Byrne Stealing

One would think that with a message thread of over five hundred entries, I would have responded to every aspect of a topic imaginable.  (Not that responses really matter to the hit and runners who come in with their minds made up, don’t read the thread, hurl invective and boycotts and then split.) But in cruising around the blogosophere that currently portrays me as being so poisonous that a tarantula could bite me and die, there is apparently one aspect that I have yet to address.

It has been wondered in several places whether I concur with the concept that is popularly referred to as “Byrne Stealing.”  Namely, John Byrne’s philosophy that reading through a book on the stands and then putting it back is basically theft.  Was I, in letting Marvel know about a potential copyright violation, saying that Byrne was right?

Well…hypothetically, he is.  In the hypothetical comic shop that he owns (let’s call it Byrne’s Book Store, or Byrne’s BS for short) he is absolutely correct.   The books are his physical property.  Absent any state or federal laws that prohibit browsing, he gets to decide what does and does not constitute abuse of his property.  If you’re willingly dealing with Byrne’s BS, then you don’t get to just stand around in Byrne’s BS, inspecting and fondling comics and reading them while munching on a corn dog, with a big Byrne BS-eating grin on your face.  And if he yells at you about it, you can certainly storm out and announce that you are never going to stick your head into Byrne’s BS again.  But don’t kid a kidder:  It was Byrne, and you knew what sort of BS you were going to be dealing with when you walked in.

However—and here’s the sticky part—Byrne doesn’t get to decide what’s best for other people’s property.  Just his own.

Many is the time that I’ve walked into my local Borders and seen people relaxing on couches or in the café, reading books or magazines that they have yet to purchase.  They treat the place like a library.  They sit there and read books (not mine, of course, because, y’know, who stocks those?) and apparently feel under no obligation to buy them.  And if John Byrne waltzed into that store and started accusing them of theft, then the store manager and clerks would have him thrown out.

Why?  It’s their store.  They get to decide.  Again, absent state and federal laws, they set the terms of right and wrong.  They have big old magnetic strip detectors set up at the front door to stop you from walking out without paying for a book, but if you sit there, read an entire issue of Final Crisis #7 (presumably without spilling coffee on it or doing a spit-take on it or in some way rendering it unsalable) and put it back, Borders has effectively decided that that’s permissible.

Which they can do.

Because it’s their property and they get to decide what to do with it and what constitutes fair use of it.

So in Borders, reading Final Crisis #7 and putting it back isn’t stealing, Byrne- or otherwise.

Because.  It’s their.  Property.

Now…here’s where it gets entertaining.

The people who are running around cursing my name and crying boycott and writing my wife threatening e-mails (because she had so much to do with S-D being shut down)—the very same people who would not hesitate to download the latest virus protection software to prevent someone from helping themselves to whatever is on their own computer—are perfectly sanguine with deciding what Marvel should and should not do with Marvel’s property.  The images, the characters, the stories…those are all Marvel’s.  Legally.  Morally.  In every way that human beings have to measure such things, it’s Marvel’s property.  Granted, the comic book itself is the fan’s property once it has been purchased.  Which entitles them to give the physical comic to as many friends as they want to loan it out to, or even resell it if they’re so inclined.  It does not, however, give them the right to reproduce it and redistribute it—which is what putting it out onto the net basically is–because there are specific laws that say they can’t do that.  For that matter, there are specific rules on Live Journal that say they can’t do that, and Live Journal gets to make their own determinations of how best to handle their own property.

Some people are claiming that Marvel and DC and other major publishers should embrace the concept of having anybody, anytime, do whatever the hëll they want with the publishers’ property because the fans have decided that it’s going to be beneficial to the publishers.  The demise of Scans is—I’ve seen this term a lot—killing the golden goose.  (Considering that sales have been in a steady decline for the duration of Scans’ existence, I have to observe that golden geese aren’t what they used to be.  It seems less a golden goose than golden goose pate.)  These fans have judged, on the publishers’ behalf, how the publishers’ property should be disseminated and distributed and marketed.  And if the publishers don’t agree with it, then they are somehow uncool or evil or, at the very least, not current with the 21st Century.

