Ahoy, me hearties.

I’m currently engaged in a discussion on a comics industry board about digital comics piracy. (It seems quite a few comics retailers and publishers are still unaware of just how prevalent comics piracy is.) It got me wondering how easy it would be to legitimise comics downloading. And it didn’t take long to realise that really, as digital solutions go, it would be very easy indeed:

Follow the iTunes Music Store example.

I would guess around 95% of comics produced these days are ‘finished’ on a computer, and sent to a printer as digital files. It would cost publishers almost nothing to send these same files to a third party company (let’s call them Smapple, Inc.) who have set themselves up as a licensed supplier of digital comics.

Smapple would encode these files into a single ‘issue file’. This issue file is in a secure format which can only be viewed with a multi-platform program that Smapple supply, free of charge (let’s call it iPanels).

Anyone who’s used the iTunes music store can see how this works. A customer uses iPanels to browse/search a database of available comics on Smapple’s servers. When they find one they like, they download it (having already set up an account) and view it on-screen using iPanels. Voila. Smapple pass on a percentage of the revenue from the download to the publisher/licensor/whoever.

The key, and the most difficult part of the solution, comes in not only making the format solely compatible with iPanels, but also completely secure - in other words, the comic would have to be ‘locked’ into the program, so it couldn’t be moved to another computer or converted to a different, more portable format.

(Sure, someone would eventually crack it, but just like with music, the majority of people are law-abiding types. Make the legal part easy - really, really easy and idiot-proof, just like iTunes - at an attractive price, and most people will go the legal route rather than face the hassle and guilty conscience of piracy.)

It would take someone with money, vision and very robust servers. And who knows whether it would actually make any money? I reckon it would be worth trying, though.

[Addendum: I’ve started a thread on my message board about this, if you have an opinion you want to share] [UPDATE: No longer active: go here to discuss the issue.]

[ Musings ]

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