Debates over file-sharing follow the same right and wrong argument.  Downloading comic books, I feel, adds a different layer to the debate.  Music companies argue they lose money because people download songs for free, which has been to be found untrue. Movie companies think people stop going to the theaters.  Comic book companies have remained out of the dialogue until their recent requests for BitTorrent tracker Z-Cult FM to pull its comic book torrents.  This new front in the War on Piracy will be another example why the war can’t be won - and why it shouldn’t be.

Much like file-sharing for movies and music, comic book downloads are spread over dozens of site and software.  PirateBay.org and Mininova.org provide hundreds of comic book torrents while programs like DC++ and eMule have huge collections themselves.  More than 90 percent of Marvel and DC’s comic books are available for free downloads from several sources.  Pirated comic books even have their own file extensions: .cbr and .cbz which are read by a free program CDisplay. Just like ending Napster did nothing to slow music piracy, neither will stifling Z-Cult FM. 

Going after Z-Cult and ComicSearch has probably caused Marvel and DC more harm than help.  Since stories about Marvel and DC’s emails to Z-Cult, online searches for torrenting and downloading comics has jumped on my site and I’ve only written two articles about it.  My own site is an extremely small sample size, but might reveal that more people are now aware they can download comics than before all the press the emails attracted.

Marvel and DC’s sudden aggressiveness likely comes from their interest in offering comic book downloads, which Marvel is already testing.  DC doesn’t have a comparable service for archived comics, but it’s likely they will reveal one soon.  The problem is Marvel’s service is a small offering of online only content.  You can’t download comics for future reading; the quality is mediocre compared to free versions; and the selection is tiny.  Marvel offers about 2,500 compared to approximately 60,000 Marvel Comics available for free in high-quality, DRM-free downloads.

I believe comic books have a unique market better suited for file-sharing than other media.  I love reading my comics each week, but I also collect them, as many people do.  I track their values and, as sales from eBay show, people like selling them too.  Collecting is fun, making money is fun, and comics can provide both with the added pleasure of pretty art and an occasionally engaging story.  And it’s collecting makes comics party impervious to the threats from file-sharing.  A sizeable population will likely continue buying hard copy comics for their collection, much like people who collect DVDs and CDs (someone is still buying them for some reason).  On a similar token, how much do comic creators make on second-hand sales of comics?  None.  And I don’t see anyone whining about how reselling comics hurts creators and trade paperback sales.

But DVD and CD sales are dropping, you say.  Comics cater more to collectors with issue numbers and a healthy second-hand market that lends itself to making a profit (when was the last time you sold a used DVD for a profit).  Even comic stores will pay half a comic’s listed value, which can be multiple times the cover price you paid.  Issue numbers are more subtle, but offers the ability to have all of something.  If you have every Uncanny X-Men from #1-#500 except #356, you will probably track it down without a care of what it’s about - you just want to complete your collection.

Downloadable comics offer a completists dream.  You can now read every X-Men comic ever without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy them all.  This means when you read about some unknown character, you can find out their earlier appearances and download them.  This isn’t simply a promotional argument, claiming that downloading comics helps you find out what you like.  Downloading comics helps add value to the comics you read because you can understand them more.  This is a huge challenge for the complicated histories of the Marvel and DC Universe where character histories travel back more than half a century.

The possibility of money lost or immoral activity are short sighted arguments.  For one, Marvel Comics (which is the only public comic company and thus the only one with available data) only claims approximately 20 percent of its revenue to publishing content.  The rest comes from licensing its 5,000 plus character library.  The best way for Marvel and other comic companies to increase their value is to increase the value of their characters - not by selling more comics.  They can do this by putting their characters in front of as many people as possible.  File-sharing has the ability to help with that.

And like other media, people posting these comics have an evangelical spin on their releases.  Copying a movie or CD just takes pushing a button, but comics have to be scanned page by page, then run through a photo editor to enhance the text and compress the files.  This significant time commitment reflects more on a passion for the medium and a want to spread it to others rather than some malicious attempt to steal content.  This is all done for free and rarely with named credit (some scanners use online handles which help recognize quality scans, but they never use real names).  Harassing these evangelicals will pay off far more than blocking them or, worse, suing them.  Just think.  These people have already created high-quality scans of almost every comic  book there is for free.  Why should Marvel and DC shell out any money to scan these comics again themselves?

File-sharing isn’t going away, no matter how wrong or right people think it is.  People always shared stuff.  The internet has just expanded the available people to share from and with.  The question will be how can media companies, including comic book companies, take advantage of these evangelical fans.  Maybe they can launch a first-party file-sharing program with advertising or maybe expand their own digital offers with the high quality scans currently available.  Or maybe Marvel and DC will continue to send DMCA takedown notices to websites, pushing file-sharing farther underground, but no less effective or widespread.  And they’ll only increase the publicity file-sharing receives while aggravating the fans who so passionately sought after these comics.  And that won’t be good for the bottom line.

For an opposing point of view, please read Scott Saavedra’s post.

For more on how to download comic books, please read Comic Book Galaxy’s article.