the fight against the distribution of entire scanned issues.

Agreed, Meg.

It seems the community’s detractors are just using them as a visible target when the real problem, torrent sites/downloads, is something they lost the battle to long ago. Honestly, Scans Daily is the last place I’d be going if I wanted to read new comics online for free.

“Someone needs to issue a “cease and desist” notice to Marvel over that terrible Noh-Varr costume, ugh.”

Yes, AGREED. If Marvel is actually worried about their business then they would abort that non-sense, or do a redesign that doesn’t look completely generic and ridiculous at the same time.

I love how Scans_Daily figures that by making the site more closed it would somehow cut down on legal troubles. As if making it “members only” makes it less illegal.

@Kirk: Let’s talk numbers. Over this past week (Dec 4- Dec 10), 117 posts were made to scans_daily. Not counting webcomics (the few posted were usually by creators) or preview pages from websites such as Newsarama, there were 456 full pages of comics in those 117 posts, along with an additional 116 individual panels. Of those totals, 71 pages and 6 panels were from comics released in the past month.

What, then, is your definition of “a few”? I like to think “a few” refers to a single-digit number myself–but I’d love to read an argument about how posting pages at the rate of 65 a day is just a few pages in your book. At this rate, scans_daily could post the entirety of Watchmen, Maus, Persepolis, Bone, Blankets, Civil War, Secret Invasion, Secret Wars Omnibus, World War Hulk, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis, Identity Crisis, Final Crisis, all four volumes of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World, all five volumes of Scott Pilgrim, all seven volumes of Love and Rockets Vol One, all ten volumes of Sandman, and all 300 issues of fucking Cerebus in a single year–and they still wouldn’t hit the 23, 712 page count that posting at a rate of 456 pages a week would lead to!

I think that’s worth a take down notice.

“Oh,” I hear you cry, “but scans_daily isn’t posting entire books. It’s someone else who’s scanning and hosting torrents.” Yeah, I’ll give you that not all posters at scans_daily aren’t torrent makers or hosts themselves–a majority of them probably aren’t. But! Plenty of scans_daily users admit to using torrents as the source of “their” scans. Scans_daily is a place that creates and organizes demand for torrents of comics to be made and shared. Those scans_daily members are as bad, then, as the torrent makers themselves (worse, possibly. One presumes the original torrent-maker purchased himself a copy of whatever book he was scanning; that’s not a presumption one can make of scans_daily users). (And if any of you want to pull that “here’s a list of comics I regularly buy because of scans_daily” bull on me, start scanning the fucking receipts.)

Oh, and Kirk? The “discussion” a poster usually makes? Actually just a summary of what was going on in the pages that weren’t posted. Scans_daily isn’t some innocuous online book club (I would love it if they were). It is an amateur website whose primary purpose is to post spoilers from recent comics, and summaries of older comics. Scans_daily allows “fans” to keep up with their comics without buying them, and depresses demand for older comics to be reprinted. It certainly isn’t the only forum for such behavior, nor is it the most comprehensive–but just because other sites are doing the wrong thing too doesn’t make scans_daily right.

@Kirk Scans Daily creates demand for torrent and depresses demand for reprints? Show me your numbers on this, because as far as I can tell, this is a site with less than 2000 members. More watchers, certainly but no one at my LCS has even heard of the place. Same goes for many parts of online fandom.

Go search for comics torrents. The numbers of people seeding/leeching will astonish you. These are not Scans Daily numbers.

Marvel isn’t going to win the war against torrenters by going after Scans Daily. It’s not going to win that war. Period. For many scanning groups it’s not just a way to share comics, it’s a political issue. We’re talking about a whole subculture devoted to not paying for copyrighted stuff, either because of greed, entitlement or a political objection to the current ip/copyright regime.

Even aside from torrents, there are sites and communities entirely devoted to sharing *whole comics*. Scans Daily has no relationship with them and has no effect on their existence, nonexistence, or what and how many comics they scan. There are English sites, French sites, Spanish, Japanese and Russian sites. All of them devoted to comics piracy.

This issue is so much larger than one image-heavy community blog.

@Brian S, even. I fail at commenting. :/

Brian S.,

First of all, the rule at scans_daily is that no more than 1/3 of a work may be posted. So, no, the entirety of Watchmen, Bone or Persepolis or any of those others could not be posted. If they were, the moderators would have them taken down.

