I'm posting this because it's in a local publication although I don't remotely agree with her conclusion about copyright. Or about DC's Vertigo's financial problems either.
The "real" victims of online piracy
By Colleen Doran
The Hill's Congress Blog 11/17/10
In my opinion, the carriage makers that survived started making cars, not by continuing to make horse carriages. Technology's changed the world and no matter how Draconian you'd like to make copyright law, it isn't going to matter. As Rob Pegora says in the Post today, apropos of the Beatles and mp3s, "This is a point that often gets overlooked in entertainment circles: The market continues to function even if the logical and rightful supplier of a product refuses to participate. The ease of duplicating and transmitting digital data ensures that somebody else will fill that vacancy.You can mope about the massive copyright infringement that results from this dynamic, but the best way for artists to reverse it is to get into the market themselves."
That's what's happened with comic book publishers and digital comics. As I like to point out, if the current copyright law was retroactive from when it passed, the Spanish-American War would still be in copyright. Anyone remember that war? No. Because it happened in 1898. On the other hand, Disney, the chief financier of the law, wouldn't have been able to make any of their movies based on Grimm's fairy tales like Snow White or Cinderella because those original tales would have been in copyright when the films were made in the 1940s.
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