The vast majority of online comics... follow a relatively straight-forward three or four panel format... exactly like newspaper comic strips.
Here's the difference: Online, you can say "fuck", deal with important topics (relative to the thrust of the comic) and are completely and totally free of editors and syndicate hacks breathing down your neck.
Got it in one. A lot of webcomics are identical in format to newspaper comcs, simply because they're drawn by fans of the art form who can't stand to watch it deteriorate.
Syndicates approve some stupidly-low percentage of new comic applications each year, making themselves the number one roadblock to producing a daily comic strip. How can the comics page improve when the syndicates are maintaining the status quo (bland-but-profitable)?
So you can see why so many artists are doing the exact same thing on the web... without compensation. Meanwhile, critics complain that web artists aren't exploiting the new medium to its fullest... well, some of us don't want to. There are webcomics out there that are truly innovative and use the web to breathe new life into an old medium (like When I Am King, lost the URL), but others are simply taking advantage of the freedom to draw comic strips they way we want 'em.
bricriu sez: Once again, Sluggy Freelance has been passed over in an online article/discussion about comics.
Once again, x-thousand other webcomics got passed over, too... many of them better than Sluggy et al, but not so long-lived or well-hyped. Comics like Irritability and Zebra Girl are pretty much unheard-of, but are quality stuff. Unfortunately, they aren't as media-friendly as Sluggy or User Friendly.
So, with all due respect, quit yer complainin'.;-) There are a lot of webcomics being "forgotten," not just your favourites.
I *thought* I had seen some bastardized HTML tag which achieved the same effect as a 1x1 transparent GIF... the SPACER tag. Introduced in Netscape 3. I can only assume that IE doesn't support this, and that CSS makes the whole thing moot anyway. But if that can eliminate the need for 1x1 transparent GIFs for layout, then we can safely block such.
A useful trick used in the webcomics world (and could be used in any image archive) is to load a comic image in a 1x1 IMG in order to cache it.
So say you're reading through some archived pages on a site. While you're reading July 24's comic, the one for July 25 is loading into a 1x1 pixel down in the corner. Click the "Next" button to go to July 25's page, and boom, the comic is loaded directly from the cache. And while you read that one, July 26's is loading quietly in the corner.
Granted, the images aren't originally 1x1, but are merely shrunk to that size. Plus, the traditional usage seems to take a 1x1 transparent GIF and stretch it to larger sizes for layout purposes. So maybe 1x1 images which are specified to display 1x1 could be filtered. It'd break *some* pages, but not nearly as many.
You are right. It is not only silly, it is also untrue. The courts have found several times (for video AND for computer data) than you can even charge a fee to duplicate someone's copy of copyrighted material or convert it to another format. Examples of this include NTSC -> PAL video conversions, moving vidoe collections from Beta to VHS, and recovering software from outdated media such as 8" diskettes and moving it to a more convinient (e.g. 3.5" diskettes) medium.
This is all assuming that the source is owned by the customer. In fact, in the examples you mention, it's almost impossible to do the conversion otherwise.
With MP3s, it's actually quite easy to perform a "conversion" without the source. Yeah, you own the CD, but those MP3s you're downloading weren't ripped from your own personal copy.
Imagine walking into Blockbuster with a receipt for a Beta cassette of Casablanca you purchased in the '80s, and a blank VHS cassette. Will they give you a copy of Casablanca on your VHS tape? Heck no. But you could take the original Beta cassette to Charlie's Media Conversion and get it done there.
So yeah, I see the logic behind the argument (that d/ling MP3s of songs you already own on CD is still bad), but I think it's outdated logic. Thanks to modern technology, information can spread without the confines of physical media. Record companies sell physical media. Record companies are going to be obsolete very very soon.
Re:Way too dumb-downed - no real info here
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The Basics Of RAM
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I would debate that by "using computers for more than a week" one would know the difference between SRAM and DRAM. I thought the article was great; it didn't require any sort of electrical degree to understand.
So perhaps the article wasn't useful to an expert, but it's pretty damn useful to someone who wants to become an expert.
I visualize a thinning of the crowd when someone steps up and says "OK, now you can assuage your guilty conscience and pay 10 cents per track for the 6 GB of MP3s you've downloaded.Here's the hat, step right up, don't be shy..."
Heh... that reminds me of the occasional Gun Amnesty programs put on by the local police. Basically, the police will accept illegal firearms from people, no questions asked. You just walk down to the office and clean your hands of it.
And apparently these programs are quite successful. So I would disagree that a similar MP3 program would be unsuccesful. It's not a direct parallel, but what if there *was* a way to pay the respective artists for the MP3s you've downloaded, and be given a certificate claiming full legal rights for the personal use of those MP3s? It's a little more cumbersome than online micropayments, but if it were handled correctly, I can envision a lot of people cleaning their hands of this whole piracy business.