Secondly, some of the posts that Marvel has taken issue with have/had three pages or fewer in them. The scans_daily rules are set up in the spirit of fair use.

I don’t believe Marvel has the power to get the whole community shut down, so unless every publisher/copyright owner comes forward and hits scans_daily with DMCA takedown notices for every single post, it doesn’t seem likely it will get shut down entirely.

What Marvel is essentially saying is that nothing is fair use. Do you defend that? Because tons of comics blogs all over the Internet (including blogs hosted by CBR, I might mention) use comic scans as a part of their posts, and I’m willing to bet there are scans of Marvel comics among them.

Scans_daily is a visible target, sure. But honestly, I think it’s most likely that someone with a grudge against the community managed to report it to Marvel’s lawyers, and it’s the lawyers’ job to deal with it, so they issued the takedown notices, same as last time. (The difference being that scans_daily is now hosted on a site whose administrators aren’t going to panic and shut it down at the first sign of trouble, but instead focus on the individual offending posts.)

When it comes down to it, Marvel and DC have way bigger problems than worrying about scans_daily. As Meg pointed out, torrent sites are a much bigger issue than scans_daily. And really, if 7 pages of a 22-page comic being posted is enough to prevent a person from buying it, then it’s not saying much in favour of them. Also consider that sometimes authorized previews for Marvel and DC comics contain as many as 7 pages. Hell, wikipedia’s almost as big a “threat” as scans_daily for summarizing comics and character histories.

Come to think of it, the official preview for Cry for Justice helped me decide not to buy it–and good thing, too, considering pretty much every review I read of the first issue denounced it as being pretty bad. Had I not read that preview and been able to judge the comic’s contents before heading to the comics shop, I might have actually wasted my money on it. Instead I’ve been buying comics I enjoy, and I wouldn’t be buying comics in the first place if I hadn’t first gain a certain amount of fluency in comics through reading scans_daily.

@Brian S – If we want to go with random numbers to make things look worse, lets use CBR as an example. They post roughly 8 pages per comic each week times the 100 or so releases from DC and Marvel and other indies for a total of about 800 pages per week! They even have forums where people post spoilers and discussion on the comics the same day they come out! Marvel needs to issue a take down notice to CBR asap.

Maddy: I’m not sure that posting up to one-third of a comic is in the spirit of fair use. Can you imagine, say, a book critic excerpting one-third of a novel for a review?

It’s not really up to Maddy or Meg or Scans Daily or even Dreamwidth to determine what is fair use. They’ve been playing internet copyright experts since February, and yet all it took was Marvel Legal to notice their material being used without permission and presto-chango! DCMA violation!

Marvel doesn’t care if S_D turns people onto comics. They don’t care that this community has its own set of rules. They only care about protecting what rightfully belongs to them. In fact, they are legally obligated to do so. Otherwise they set a precedent.

So, to borrow words (but only 1/3 of them) from the twice moved scans_daily profile page, it’s never just you.

If I recall correctly, fair use is 10 pages or 25% of the work, whichever is lower. Scans_Daily is a bit above that, true. (and could probably stand to reduce it to 25%) but not so much that it is an egregious abuse.

Arilou: There’s nothing in U.S. copyright law that specifies what percentage of a work may be excerpted.

Whether an excerpt qualifies as fair use depends on the circumstances, specifically: the purpose of the use; the nature of the copyrighted work; “the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole”; and “the effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work.”

A publisher of a 22-page comic could make a convincing argument that the posting of seven of those pages — one of which features, say, a major plot twist — could have a negative effect on the market for the work. That, and that those seven pages constitute a significant portion of the copyrighted work.

I’m not sure how marvel thinks it can win this. Scans falls within US copyright ‘fair use’ laws. This notice is just a scare tactic

Maddy said Hell, wikipedia’s almost as big a “threat” as scans_daily for summarizing comics and character histories.

I’ll second that. Back in the day, I bought the first issue of “Countdown”, then dropped the rest of the series in disinterest. I subsequently read the entire plot, usually in far more detail than I even cared to know, on Wikipedia.

Also, while I’m sure someone could cite an example that disagrees with me, I’ve yet to see a spoiler on scans_daily that I haven’t seen or read on a “legitimate” comics blog first. At least scans_daily hides spoilers behind the link and with big “SPOILER” warnings. I found out about Batman’s death in “Final Crisis” by seeing Superman holding his corpse on the front page of CBR or some other blog (I forget which site I saw it on first, but it was all over the blogosphere that day) the day before I picked up that issue from my LCS, and boy was I mad; that never would’ve happened on scans_daily, where I always have fair warning before clicking on a link to a comic I haven’t read yet.

