With the release yesterday of Windows Vista and its somewhat onerous music and video content management/monitoring systems, digital rights management, a.k.a. “DRM,” is a topic that’s once again on people’s minds. DRM is, in short, technology used by someone who owns a copyright on digital intellectual property to attempt to protect that property from illegal duplication and distribution. The problem, though, is that in attempting to do so, it also heavily restricts what you can do with content that you yourself have legitimately purchased. If I buy a “CD” with DRM (I use quotations because technically music sold with DRM is not sufficiently hardware compatible to garner an official “CD” designation), I may not be able to rip that CD to my desktop computer so that I can listen to it while in the upstairs of my house, for example–or onto my laptop to listen to while travelling.

I personally find DRM to be simply too onerous to deal with, and consequently I do not buy music CDs that are DRM “protected” (and I use quotations there, because the idea that you protect a product from being used by its purchaser doesn’t seem to me to be “protection” in any conventional sense of the word), nor do I use the popular itunes store, whose music use restrictions are so bizarre and draconian that I would hesitate to use the word “buy” to refer the the transactions that occur there.

Less scrupulous folks (read: everyone under the age of 30) though, use the burdensome nature of DRM as a justification to simply steal content they feel they’re entitled to via filesharing networks, bittorent, etc. When confronted about this, the usual response is, “If there were a reasonably-priced DRM-free way to buy _____, I’d pay for it.” (How you get from that to, “But because there isn’t such a system, it’s OK to just take it illegally,” is a bit more dubious, but is a whole different can of worms.) A case in point that backs up this sort of reasoning is the wild success of the site allofmp3.com, an online music store based in Russia that sells legal (at least in Russia–again, another can of worms), reasonably priced, non-DRM protected music in a variety of formats and bitrates.

It’s not just with music, though, that rights management and piracy comes into play. There’s apparently a huge network of pirated comics content available as well that can be had for free via similar peer-to-peer, bittorent, and usenet systems. I’ve never really checked any of this stuff out, mainly just because I don’t really enjoy reading stuff–comics or prose–on a computer screen, but it’s well known that this content is out there.

I’d like to point out an opportunity for comics folks to put their money where their mouths are when it comes to pirating comics: eyemelt.com.

Eyemelt.com is publisher Slave Labor Graphics’ downloadable comics store. The comics available are all (obviously) stuff published by SLG and thus not really a comics analog to something like allofmp3.com, but they are similar in that they are selling digital content that’s DRM-free, legal and cheap. There’s not a ton of stuff available at the moment, but the site just launched I think last week so that’s to be expected.

I’d like to see the site succeed (not just because they publish my stuff!) because I’d like to think that if it can be demonstrated that selling reasonably priced non-DRM content is a viable business model, then maybe other publishers will get onboard, which could lead to a more appealing “one stop” itunes-like comics download store–and maybe begin putting an end to the futile cat and mouse game of trying to “protect” content from its legitimate owners. As Ian Brown, a senior research manager at the Cambridge-MIT Institute in England, said at a recent presentation on DRM, “It’s the business models that need changing, not the technology.”

I was looking through Diamond’s solicitations that are due in this week to see if there’s anything I wanted to order last minute, and I noticed that Drawn & Quarterly was soliciting a collection of the first fifty or so issues of John Porcellino’s King Cat Comics. I like Porcellino’s work and ordered the book, but I was a bit taken aback by the text of the solicitation blurb, presumably written by someone at D&Q. It began thusly:

“John Porcellino has long been considered the greatest of all cartoonists…”

Really? I’m not so sure of that…

In what will likely be the final installment of this tempest in a teapot that wasn’t–namely last week’s Get Fuzzy story arc–I’ll post a small update with a few bits of info I received yesterday from folks who read my initial posts.

First off, I heard back from my friend at our local paper, The Winston-Salem Journal, and he confirmed that the Journal did not in fact run the (potentially) offending strips, but ran instead replacement strips presumably offered by the syndicate, who certainly must have anticipated resistance from the get-go. (Although I seem to recall that a Sunday Get Fuzzy in which Satchel is shown reading a partially obscured magazine called Bitches in Heat managed to slip through a while back.)

Andrew from MetaDC wrote in to note the interesting choice of replacement strips chosen by the syndicate (assuming that the ones running in The Washington Post are the ones offered to all the papers that chose not to run the strips). I’m not sure how much one can read into this, but apparently the replacement strips were from a previous story arc in which Rob tries to brew beer in his apartment! I’ve got to admit that it seems peculiar to me that a character shown brewing beer in his house is more acceptable to the general public than a character making sign with a slogan that could be construed as referring to–an not even necessarily advocating–marijuana use.

Anyway, at this point it seems like it’d be more fruitful to try to locate a paper that did run the original strips than to keep adding to the list of ones that didn’t. I’ve in fact yet to hear of any paper that ran them…

UPDATE: Well, if this article on Editor and Publisher is to be believed, I’m wrong on several counts. Apparently only 10-12 of the 650 or so papers that carry Get Fuzzy, opted to run the alternate strips instead of the Bucky pot slogan strips.

I’m also pleasantly surprised to be wrong as well in my supposition that, had the original strips been run widely, there would have been more complaining in evidence. Maybe people are so busy complaining about Lio that Get Fuzzy flew in under the radar?

On the other hand, it’s hardly a mark of pride that my local paper, The Winston-Salem Journal was one of the apparently few that wouldn’t run the original strips.  “City of the Arts,” my ass.