layla | Comics fandom stuff

Whoa,

scans_daily was TOS'd!

I'm kind of torn about it. When I first became aware of the community, I was actually amazed that they hadn't been TOS'd already, let alone that they continued operating for a number of years without problems. It wasn't just a page here and a page there ... it was whole issues of brand-new comics. Leaving aside the right and wrong of it (I tend to come down pretty firmly on the side of more liberal copyright laws, on the whole), I was kind of surprised that some copyright holder or other hadn't come down on them like a ton of bricks a long time ago.

But on the other hand, during the time that I was visiting them a lot, I discovered a ton of series, GNs and webcomics that I wouldn't have otherwise known about. A lot of what was posted to the community were older series that have been out of print for a long time, and in some cases can't be had for love or money; I tracked down a lot of old back issues on Ebay, and in other cases just enjoyed reading the scanned pages and the snarky comments. It had one of the most vibrant and cheerful communities in online comics fandom these days. A number of creators were aware of them and turned a blind eye, or, like Warren Ellis, joined in occasionally.

Getting a lively comics discussion going online is difficult because it's a visual medium and kind of a niche one. Especially with a long-running series or an old or obscure one, the scans_daily model (where you post pages illustrating what you're talking about) is just about the only way that you can launch a large, active discussion. Some of those comics would never see the light of day otherwise (they had so much old and long out of print stuff on there ...) As for the newer stuff, if comics companies are passing off bright-colored tripe for $4 a pop, I want to be warned ahead of time so I don't drop my money on it.

I wonder what the situation is ... There's no lawsuit that I'm aware of, just a TOS'ing, so maybe it's nothing more than one person sending an email to LJ and LJ going "oh shit" and deciding to cover their asses and pulling the plug. I really can't see how Marvel and DC could not have known about a site this big and long-running already, and it's been operating for a number of years without interference. I'm not shocked or even particularly surprised, but I am sad, and I wonder what the whole story is.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Wouldn't posting for the sake of review and discussion come under the heading of fair use?

I know you can repost some. I'm not sure where the technical line is, but I suspect that scans_daily probably crossed it, since there were people doing things like picking up the latest issue of X-Men the day it came out and scanning the entire part of the story arc having to do with Magneto, or whatever.

On the other hand, the vast majority of it was, say, someone going through a 20 years' worth of X-Men and picking out the one or two pages here and there that had to do with a particular minor character's arc and doing a timeline, or somebody posting a hilariously WTF? panel from an issue of Batman that came out in 1963, or people digging up obscure manga or Golden Age comics that haven't been in print in 50 years. There was a lot of really cool stuff on there and a lot of highly entertaining snark and discussion in the comments -- it was gay-friendly and woman-friendly (at least compared to most other places) and funny, and turned me onto a bunch of comics I hadn't heard of.

The only reason why I never got more involved with discussions over there, I admit, was because I figured they'd probably get nailed for copyright infringement eventually, and I was a gigantic wuss.

I'm kind of surprised by some reactions to it- is it that shocking that it would be taken down? I'm also kind of disturbed by the pro-copyright infringement flavor of some sites regarding the removal of it from LJ. I don't really buy the whole "reading it for free brings sales up" thing, as it's not like it's done wonders for anime dvd sales. Don't these people know what libraries are?

Still, I don't think it was the worst offender out there for piracy, but was kind of surprised by how often whole or almost whole issues would pop up. I hope they implement sticter standards in their new host so they don't run into the issue again, as people do seem to enjoy it. One or two pages plus some commentary for fair use, or at most 20% of a work, is perfectly fine. But I know I'd be pretty uncomfortable with someone posting a large chunk of my work on their site without my permission.

I'm guessing it was just a case of LJ getting a request to take something a creator was uncomfortable with down, but not take the site down itself, and going a bit overboard.

Then again, Tokyopop's put-it-online promotion for Loveless worked now that I remember it. Though I'm guessing it depends on the context of where the work is posted, which audience it's posted to, and how much of it is posted/how long it's available for.

*nods* Like I said, I'm torn. I think scans_daily was, on the whole, a positive thing for the comics community; the mods were pretty responsive, from what I heard, on taking down material at a creator's request, and they had rules about how much could be posted of an issue at one time.

Having said that, though, I did always feel pretty damn skeevy when I'd go on there and see that someone had picked up the latest issue of whatever the hot book was at the time, and posted the moneyshot pages. I had no problem whatsoever, from a moral standpoint, with probably 90-95% of what was on the site -- I don't feel weird, for example, about someone scanning a big chunk of a Classics Illustrated that hasn't been in print since 1965, that I will probably never get to see otherwise. But if it's a book that I could just walk down to my corner LCS and pick up today ... yeah, I do feel very uncomfortable about it, and although there were a lot of comics I bought that I wouldn't otherwise have known about, there were also some "iffy" comics that I read the scans in lieu of buying.

I'm with you on being a bit confused that people are shocked that it's been taken down -- like I said, I felt like it was running on borrowed time for a long time. But I also feel bad for people for whom this was their community, which has now been scattered.

Yeah, the fact that a lot of the time it's the hottest thing you can get everywhere, rather then something so old and obscure if you checked it could even be out of copyright, is what makes me generally sketched out, and skeptical about the merits of bootleggers of comics/anime/fandom stuff.

Though as far as I understood it, scans_daily didn't allow you to put up more than 50% of a given comic? And its new incarnation on insanejournal only allows 1/3...for people who are only following a single arc of a comic, that's probably okay, but most comic readers still would have to buy the whole thing...

I never was on scans_daily regularly, but I liked popping on to see, say, old Silver Age comics with Lex Luthor, the kind of stuff it's hard to find otherwise. I might have gotten into comics when I was younger if they weren't so dominated by the collector culture that it's difficult to get hold of older stuff...it's one of the things I like about manga, that they reprint everything in cheap, easily accessible volumes (I wish the English-language versions were as cheap, but...)

Yeah, I think one of the biggest things working against comics is that they're so very inaccessible -- if you want to jump into a long-running title, they expect that you know 50 years of history, most of which you can't get because the comics are long out of print.

Marvel has been bringing out big, cheap omnibuses of some of their old comics, which I think is fantastic; I've picked up several volumes. But, yeah, scans_daily was the only place I knew about where you could find a lot of the old stuff, or start catching up on the history of a character or series without having to spend ages crawling Ebay (if you could find those issues at all).

And I'm bummed on a personal level because I had been wanting to do a pimp post for Justice League International, which is hilarious and teamy and I think a lot of my f'list (including you!) would really like it, but it's from the 80s and I was going to link to a lot of scans_daily posts (which was where I originally found out about it myself). Now I guess I have to scan my own issues. *sigh*

Most creators were pretty much okay with scans_daily -- in fact, they've been generally pretty supportive. (http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2009/02/livejournal-shuts-down-scans-daily-community/) I did feel uncomfortable with the posts from current comics -- they did have a rule about how much of a whole comic you could post, but usually it was the "moneyshot" pages that got posted (does Superhero X DIE? does Superhero Y accept Superhero Z's marriage proposal?), and I must admit there were definitely times when I'd just check S-D rather than buying the whole issue. So I can see why a creator might want their stuff taken down; however, most of them seem to recognize that "free stuff on the Internet" is a genie that can't be put back in the bottle, and roll with it.

Not that it's a surprise, but it's back:

http://asylums.insanejournal.com/scans_daily

Von

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