Eyemelt.com: DRM-Free Comics Downloads

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.”