I understand that copyright laws change all the time. Not too long ago, fair use meant teachers could make xerox copies of a printed work for the their students to read. One could not “dub” their bought movies on VHS tapes (look it up, kids) to blank VHS tapes. Heck, MLB once won a court case against a beeper carrier over publishing baseball scores. Now, you can jailbreak your iPhone and rip cds you purchase to iTunes and share your library throughout your local network.

However, this goes a long way to justify piracy and I just don’t buy it.*

The comparison between ripping a cds and downloading a pirated copy of a comic book is weak. Ripping a cd doesn’t require an internet connection, finding an existing copy on a site. Downloading means accessing a network where all the materials are pirated and shared openly without any proof of purchase. Also, when you torrent a comic book, you are sharing your bandwidth to further distribute that book to others users (without checking to be sure they had already purchased that book).

And to this last point:

Since I’m outing myself as sometimes looking at pirate comic sites, I’m also going to note that it’s a bad sign if a particular comic isn’t available on the net within a week. That means no one cares about the book. The big, popular franchises are the first to hit, with other books trickling out. Sometimes copying isn’t the threat; obscurity is.

I’m not aware of any film critics who download their movies, so I asked. They’re aren’t. Maybe comic book critics do not receive preview copies of books or get any screenings of books or have to adhere to media embargos like film critics, but even if film critics do happen to dabble in the occasional piracy, they would certainly never ever admit it.

As to copying not being a threat, consider the ability to bring obscure comics back into print. And I’ve heard this argument form piraters and scanners many times, “This comic isn’t available in print any longer.” Why would a publisher (be it dvds or music or comics) ever bring back an out of print property?

J. Michael Straczynski, no stranger to copyright and ownership, on the matter:

First, having talked to distributors, I can tell you straight up that if a show has had too much online exposure and too many downloads, if it’s too much out there, they won’t distribute it because the market that would want to see it already has. So you’re helping to destroy any chance of a show getting picked up. The logic of “well if I watch it that’ll help to create a market for that show” is a convenient untruth downloaders tell themselves that has not once ever been validated. It just never happens. It’s just a justification.

Second, when you download a show (and most of the shows that are downloaded don’t fall into the category of “there’s no other way to get it,” they’re downloads of popular shows and movies, so lets dispense with THAT bit of nonsense right off the bat…it’s not just that you’re denying the producers/distributors of that movie or TV show the “price” of the DVD (or the commercials not watched). You’re also having a direct impact on the creative people who made that show, and taking from them as well.

All this said, my disapproving head shaking won’t dig out any heels.

* my husband runs a comic shop, so I have a personal interest in the matter.

How would we possibly be able to boycott Google?

I never really thought about this before, but a google-less scenario is impossible to imagine. It’s like as being internet free but still having to somehow be online (but let’s leave AOL out of this for now). Google’s services are everywhere. Not just with search, but maps, document creation, web site traffic analytics,… internet “waving.” If you were to remove all of that, what would you replace it with? How would you find them?

Searching — lots of options, both country AND western. Google pretty much trounced everyone else in the search engine wars. Yahoo! came out of it mostly intact. Bing is the MSN Search replacement.

AdSense — the market is still open for getting ads to display on your site for revenue. Project Wonderful and VideoEgg are two that come to mind.

Base — a free market place to post your wares? I suppose ebay comes close, but you have to use their transaction system, and NextTag is expensive with terrible support (from my experience).

Checkout — late in the game and never really stood up stood up to PayPal.

Documents — I’m writing this on Zoho Writer. It looks strangely like Google’s version, but still has that remember-why-you-hate-Word feeling.

Gmail — Both Yahoo and Hotmail/Livemail are free and still very popular. Both have instant messaging too.

Picasa — Flickr is far better in my opinion. Facebook already outnumbers them both. These days, all my pics are by phone and go to TwitPic.

Maps — Bing and Yahoo are still in the game. They seem to offer web site embedding as well. MapQuest anyone? Actually, Bing Maps’ interface is very slick, even with the Segoe font type. I’m just worried that there will come a time when it’ll make me install Silverlight.

Reader — I made the switch to Google Reader a few years ago. I was a true believe in NetNewsWire, but Reader was totally online, looked great on my iPhone too. Turns out that NetNewsWire (at least for the iPhone) syncs with Google Reader instead of NewsGator. Does anyone use My Yahoo anymore?

YouTube — Vimeo? YouTube enjoys more than 40% market share of all online video. That’s not a lot, but when you consider the some 60 other video services fighting over the remainder, there is no clear competitor. That doesn’t mean that YouTube is better in service, quality playback or content for that matter.

So, not all of them are leaders, but at this point, I don’t think anyone can fully get along without Google. They have integrated themselves into so many facets of the internet simply by doing one thing, doing it extremely well, and for free.

Nobody is willing to roll their own Flickr or YouTube and take on the burden of traffic and maintenance. These are services that we expect. But our ability to use them is completely on their terms.

“We hold these companies to a higher standard. But, hey, they’re the ones who set it.” -Zeldman

Bookmarklet

Someone on twitter asked how to find and replace certain words on a web page. This is a bookmarklet on that replaces the word ‘god’ with ‘sky cake.’

Test it out!