Are you following that?  These fans are deciding on behalf of the publishers the best way to handle the publishers’ property.  It’s not enough that they believe they know the best way to handle their own property (locks on the front door, LoJacks on their cars, virus protection on their computers, etc.)  They believe that they have the self-declared right to decide what is right and wrong for the publishers’ property.  They believe that their vision of what constitutes theft should supersede that of whose property it truly is.

Just as John Byrne apparently believes that his vision should supersede the opinions of the book store owners whose property the books and magazines are.

So basically…every single fan who is excoriating me and condemning me and boycotting me for slights either real or imagined…

… is buying into Byrne’s BS.

Perhaps some fans should consider boycotting themselves.

PAD

221 comments on “Byrne Stealing

  1. Adam Boorman Says:

    The SECOND issue in play is that when the copyright laws were created, the role that duplicating and distributing things had in our lives was vastly different to what it is now. In 1985, the act of creating duplications and distributing things was unlikely to occur very often in everyday life.

    Oh? Thge RIAA was already pìššìņg and moaning about bootleg albums and private taping long before that … and do the word “Sony”, Disney” and “Betamax” in close association mean anything to you?

    When i got my first VCR (a VHS) in 1978, Disney and Universal were already suing Sony and trying to get home taping declared illegal.

    By 1979, i was trading tapes with people in California, Massachusetts and Canada (among others) on a regular basis, and Xerox copiers (and other copers, too) were already pretty common.

    In the Fifties, the statement of copyright in the front of most books said that the Work was not to be reproduced in any form, including electronic and mimeographj “…except by reviewers, who may quote brief passage in reviews.”

  2. Hi Peter,

    I just wanted to say: Anybody who doesn’t understand where you’re coming from is a flaming idiot.

    Your material is copyrighted. Period. If someone scans full pages of your work, and ILLEGALLY uploads it to a public internet site, that is a theft of your (and Marvel’s) property.

    You didn’t personally take Scans Daily off the internet. You simply reported, to your publisher, a violation of copyright. Whatever happened after that is not your responsibility.

    I don’t understand certain people’s righteous indignation. They’re idiots.

    You are not an idiot. You are on the moral and legal high ground.

  3. Excuse my ignorance in terms of exactly how sales of books in bona fide book stores work — but it seems to me that a writer/artist/publisher could have a legitimate beef about a person reading a book without purchasing at a bookstore and being allowed such behavior by the chain/owner.
    In the direct market, the book is sold. The publisher has collected the money and that doesn’t have to go back. So a writer/artist/publisher wouldn’t necessarily have a beef about someone going into a comic store and reading something without paying for it because they’ve obviously already been paid. The store owner obviously would have a problem with it.
    [of course, the writer/artist/publisher still wouldn’t want someone reading without buying in a direct market store because, while the book has already been bought and paid for, readers who don’t buy affect sales of future issues/books — the store owner will cut their orders if they see they are not moving enough of that product.]
    In a book store, where things are returnable (this is where I’m hazy on the full details of how sales in a book store work in regards to returns), the writer/artist/publisher should take offense to someone reading and not buying because those books are not fully committed the way they are in the direct market. Yuo say they can make that rule because it is their product — but in reality, it isn’t fully their product until they’ve sold it because they can still return it for credit. A bookstore can order a lot of a certain product and make the writer/artist/publisher happy at the on-set, but if they return the product later because people are reading but not buying, the it isn’t going to be as positive a situation (all around).

  4. That’s a interesting point, Hutch.

    I would say that even if something can be returned, it’s still owned. They may return it later, but they have ownership at that moment. At the very least, that makes them a business partner of sorts with the people they bought the books from. They have a business arrangement for the books and the supplier accepts giving them a certain amount of control of those books.

  5. So when is Marvel or DC planning to shut down Fanfiction.net and Deviant Art? Both of those sites host material that is clearly violating their copyrights.

    Keeping in mind that Marvel didn’t shut down Scans Daily: I have every confidence that if either of the above sites wind up being shut down, somehow, in some manner…I’ll get blamed for it.

    PAD

  6. PAD managed to get an entire website shut down with a single phone call – to a third party, no less? Wow, I never knew he had that kind of power!