Well, now that I've read about this interstate "use tax," I'm unsure if Canada has something similar or not. What I *do* know is that I've never had to pay more than just shipping costs on top of the regular price for an item on a U.S. web site. Maybe I should be glad I haven't been audited yet.
And I don't think there would be an overall balance of taxation between countries... a majority of international customers could purchase from a single country (likely the U.S.), and their home countries would ultimately be screwed out of their taxes. I'm no economist, but I think that's the entire point behind placing duties on imports.
So maybe I can blame my spending habits on NAFTA.:-) I knew it was good fer somethin'...
So to circumvent the GST, we Canadians can buy from the States. Even after you factor in shipping and currency exchange, the total cost of an Internet purchase from the U.S. is *still* often less than buying the same item from a local store in Canada.
And if the U.S. institutes a nation-wide Internet sales tax, Americans can purchase from some other country. As long as there's open (and international) competition on the Web, there will be ways around the government greed.
The only thing new about a hyperlink is that it does the "page flipping," so to speak, for you -- you can go directly to the referenced material with one click -- and I have no intention of paying anyone royalties for the miniscule amount of value added by that feature.
"Miniscule amount of value added"?? Is the Web not entirely founded upon hyperlinks? Of course, instead of using <A HREF="http://foo.com"> in one's page, one could write "http://foo.com" in the text, requiring the user to enter it manually (or copy/paste) into their browser. Though I doubt the average Web user would enjoy that (mind you, such an arrangement would pretty much scare away every AOL user on the Net today...).
Without Microsoft, there would BE nothing like what we have today.
How does anyone know it might not have been *better*? No one can accurately predict that the world is a better (or worse) place thanks to MS. But we all know what we like or dislike.:-)
Heh... I wish the "mainstream" publishers even knew webcomics existed. There's a lot of lucrative material out there, being pumped out by independent artists who are doing it just for the love of their work. Certainly your examples are among them; some more can be found here, and maybe even here.
Now, I'm as much a fan of Illiad's "selling-out" as the next guy, but this could be the start of something good. If UF can help support the other quality comics out there, then everybody wins.
Or he can hoarde his vast fortunes to himself, and continue to give UF Media a bad name.;-)
Are you allowed to legally upgrade to a better format, from an album purchased on an older format?
Ooooh, if this one's allowed, I've got a whole lotta tapes to trade in.:-)
There's also the argument that out-of-print media should be fair game for free distribution. Although I have yet to see a final conclusion to that debate (possibly because I'm not looking hard enough...).
Really, Napster (et al) is merely a tool. It happens to be very useful for the above reasons, as well as for piracy. It just searches for filenames which end in.mp3. Big deal.
So it turns out that this newfangled technology is a threat to the RIAA's money-making formula. I don't blame them for trying to fight it, even though they will inevitably lose. And then physical audio media will go the way of the Beta cassette.
Did VHS kill Beta sales? Yes. Will MP3 kill CD sales? Yes. Is this really all that bad? No.
So legal/ethical or not, the industry is gonna change. And it'll be that much easier for me to trade in my old cassettes.:-)
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Here's the difference: Online, you can say "fuck", deal with important topics (relative to the thrust of the comic) and are completely and totally free of editors and syndicate hacks breathing down your neck.
Got it in one. A lot of webcomics are identical in format to newspaper comcs, simply because they're drawn by fans of the art form who can't stand to watch it deteriorate.
Syndicates approve some stupidly-low percentage of new comic applications each year, making themselves the number one roadblock to producing a daily comic strip. How can the comics page improve when the syndicates are maintaining the status quo (bland-but-profitable)?
So you can see why so many artists are doing the exact same thing on the web... without compensation. Meanwhile, critics complain that web artists aren't exploiting the new medium to its fullest... well, some of us don't want to. There are webcomics out there that are truly innovative and use the web to breathe new life into an old medium (like When I Am King, lost the URL), but others are simply taking advantage of the freedom to draw comic strips they way we want 'em.
JOSH.
Once again, x-thousand other webcomics got passed over, too... many of them better than Sluggy et al, but not so long-lived or well-hyped. Comics like Irritability and Zebra Girl are pretty much unheard-of, but are quality stuff. Unfortunately, they aren't as media-friendly as Sluggy or User Friendly.
So, with all due respect, quit yer complainin'. ;-) There are a lot of webcomics being "forgotten," not just your favourites.
JOSH.
