Thanks Copyright Culture: Web Comic '8-Bit Theater' Releases Book With No Pictures Out Of Fear
from the promoting-the-regress dept
We tend to talk about many of the nuanced and intricate problems with our current copyright culture, but the 10,000 foot view of the problem is essentially that copyright tends to make culture disappear. It can do this in lots of ways, but one of the least recognized of them is simply that with a culture of copyright maximilism, many content producers simply don't release the content they want to release it out of fear of the reprisal that has been seen in other cases.
That's something of the case when it comes to 8-Bit Theater releasing a book featuring the entirety of the comics that were released, just without the pictures. Instead, it's just a "script" release. Why? Well, because those pictures are based on old Final Fantasy assets.
From 2001 to 2009, writer Brian Clevinger of Atomic Robo fame produced a hilarious webcomic called 8-Bit Theater, which follows the misadventures of a dysfunctional adventuring party. Unfortunately, that adventuring party is comprised of Final Fantasy game sprites, so Clevinger can’t reprint them without getting sued to hell by Square Enix. That is unless he leaves out the images and creates a 20th anniversary book featuring just the scripts. That’s what he’s doing. The script thing.
According to the Kickstarter page for the 8-Bit Theater 20th Anniversary Complete Script Book, which is just now reaching its $28,000 goal after less than a day since being posted, fans have been clamoring for some sort of print edition of the beloved series for years.
Now, to be clear, Square Enix didn't seem to have any problem with the web comic being produced to begin with. But it seems clear that no deal was worked out with the company to allow this physical book to be published using the images from the comic. And, as the Kickstarter results indicate, this is a book people very much want. Unfortunately, they very much won't get it in its original form, due to fear of copyright reprisal.
Instead, backers will get the 8-Bit Theater 20th Anniversary Complete Script Book Do Not Sue Edition.
Funny? Sure, in a way. But it's also a little sad and a lot irritating that something as transformative as this comic, still very much in demand by the public, cannot be produced the way it should in book form simply out of fear of being sued for copyright infringement. After all, Square Enix loses nothing by the production of this book.
But we all lose out on the loss of culture due to the fear of copyright culture.
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Filed Under: 8-bit theater, brian clevinger, chilling effects, comics, copyright, script
Companies: square enix
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The only sensible position
If creators were allowed to sell comics using characters from games decades in the past what possible reason would people have to pay for the legal and easy to find version of the games the characters (very loosely) are from?
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Re: The only sensible position
wow, that amazing. Thanks for share this
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The fear that someone somewhere might make a single cent that is rightly yours, even if you completely abandoned the IP for a really long time.
Well it never would have been successful without our part so you owe us 95% of the profits.
We don't like that you made this character racist/gay/other horrible things. People will think less of us or that we made it!
It is easier to say no to everything & sue than to risk that someone might do something unimaginable and make a buck.
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In the case of 8BT, I think Brian did all of those — sometimes at the same time. I mean, Black Mage alone… 👀
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"I mean, Black Mage alone…"
You just had to invoke rule 34, didn't you? God damn it, Stephen...
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...yes, because if there's one game I think of when I think "completely abandoned," it's Final fucking Fantasy.
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Re: Re:
Well it's been abandoned in the sense of "we'll let basically anyone jam a generic boring script into a game and call it FF 20 or whatever...."
Square Enix gave up caring about game quality quite a few years ago and every single employee left for greener pastures, where generic fantasy 29.4 isn't the go-to method.
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Re: Re: Re:
Final Fantasy was completely abandoned.. They made some new game with the same name to replace it with, but there is no relation.
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Square Enix never abandoned either the game or the franchise known as Final Fantasy; to say otherwise is to knowingly and openly lie. And even if the first Final Fantasy game had been “abandoned” somehow, that wouldn’t entitle Brian Clevinger to infringe upon the copyrights held by Squenix on that particular work any more than it would entitle me to do the same.
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"Square Enix never abandoned either the game or the franchise known as Final Fantasy; to say otherwise is to knowingly and openly lie."
Well, you could argue that once they'd hit a certain treshold they at least stopped developing it. FF 7 and 8 were about peak for the franchise, and ever since there has been a significant degradation with focus given only on upgrading the special effects and shoehorning the game into some generic mmorpg template.
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Re:
That "rightly" belongs in quotation marks.
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To be fair, Clevinger also stated that the comic pages are only 72dpi, when you'd want at least 300dpi for print. So this script book is probably for the best anyways.