    Now I’m seeing you as played by Marlon Brando, PAD. “There is a certain group that is causing me much heartache, Mr. Quesada. I am sure that you are distressed to hear this, and that you would like to do something to ease my pain. Perhaps if this certain group were to find themselves – discommoded, this would help. And of course, if one day I were to be in a position to do you a favor, I would be disposed to look kindly on such a request.”

  7. *snort* Okay, I’m seeing this whole S_D argument from two different sides.

    First, I work for a scientific publisher, so I’m very aware of the whole copyright thing that we run into (and *how many* authors decide that the copyright transfer agreement either does not apply to them or they can re-write it as they please???). Authors are specifically told that article proofs are for review only, but if I search on my real name — presto! an author’s posted the entire gol darn proof packet online (yep, people who write *medical* articles cannot follow simple instructions — remember that the next time you go to the doctor).

    Second, I’ve been collecting comics for 27 years. Since leaving the industry (distributors, LCSs), I’ve felt a bit cut off from the “pulse” of what’s going on. S_D has been a nice way of reconnecting — seeing what’s getting people excited or angry; mocking disproportionate female anatomy (can’t these morons even use a Playboy as a reference, since they’ve never seen a real woman?); laughing at old comics, etc. I’ve been able to rant about Benes’ art in JLA (who knew that JLA stood for JL Úš-crack?), and yes, even dropped the new Titans book after seeing some pages on S_D (horrible, horrible art — took days for my eyes to recover).

    On balance, I certainly understand why a publisher would take issue with S_D — the argument can certainly be made that scans of recent comics hurt sales. As a fan, I’m hoping for some sort of happy medium: I do think that the discussion on S_D has been helpful to the community (tho, I’d argue that the Essential/Showcase volumes have also helped), but then we get into the rather old argument about how to grow the comic community, and I just don’t have the answers, or rather, don’t have answers that the community wants to hear.

  8. “Keeping in mind that Marvel didn’t shut down Scans Daily…”
    Curiously, it would appear that you may well be incorrect about that

    The article changes nothing.

    I still have no reason to disbelieve Marvel when I was told that the X-Factor pages were taken down before Marvel legal contacted them.

    There was, of course, other material still up, and Marvel is required by law to vigorously defend its copyright upon seeing the material. Whatever cotton candy concepts people may have for what they think the internet should be, publishers continue to live in the real world where such defenses are mandatory.

    Marvel didn’t shut down Scans because Marvel doesn’t have the power to shut down Scans. Only Live Journal does. That they chose to nuke the entire place and salt the Earth was Live Journal’s decision. Perhaps LJ’s concern was that posters would continue to ignore Live Journal’s TOS against copyright infringement. Considering the number of people who have posted on this thread who have made it clear that they think copyrights are bûllšhìŧ and that everyone should be able to read anything for free at anytime, it seems to me that LJ’s concerns might have been well-founded. And once alerted to the problem, LJ likewise had to worry about protecting THEIR corporate ášš.

    How two corporations working within the current legal system to protect their IP and cover their own backsides translates in so many peoples’ view to “Marvel shut down Scans” or, even better, “Peter David shut down scans” remains a mystery.

    PAD

    1. Not disagreeing or arguing the semantics of it, I just thought I’d clarify your earlier misapprehension:

      “Purely a guess: Photobucket complained to Live Journal and LJ said, “Enough’s enough.””

      Apparently it was Marvel, not Photobucket. Of course, this was always liable to be the case as Livejournal’s stance on copyright is that they’ll only act at the behest of the copyright holder. Which is Marvel, not Photobucket.

      Since the waters were already murky enough on this one, it seems worth clarifying. Marvel contacted Livejournal, cited examples of where their copyrighted material was being used and the community was permanently removed.

      It seems likely /someone/ there must have contacted Photobucket too, presumably not the same person you spoke to. Just a glance at Photobucket’s copyright policy (http://photobucket.com/copyright/) shows the same stance as Livejournal – that they have to be properly notified by the copyright holder, in this case Marvel, and the material will be removed.

      It’s just a simple case of Marvel acting to protect their copyright. In the case of Photobucket the images were simply removed, in the case of Livejournal, the multiple violations caused them to kill the community. Pretty straightforward really.

