Justice League #1 went on sale at dozens of midnight release events across the country last night, kicking off the DCnU with a lot of excited nerds who are now probably somewhat sleepy. But if they’d just stayed home, according to Comic Book Resources, they could have picked up an illegal copy from their home computers as early as 11:10 last night, from the Pirate Bay alone.
Right, so, not really news, right? Comics have been pirated ever since most of us got the kind of internet connection that would allow for tons of images to be transmitted in a manner of hours or less. Piracy is a real issue for the comics industry, and something that DC, as the publisher taking the first real dip into the digital distribution pool (if not a cannonball, they’re at least venturing in far enough to get their suit good and wet), should be looking out for. Surely just 50 minutes after that pirated digital copy hit the internet their legal digital copy of Justice League went available with the release of the physical comic?
Nope.
DC’s digital releases, nominally day and date with their physical counterparts, are actually unavailable until 2pm every Wednesday, leaving, to take my local hometown store as an example, a window of at least four hours between the availability of the physical and digital editions.
As CBR points out:
DC Comics has two things to worry about here. The first is that the first comic of the publisher’s biggest event in decades was available illegally more than 14 hours before the legitimate digital release, which begs the question of why the company is holding the digital release till so late in the day. To protect comics shops? Well, that failed. There will always be people who use illegal downloads because they’re free, but what DC needs to worry about is people who would pay for a legitimate download but grabbed the torrent first because it was up when they woke up this morning, and they could read the comic over their coffee. If you’re going to do digital, dammit, do it right.
Personally, I’m going to be using digital for one thing only: picking up the titles I didn’t buy in the store that turned out to be good… one month after release, when their price goes down by 30%. The availability of cheaper back issues is the single greatest advantage of this distribution method to the regular comic purchaser, and is a great deal for DC as well, since the brick and mortar store that one would normally search for back issues has already paid up front for that issue. The purchase price of the physical back issue goes to the store. The price of the digital goes straight back to DC’s pocket.
That is, if everybody doesn’t pick up the pirated copy.