(I'm not saying the copyright issue isn't a valid concern. I do recall Square Enix having a fit initially when people from Overclocked Remix started up a Kickstarter for a FF6 remix album. SE did eventually allow it to happen, but the initial Kickstarter was shutdown due to SE filing a copyright claim.)
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High DPI of.... 8-bit sprites ... won't change anything (In theory it might change the quality of the images that don't belong to Square, if Brian has higher quality version of it. More likely he just has the originals, and is not interested in spending the time to recreate all the pages just for print).
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The script book, is "for the best"? isn't it just a joke that only exists because they promised something and couldn't deliver? The quality of the originals is not an issue if what you are supposed to be putting out is a book of the originals.. You can just make them smaller or blow them up at poor quality or whatever, at least it's still some form of the comic people are looking for. You don't release an old TV show in audio only because you can't properly upgrade the picture to HD
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Re: Re:
You know, if you don't have a basic understanding of a topic, it's okay not to express an opinion on it.
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Re: Re: Re:
When you are printing if your original image is lower res you can print it smaller to increase the DPI (but get a smaller print) or print it larger but get lower quality, but you are still going to have a comic. Without the copyright issues, it's hard to imagine they could have come up with something someone would consider worse than having the pictures stripped out entirely. I haven't seen the script version, but I read the comic and the pictures are kind of important
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Re: Re: Re: Re:
Yes. In the case of this 612x936 strip, for example, printing at 300dpi would mean that you're printing it at about 2"x3".
I'm going to go ahead and assume you're not going to click on the link I've provided, so let me clarify that the strip I have linked is 13 panels and has extremely dense text. It would be illegible at 2"x3".
You say "print it larger" like it's simply a matter of adjusting the percentage in your print settings.
But changing the size of an image involves multiple judgements that are often hidden from the end-user and which you do not appear to have considered.
There are multiple ways to make an image bigger. To put it in reductive terms, you can either just make the pixels bigger, or you can put the image through some kind of filter that makes it blurrier.
Problem: There are multiple components to an 8BT strip, and those components would benefit from different kinds of resizing. The pixelated 8-bit art should simply be upsized, with colors and pixellation preserved -- but that would look like shit for the text, the balloons, and other elements of the strip. Whereas the text and balloons would benefit from being put through some kind of upscaler algorithm, but if you did that to the art, it would come out smeary and wouldn't look like the 8-bit pixel art that gives the strip its name.
And I haven't even gotten into the heavy JPEG artifacting that's visible even in those small images, and the question of whether Clevinger even has access to higher-quality, uncompressed originals.
This is a much more complicated problem than you're making it out to be. You have not thought this through. It also seems pretty clear you haven't actually looked at the Kickstarter and read what Clevinger has to say about it; you're making all sorts of baffling claims like "isn't it just a joke that only exists because they promised something and couldn't deliver?" that you seem to have completely made up out of whole cloth.
And my dude, you do this a lot. I've seen you aggressively argue stances on everything from the First Amendment to the Senate to US v Microsoft that demonstrate you're not only completely pig-ignorant of even basic facts about those subjects, but not at all interested in listening to people who know more than you do.
So I dunno, man. Maybe the next time you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, instead of pretending that you do, you could try being quiet and listening. You might learn something.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I'm happy to be corrected, I'd rather be attacked and insulted and learn something than stay ignorant if I'm in the wrong but seriously, that stuff is completely beside the point. I just printed the image from the link that you sent me full size on letter and you can see the picture and read and understand the text and image context just fine with no manipulation whatsoever. The point wasn't that image manipulation for printout (which I need to do all the time for work, although it's beside the point entirely) is so easy or that it's so easy to get a perfect printout or a great printout or even a good printout.. The point is that you are comparing something to nothing here at least in terms of the images.
The title on the thing is "Do Not Sue Edition", which I took as jokingly referring to them wanting to release the actual strip, but releasing this instead due to copyright concerns.. This edition is a compromise and the joke in the title is pointing out the compromise, they are completely up front about having to make the compromise.
I should not have said they promised something and couldn't deliver though. I misunderstood this from the article
"Instead, backers will get the 8-Bit Theater 20th Anniversary Complete Script Book Do Not Sue Edition."
To mean that backers were getting this instead of what they signed up for which is completely not the case
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The copyright reason is the primary reason the comic won’t see print, yes. But Clevinger himself said that because of the dpi issue, “even if we could print them we can't print them” (direct quote from the Kickstarter page).