  9. Matt, I noticed several canards in that article:

    1) Marvel shut down Scans Daily) As PAD mentioned, Marvel doesn’t have the power to do that. Livejournal decided what action to take, so the very title of that article is misleading.

    2) Other authors loved Scans Daily) Gail Simone herself has come on this board and said that PAD did nothing wrong. The article assumes that because she and other authors posted on Scans Daily, they must be completely on Scans Daily’s side. This is reaching and it’s unfair to speak on behalf of those authors without finding out what they actually think about this issue.

    3) Marvel puts up really long previews) They mention that Marvel has put up previews as long as 8 pages. I can do better than that: Every year Marvel and DC give away comics for free. It’s called “Free Comic Book Day.” The free comics and long previews don’t have anything to do with copyright law. It doesn’t matter how long the previews are, Marvel owns the comics and can do that if they want. That has no affect on what’s reasonable for someone else to post.

    4) Scans Daily “can boost sales of certain books”) This is stated as fact with no proof. The idea here is that Marvel either hates making money or is too stupid to accept this gold mine. The reality is that a) the benefit isn’t the least bit proven and b) It’s still Marvel’s choice to make.

  10. How is something like Scans_Daily any different than a library? Is it the turnaround time? Both offer free copies of books, the library just takes longer to get them to the public.

    1. “How is something like Scans_Daily any different than a library? Is it the turnaround time? Both offer free copies of books, the library just takes longer to get them to the public.”
      .
      Zundian, a library gets, depending on size, two to twenty copies of a book that it then loans out. Each book was bought and paid for and, just as you might do with friends, the owner can lend a copy out. And that’s really all that they’re doing. They’re lending their books to people.
      .
      If I get a copy of World War Z (great book everybody) and scan every page so that I can put them on the net; I’m basically publishing that book. People aren’t just swinging by the website and reading the thing, they’re saving the pages to their computers. By the end of the week you could have now turned one copy of the book into, for all intents and purposes, two million copies of WWZ on two million computers. If enough other people do that you’ve probably killed the book’s actual sales by a sizable margin.
      .
      Lots of other differences that get into tiny details and legal matter, but I’m really not up to type something like that right now. Maybe one of the lawyers who post here can take it from here.

  11. Jack, I don’t thing you actually read that article you just linked to. His first argument in the thing is that SD was clearly in copyright violation and didn’t have the right to keep going. His second argument is that none of the people talking about SD and fair use know anything about fair use.

    That article hardly supports what you’re saying. “You wont get away with your Lars Ulrich attitude so easily,” really shouldn’t be followed by a link to an article that tells you to shut up and accept that this was going to happen sooner or later.

    Sure, it has some arguments against PAD. Like saying that his goal to triple sales of X-Factor is too high. Of course it’s too high, it’s a goal! Setting a goal of 1% increased sales is a waste of time, so yeah, sometimes people set very high goals.

    Oh, and he disagrees with PAD about whether the kind of stuff SD was doing helps with selling comics. He doesn’t have any proof to back that up, nobody does one way or the other, but the important thing is that he’s disagreeing. That’s it, just disagreeing. That’s pretty mild compared to “Dear scans_daily members: Jesus Christ just shut the fûçk up and stop throwing tantrums.”

  12. Zundian,

    Libraries buy books. The owners of books have the right to loan them out.
    What copyrights do is restrict *reproduction* rights. Even a library can’t buy a book and then start printing their own copies of it.
    Putting something on the internet is reproduction. Any number of people can get a copy of something once it is posted on the internet.

    1. The person who posts a cbr buys the book as well, so is it a scale issue? I mean, my local library has digital copies of certain books available online (I believe the audio-book version) along with some tv shows. (www.champaign.org)

  13. How is something like Scans_Daily any different than a library? Is it the turnaround time? Both offer free copies of books, the library just takes longer to get them to the public

    If the librarians started photocopying the books and distributing the photocopies for people to add to their libraries, they would be in violation of copyright laws, just like Scans was. I doubt librarians do that, though.

    PAD

  14. This is the internets, mate. You wont get away with your Lars Ulrich attitude so easily.

    As has been pointed out, the article basically says that Marvel’s actions were warranted. Second, the article–just as everyone else seems to be doing–repeats the canard that I showed up on Scans, people were mean to me, and consequently I contacted Marvel. Getting a little tired of pointing out that is patently false.