The cyberstalking thing notscans_daily’s got going on is creepy.

It’s pretty clear that it’s just someone with a grudge against those grim pants-wearing feminists.

@Scotty

Hey! Speak for yourself bub. I don’t wear pants!

I’m really interested in hearing how nikki thinks scanning something people are supposed to pay money for and putting in on the internet for free falls under “fair use”

If she can successfully argue that she has a bright future as a lawyer ahead of her.

Wait, so then should Scans_Daily not put up any pictures at all? Should they also (from what some people appear to be saying) not even discuss what’s going on, because they could spoil the whole thing? And not “spoiling” old comics? I would think seeing parts of it online would make people want to track down the comic as read the full thing for themselves. Based on that, maybe the Invincible Super Blog or That Guy With The Glasses’ “Atop the Fourth Wall” should be dropped as well. They tell you the full story of a comic (bad ones in AT4W’s case) and post images from it.

What then are we allowed to review on our blogs? I haven’t been on Scans_Daily in a long time, but I do like using it to find images I uses in articles related to those characters or situations. (For reviews, I scan my own pics, since I can only review what I own or borrowed.) Or should we all just not review things we don’t like and not let people know a comic might not be worth their tight budget?

The ISB posts a few panels at most from a current comic book. scans-daily routinely posts PAGES of a recent comic book. Pretending not being able to tell the difference between the two is an exercise in being stupid and not getting the point.

James- Read up on ‘fair use’. You really could stand to learn a thing or two before you start talking.

Fair Use has no set amount and there are many lawyers who would argue that what scans_daily does falls under it. There’s actually a chance that Marvel doesn’t even disapprove of scans_daily but merely issued the notice as a way to establish that they would take action should the group step over the imaginary line between ‘fair use’ and ‘theft’, something they haven’t done at this time. If that happened in the future and it was revealed that Marvel knew about the group all along and didn’t make some sort of note of it at the time then they could lose hold on their property, sort of along the lines of implied consent by not saying anything.

Krill: In several instances I think it would be easier to argue what appears on Scans_Daily doesn’t fall under the doctrine of fair use. Attorneys for a publisher could, I imagine, convince a court that by posting a substantial portion of a newly released comic, the Scans_Daily member has adversely affected the potential market for that comic (and even the market for the subsequent collection). Further, if the posted portion of the comic contains a pivotal scene, or “big reveal,” it might be argued that the excerpt constitutes the “heart” of the work — something courts have ruled does not amount to fair use.

“If that happened in the future and it was revealed that Marvel knew about the group all along and didn’t make some sort of note of it at the time then they could lose hold on their property, sort of along the lines of implied consent by not saying anything.”

You may be confusing trademark with copyright. Owners of a trademark are obligated to defend that mark. However, a publisher or creator holds a copyright for a set period of time; there’s a ticking clock, or flipping calendar, but no risk “they could lose hold on their property, sort of along the lines of implied consent by not saying anything.” The owner of the copyright is free to turn a blind eye to one site that posts protected material while unleashing the hounds on another.

Well Krill, I followed your suggestion on reading up on “fair use” and here’s what I found.

using a mere 400 words from President Ford’s memoir was considered infringement. I haven’t had the time to research how many words total Ford’s memoir was, but I imagine it ran into the tens of thousands. If something that consists of less than 10% of somebody’s work can be considered infringement I’m not sure how posting 1/4 or more of a comic can’t be as well. I’m sure you have a good explanation though and can’t wait to hear it.

In a recent issue of “The Incredible Hercules” issue # 140. Part of the story is a rip off Space 1999, the “Brian the Brain” episode. In the Space 1999 story, it is in two airlocks that Commander Keoning and Doctor Helena are locked into. Who ever presses the button first, will send the remainder of the air to the other. There is a minute of air left in the airlock. Both press the button simultaneously showing they love each other.

In “The Incredible Hercules” same thing, except that instead of an airlock sucking out the air, you have poison gas flooding the room.

Perhaps Marvel should show respect for other people’s copyrighted Material as well.

If it weren’t for marvel I would have never learned about scans_daily. Thanks marvel for being ass backwards just like the rest of the entertainment community!