So, if you guys have been watching the site for the past few days, you’ll have seen my post and Hawk’s post in regards to how a reader used Lulu to publish his own TPB of #1-141 of the comics.

A blog called Plagiarism Today has an interesting write-up on the whole story. Check it out!

I want to close the book on this, because it’s over and done with, but a few things need clarification.

1. Lulu is actually a very cool idea for a service. With it, literally anyone can make their own small runs of publications for a fraction of the cost that a larger printing press would ask. We don’t really bear them any ill will, although I’ll be honest: I’m a little skeptical of how easy it is to slip copyrighted material under their radar, and there ought to be someone checking on all the orders that come through. (I know they receive a large volume of orders, but that doesn’t make a big difference to me.) The truth of the matter as it stands, however, is that the responsibility for that is in the hands of the user - and the user should realize that if they abuse the service, then it will cause problems for everyone.

2. Some readers were angry or surprised that we reacted the way we did. Our anger on a professional level was minimal. No one really made a huge profit off of our work, and honestly, it was just one copy of the book. The whole legal end of it was not of huge concern to us. On a personal level, however, we were pretty upset. From our point of view, we’re working hard, staying up late nights and losing sleep so you we can put these comics and content out onto the internet for free. In my opinion, that is already a lot to give. People in the past have e-mailed us and asked us (for example) if they can print out comics and put them up in the office, and we don’t have a problem with that (in fact, we think it’s damn cool) - and we appreciate that they asked. This situation is a whole different story, though - the scale of it, in particular. We weren’t asked, and we found ourselves in a situation where we had to say something in order to stop this sort of thing from happening in the future.

3. In the past few months, we’ve had a lot of these issues crop up. The worst of these was the Skag story (summary: a company in Greece plagiarized our wallpapers for notebooks they sell in European countries). So it’s quickly becoming our policy to nip these things in the bud before they balloon into larger problems, because it’s … just honestly a pain in the ass.

4. Just to re-iterate - we fully plan on releasing a book. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that Applegeeks doesn’t provide us with a livelihood, so it has to become a secondary to work and school. Just remember, the day that we see that baby in print, no one will be happier than Hawk and myself. Trust me on that one.

As far as this past little fiasco, I consider it over and done with. The book is closed (I hope), and we can all happily move on. Anime USA is this weekend, and I have plans - plans to rock out. You should perhaps join me, and we can rock out together. I will be hanging with Shannon and Hawk, and we’ll be floating around the convention when we’re not at panels. Keep an eye out, we’re always happy to meet you guys!

Peace!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 15th, 2005 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.