    PAD

  15. Man, I’ve been away for a few weeks and the whole place goes nuts. (Third-quarter grades, etc. were the culprit. Ah, sweet sweet spring break…)

    Between this thread and the original SD thread we’ve had something like 800 posts (all of which I’ve read in the past few days, Norns help me), so there’s not much I can add. To make a few very quick points, though:

    1) The new look for the site. Color me “okay.” I do miss having a whole thread available on a single page, but that’s fairly minor, and the background is certainly purty.

    2) Peter, I’ve definitely got your back in the whole S_D mess. I haven’t had a copyright battle like this the way you have, but Roger Tang can certainly attest to the fact that he and I (along with several others) did a lot of waging semi-war on Usenet’s rec.arts.startrek.* about intellectual property rights back in the mid-90s. We slammed up against a lot of the same ignorance (willful or otherwise) that you’ve hit here. Just thought the support would be welcome, for what it’s worth.

    3) We’ve had some disagreements about the idea of “voting with one’s wallet,” in that you seem to feel it’s never really okay to not support an author due to his/her other beliefs, and I think there are times it’s reasonable to do so. Regardless, though, I think the public assertions of “you’re [whatever evil is du jour today], so I’m never buying anything you write ever again” is at best somewhat pitiable.

    4) Why does it not surprise me that, as usual, folks like Jerry, mike weber, and the two Bills are bastions of sanity in this whole thing?

    That’s all for me. Now to move ahead and hope there are somewhat more light-hearted things to come. 🙂

    TWL

  16. PAD,

    I mean my comments as no attack on you personally. I feel that well meaning people can disagree. And while I completely agree on the issue that under the current copyright arrangements, a legal situation designed with the specific intent of protecting the ‘property rights’ of the wealthy (Disney Relief Act) that occasionally provides work-a-day artists some remuneration for their efforts, scanning and distributing comic books is largely a violation of copyright laws and illegal, I do not agree that such an act is in and of itself morally wrong or in any meaningful sense ‘theft’.

    The first thing we need to examine here is the notion of ‘property’. Property is a largely cultural and legally defined concept. It is a legal concept defended by the application of state force. Historically legal definitions of property have been created and maintained by the state to foster class exploitation. The most crass example is the violent expropriation of all the land by the aristocracy, claiming that something they had no part in obtaining and could not possibly even use was now legally their property. At odds with this monarchist conception of property would be that of many North American Indian nations that did not culturally believe one person could own the land or water and that it was the source of life that belonged to all in common. When the European invaders came to North America and declared they privately owned the land by rights of conquest and discovery did it at all improve the moral situation? Certainly they replaced one legal point of view as to what constituted property with another.

    Now, on a more basic level, we might begin to examine the concept of theft. Most generally speaking, theft would be taking something from another person. For example, invading a continent and taking the land from another people, most would agree would be theft. On a more personal level, if one walked into the home of another and took some object, that would be theft.

    On the other hand, if I sit at my computer and scan the most recent issue of X-Factor into a PDF (or however it is done- I am not involved in this type of activity personally), I have engaged in the most basic act of production on a limited scale. I have produced a copy. It doesn’t take much time or talent and contributes little to the world, but unlike the aristocratic parasite collecting rents, it is still producing something. Thus I have produced a copy, and taken nothing from anyone else. No theft has gone on. In fact I would argue that the act of copying itself would even likely be protected under the current copyright regime as a method of ‘backing up’ one’s legally purchased copy, but I digress.

    The difficulty arises in that when this electronic copy is then shared with more than just my immediate friends. Similar to the economic damage libraries do to the comodified capitalist order, it might be the case that (but the evidence in your blog itself does not suggest this) such illegal digital distribution might undermine the capitalist system of renumeration and distribution involved in comic production. Now, as your income is at least in part derived from this capitalist system of exploitation and immorality, it is understandable why you would resort to state violence to protect your source of income. But I think another, more moral and more rational perspective is possible.