I *thought* I had seen some bastardized HTML tag which achieved the same effect as a 1x1 transparent GIF... the SPACER tag. Introduced in Netscape 3. I can only assume that IE doesn't support this, and that CSS makes the whole thing moot anyway. But if that can eliminate the need for 1x1 transparent GIFs for layout, then we can safely block such.
So say you're reading through some archived pages on a site. While you're reading July 24's comic, the one for July 25 is loading into a 1x1 pixel down in the corner. Click the "Next" button to go to July 25's page, and boom, the comic is loaded directly from the cache. And while you read that one, July 26's is loading quietly in the corner.
Granted, the images aren't originally 1x1, but are merely shrunk to that size. Plus, the traditional usage seems to take a 1x1 transparent GIF and stretch it to larger sizes for layout purposes. So maybe 1x1 images which are specified to display 1x1 could be filtered. It'd break *some* pages, but not nearly as many.
Hell, let's just trade burned CD copies through snail-mail. I'd like to see the RIAA shut down the postal service.
This is all assuming that the source is owned by the customer. In fact, in the examples you mention, it's almost impossible to do the conversion otherwise.
With MP3s, it's actually quite easy to perform a "conversion" without the source. Yeah, you own the CD, but those MP3s you're downloading weren't ripped from your own personal copy.
Imagine walking into Blockbuster with a receipt for a Beta cassette of Casablanca you purchased in the '80s, and a blank VHS cassette. Will they give you a copy of Casablanca on your VHS tape? Heck no. But you could take the original Beta cassette to Charlie's Media Conversion and get it done there.
So yeah, I see the logic behind the argument (that d/ling MP3s of songs you already own on CD is still bad), but I think it's outdated logic. Thanks to modern technology, information can spread without the confines of physical media. Record companies sell physical media. Record companies are going to be obsolete very very soon.
So perhaps the article wasn't useful to an expert, but it's pretty damn useful to someone who wants to become an expert.
Heh... that reminds me of the occasional Gun Amnesty programs put on by the local police. Basically, the police will accept illegal firearms from people, no questions asked. You just walk down to the office and clean your hands of it.
And apparently these programs are quite successful. So I would disagree that a similar MP3 program would be unsuccesful. It's not a direct parallel, but what if there *was* a way to pay the respective artists for the MP3s you've downloaded, and be given a certificate claiming full legal rights for the personal use of those MP3s? It's a little more cumbersome than online micropayments, but if it were handled correctly, I can envision a lot of people cleaning their hands of this whole piracy business.
But I thought MS decided not to move north to British Columbia...
And I don't think there would be an overall balance of taxation between countries... a majority of international customers could purchase from a single country (likely the U.S.), and their home countries would ultimately be screwed out of their taxes. I'm no economist, but I think that's the entire point behind placing duties on imports.
So maybe I can blame my spending habits on NAFTA. :-) I knew it was good fer somethin'...
And if the U.S. institutes a nation-wide Internet sales tax, Americans can purchase from some other country. As long as there's open (and international) competition on the Web, there will be ways around the government greed.
"Miniscule amount of value added"?? Is the Web not entirely founded upon hyperlinks? Of course, instead of using <A HREF="http://foo.com"> in one's page, one could write "http://foo.com" in the text, requiring the user to enter it manually (or copy/paste) into their browser. Though I doubt the average Web user would enjoy that (mind you, such an arrangement would pretty much scare away every AOL user on the Net today...).
How does anyone know it might not have been *better*? No one can accurately predict that the world is a better (or worse) place thanks to MS. But we all know what we like or dislike. :-)
Yeah, it'd be nice, but that's assuming that activities on the Internet are (legally) parallel to activities in real life.
That would also be nice.
Now, I'm as much a fan of Illiad's "selling-out" as the next guy, but this could be the start of something good. If UF can help support the other quality comics out there, then everybody wins.
Or he can hoarde his vast fortunes to himself, and continue to give UF Media a bad name. ;-)
Ooooh, if this one's allowed, I've got a whole lotta tapes to trade in. :-)
There's also the argument that out-of-print media should be fair game for free distribution. Although I have yet to see a final conclusion to that debate (possibly because I'm not looking hard enough...).
Really, Napster (et al) is merely a tool. It happens to be very useful for the above reasons, as well as for piracy. It just searches for filenames which end in .mp3. Big deal.
So it turns out that this newfangled technology is a threat to the RIAA's money-making formula. I don't blame them for trying to fight it, even though they will inevitably lose. And then physical audio media will go the way of the Beta cassette.
Did VHS kill Beta sales? Yes. Will MP3 kill CD sales? Yes. Is this really all that bad? No.
So legal/ethical or not, the industry is gonna change. And it'll be that much easier for me to trade in my old cassettes. :-)