Written By: Dave Baxter

Subtitle: The Consumerist Clout of the Creative Commons

Folks can talk all they want about the theory behind digital publishing and distribution, of free marketing and the economics of intangible e-products. We can argue the pros and cons and the realities and the pie-in-the-sky dreams until it's no longer a debate but instead a cold hard reality, one way or the other. On the other hand, there are some that have already made this a reality, not waiting for the future to overtake them. The brave few that are riding the white water rapids of e-comic publishing without the comforting landlines of a pro print career or built-in fan base. We're here now not just to philosophize, but to look at what's realistically going on right this very minute with specific digital publishers.

Let's take a moment to wrap our heads around this.

7 billion torrent files were downloaded in 2008 from one torrent site (though it's statistically the most popular--Mininova.org This ten-figure number easily doubles when you include torrents downloaded on the smaller to mid-range torrent portals, and the number again triples when considering the non-torrent "file sharing" sites such as Rapidshare, Bodongo, FileShare, MegaUpload and the like.

Torrents deliver music tracks, software, .cbr or .cbz or .pdf book and comic scans, movies, popular hacks, the list goes on, and on, and on, and on. In comparison, official download sites such as iTunes broke (and only just) the 1 billion mark of individual files downloaded in 2008. And worse, sales in brick-and-mortar stores went down by an astonishing (and unheard of) 25-30% in 2008 from 2007.

The number of music files available via online Person-to-Person (P2P) "file sharing" is approximately 79 million unique tracks. The number of music files available for legal download via official sites such as iTunes is approximately 3 million. And you have to pay.

Everything stated above has an explicitly analogous statistic when applied to comics, and you also have to pay. Hmm.

The major companies' provisional attempts at offering products and services online have all been, frankly, pathetic. Not just within the music and book industries, but comic publishers are off to a bafflingly slow start to boot. Marvel is offering 6-month old product available only on their security-protected non-customizable "reader" and DC's Zuda is fundamentally an American Idol-type competition that results in a handful of ongoing webcomics, to be cancelled at a moment's notice due to poor response, and which may or may not ever see print (depending again on response), and the comics' rights are locked away with DC for years before the creators can look into the ever-evolving, spontaneously sprouting, ground-breaking avenues of exposure that should be the right of any creator to pursue in order to sell more books. Beyond this then: unless a Zuda-spotlighted comic is picked up by DC, any story appearing inside a Zuda competition will have a mere 8 pages of material posted. That is, in a word, and to repeat myself, but what the hell let's add a second word to spice things up: absolutely pathetic.

"Piracy" exists because readers have evolved into a state of independence exponentially intensifying and rocketing away from the major companies' control with each passing year. At first, it seemed like a crisis--companies had to survive, didn't they? And they had to be given a chance to catch up to the times without tumbling into bankruptcy due to sudden drops in annual gross sales. Now, nearly 10 years later, it seems far less a crisis and more a tragedy that's gone eighteen Acts too many, stretching out and out and out. Companies are frustratingly obstinate. They are not "getting it". They're not competing. They're not even trying. They're looking for the "alternative" rather than the compromise. They're fishing for hidden oil veins in Alaska rather than switching to electric. So it goes. But this means the unbelievably verdant ground of P2P is virtually un-trodden by those looking to actively, purposefully reach an audience for a work of print-style media.

Into this undiscovered country strode Herm