    As to the issue of morality, commercial transactions themselves are fundamentally immoral. I am not arguing practicality here, but morality. Feel free to have your own moral standard, but I will be applying here the near universal standard that you should love your neighbor and treat everyone as you would like to be treated. I think Kant put this best when he set it out formally as (roughly, I don’t have the Kant in front of me at the moment), each person should be treated as an end in themselves, and never as a means to an end.

    Now, what does such a thing mean for commercial transactions? Well, if the purpose of the transaction, that is the interaction between the artist and the comic fan, involves one or the other using the other as a means to an end, well, that act would be immoral. For example, if a comic writer produced work and sold it to others so that he could make money off of them, the writer would be using his fans as a means to make money. The fans are the means to the end of money (which itself might be to feed and educate the writer’s beautiful children, but that is not relevant). Similarly, if the comic fan is giving money to the writer (or faceless corporation that ‘owns’ the writer’s work) so that he might be entertained (or even enlightened by art) the fan is now using the writer as a means to the end of entertainment. Nowhere in the commercial acts are the actors deliberately acting purely for the benefit of the other, that is treating the person as an end in him- or herself.

    Now, when someone calls the cops (or Marvel) to use state violence to enforce copyright laws, is this person treating those the state violence is directed at as ends in themselves? I think the answer is definitely not. The person calling the cops is using the state violence as a means to the end of protecting ‘property’ and is treating the fans as their means to protect ‘property’. Therefore it is actually, from at least one perspective, quite immoral to enforce copyright law.

    Similarly, the person providing digital copies of artwork to friends is not at all acting on the producing artists, corporations, or even the state. This person, if providing copies for the enjoyment of others, would actually be spreading art, entertainment, and enlightenment. Thus treating the bulk of humanity as ends in themselves.

    Now, again, we come back to the pesky question of how honest writers and artists of good intentions might make their living in this world. Capitalist production and exchange have brought many wonders to the world. The comic book being but one of them. I am also sure that a conscientious person such as PAD is also aware that capitalism has brought many many horrors to the world as well. The destruction and genocide on the North American continent but one of those examples. As the most reasonable (as far as I can see it) explanation of morality points to all capitalist transactions being based upon immoral acts, it is perhaps incumbent upon us to think of different economic arrangements for allowing writers and artists to work and live decent lives of material security.

    The difficulties involved in illegal distribution of artistic production is not a difficulty of morality, but a difficulty of the capitalist method of producing and distributing art. As technology makes such methods of distribution increasingly wasteful and inefficient, artists will be faced with two alternatives: more and more resorting to state surveillance and violence to enforce irrational ‘property’ rights, or join the important work of transforming the human created institutions of economic distribution into those designed to fulfill peoples’ needs as ends in themselves. For quite a long time we have had the technological ability to produce music, books, and art without the environmentally destructive physical reproduction of paper books, cds, or dvds. The immoral capitalist methods of distribution are now, relatively speaking, even more destructive and wasteful than before.

    Now, PAD, we can write in the future, if you like, about moral, humanist economic alternatives to state violence and capitalism. The purpose of this essay was to simply challenge your honest and sincere belief that illegal digital copying was a moral violation, or as you put it, “The images, the characters, the stories…those are all Marvel’s.  Legally.  Morally.  In every way that human beings have to measure such things, it’s Marvel’s property.” I would suggest that any digital copy, just as any hard copy, in a fan’s collection is not Marvel’s moral property, and not Marvel’s property in any practical sense, outside legal, just as the land did not in any sense beyond legal belong to the feudal landlords of Europe. Both hide behind legality and state violence to extract profit from others.

    I understand as a practical matter you need comic book revenues to to feed and educate your beautiful children. I pay for my comic books because I can afford it and I want your children to do well, as I want all children to do well. But why should the beautiful children of this world be denied your comics merely because they can’t afford them? Especially when the means easily exists to distribute them about the world for next to no material costs? You’d be a right bášŧárd to deny the poor access to your comics, and I don’t think that is who you are.

    So, for the time being I will continue to walk down to my comic shop and buy X-Factor, as wasteful as that is, all things considered. I just ask you, with your great imagination and creativity, to help the rest of us work to build a morally sound economy where no child ever has to choose between eating and reading X-Factor, a world where things are produced to benefit humanity and not the ‘owners’ of property.

    Todd Allin Morman

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