Comics and digital copy protection
Dirk Deppey, perpetrator of The Comics Journal’s weekdaily ¡Journalista! newsblog, just posted a pointer to an essay he wrote about file formats for digital comics. He has a good handle on the historical examples of the music and video industries, the legal issues involved in encryption and copy-prevention technology, and also the whole open-source software phenomenon. So rather than writing up an article about this myself, I’ll refer you to his. {smile}
However…
I do take issue (somewhat) with his implication that a proprietary format for “e-comics” is likely to displace any open format for them, making it impossible for the proverbial self-publisher to publish and distribute his wares. Despite the foothold that proprietary anti-copying formats have gained in video, and the possibility that they might win legislative backing in audio, support for more or less “open” formats is still widespread. Players for unencrypted MPEGs (for movies) and MP3s (for music) are widely available and seem likely to remain that way. Even when/if proprietary formats become the norm for these media, if a movie studio or music label of whatever size decided to start releasing their wares in VCD or MP3 disk format, they’d find a large market of players for them.
The same is true of comics. Perhaps even moreso, because comics are such a fundamentally “recordable” medium. (We’ve been putting images on flat surfaces for millennnia; capturing sounds and moving pictures are very recent innovations.) So I don’t think it’s likely that the non-proprietary digital formats that currently enable you to self-publish comics on a shoestring budget (PNG for flat line art, JPEG for fully-rendered art, perhaps SVG for Illustrator/Freehand-style art) will no longer be supported. These formats are essential to the Web as we know it, so browsers will have to support them. (Even if these standards are eventually replaced, there will still be a need to display images on screens without mucking about with digital rights management. Something equally unrestricted will replace them.) Open graphics formats should remain as available to digital zinesters as paper and photocopiers are to the current analog counterparts.
Proprietary data formats are definitely something to be fought, both on principle and to preserve the rights of legitimate consumers of music and movies (to say nothing of poor Microsoft Word users, with documents that Microsoft is trying to partially encrypt whether they like it or not). And it’s certainly possible for a combination of market domination, craven poltiicians, and apathetic consumers to make your worst-case scenario come to pass. But I’m not losing much sleep over the prospect of getting locked out of the comics distribution market… at least not that way.