Mark Waid: I’m Fine With You Pirating My Comics, Pirate People!

I’m paraphrasing, obviously. However the guts of the sentiment remains the same. Mark Waid is fine with people pirating his comic books — even the ones that cost money.

Robot 6:

Mark Waid has really put his money where his mouth is: After preaching the gospel of  the “culture of sharing”  for a couple of years now, he’s  making his comic  Insufferable  available for anyone to download and share.

Although the comic is available for free from his  Thrillbent  website, he found that within 24 hours the first chapter had been copied and uploaded to torrent and file-sharing sites. “The only thing that startled me was that it took 24 hours,” he said, and sure enough, the next two chapters were uploaded even faster. And he’s happy about it:

Your mileage may vary but, me, I’m okay with torrenters and “pirates” sharing INSUFFERABLE.Not  just because, what the hell, it’s free anyway, Mr. Cynic. .. my hand to God, even if we were charging for it, I’d still be happy because the exposure and promotion is worth more to me at this point than dollars and cents. But more than that…more than that … after having been hip-deep in the research for the past three years, I have seen zero conclusive evidence that, on the whole, “piracy” removes more money from the system than it adds to it.

Furthermore, he points out, pirates gonna pirate and he has no way to stop them. So rather than obsessing about that, he’s turned it to his advantage by posting each chapter as downloadable PDF and .cbz files – with a pointer toward Thrillbent on the last page. There’s no reason why the uploaders couldn’t remove that page, but they haven’t. What’s more, he’s finding that most of the uploaded files of  Insufferable.

Thoughts? Impressions? Hit me.