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Yeah I saw that.. But that part I don't entirely buy if you take it literally. Yes he could say that the images wouldn't have been top notch quality even if he could print them, but really they were never all that top notch quality to begin with anyway. This seems a bit like sour grapes, I fully admit I could be completely wrong and maybe the images not being printable at high quality would still be a deal breaker for them even without copyright, but I'm pretty skeptical.
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Variation on a theme
This reminds me of 9 years ago with my daughter's Art History textbook with no images. (see https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120917/01060120399/university-requires-students-to-pay-180-art-h istory-text-that-has-no-photos-due-to-copyright-problems.shtml)
Art and technology by their very nature take a combinative form, building new by adapting and improving elements of old. Copyright, a legal fiction to assign restrictions to the otherwise natural flow and recombination of ideas, is supposed to be meant to promote advancement by giving time-limited ownership as incentive to creators to increase their motivation to share. Instead it is commonly used to inhibit sharing, to impede improvement and innovation, and with ever-increasing terms, to essentially permanently assign ownership.
Copyright reform is long overdue.
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And it only gets worse for the many spritecomics that use art from multiple sources.
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On one hand, I can see where Squenix might take issue with a published version of the comic. We’re talking about a comic that (loosely) tells (what counts for) the story of the original Final Fantasy by using assets from said game.
On the other hand, the comic is a loving (and hilarious) parody of the original game and the RPG genre in general. Any company worth a damn could at least take a hands-off approach to dealing with it (as Square apparently did when the comic was running).
I’d love to see the comic published for real. But even if copyright weren’t an issue, getting the comic ready for print would require a level of work that nobody should want Brian Clevinger to do. Also Brian doesn’t have access to magic and, by extension, the best thing about magic.
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Once of the best things I ever did was find a archive of the entire series, and make number only symlinks to the images... makes sending people links to pages (on a LAN) so much easier (that's a very very important aspect of getting anything done at any day job).
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There was no right for them to even start using copyright images
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Re: There was no right for them to even start using copyright im
Of course they are. The pixel art style is essential to the flavor of the strip. Which, in addition to literally being called 8-bit Theater, is itself a pretty specific parody of the original Final Fantasy, its characters, its world, and even its gameplay.
While it's true that he could have probably made his own pixel art that evokes Final Fantasy but doesn't step on any copyrights, I see two problems with that line of thinking:
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Re: Re: There was no right for them to even start using copyrigh
And just since I posted that, we've got a new Techdirt article up that serves as a pretty good supporting example of point #2: Not This Again: Facebook Threatens To Sue Guy Who Registered 'DontUseInstagram.com'
Companies claim copyright/trademark infringement even when they don't have a valid case all the time. Even if Clevinger had used original graphics, I don't think that would mitigate the risk of retaliation by SE much.
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Re: Re: There was no right for them to even start using copyrigh
Also
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Re: There was no right for them to even start using copyright im
The world is full of perfectly usable artwork, so why should people have to pay someone to reinvent the wheel everytime they want to create something?
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Just another slow day here at TD...
Visibly, that is: struggle out of public sight just to use plain HTML box!
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Do ZOMBIES count for diversity?
Helpful advice from "drkkgt" breaking 17 month silence.
drkkgt: 60 (6), 17 mo gap 30 Jul 2009 https://www.techdirt.com/user/drkkgt -- sparse but did reply...
All hail the 3rd oldest active commentor! Since 28 Sep 2004!
Brent Ashley: 101 (6), 17 mo gap; 21 mo gap; 4 YEAR GAP after 2005; 3rd OLDEST 28 Sep 2004! https://www.techdirt.com/user/brentashley
"Brent Ashley" hasn't commented since Oct 21st, 2019 and "drkkgt" not since Oct 10th, 2019. Yet both pop out after 17 months on same SLOW day! (18 total comments so far today, of which several regulars make two.)
Two commentors with nearly same gap CANNOT be taken as yet another coincidence. The most trivial estimate of the odds both show up this morning is roughly the square of the days they didn't: 510510, or one in 260,000. Add in that one is merely making a correction, after surely ignoring dozens of prior opportunities, and it's ASTRO-TURFING. -- YES, a dull correction is actually MORE significant: the purpose of the astro-turfing is provide a background to make the site look "believable".* The zombies never bring themselves to attention, definitely never dissent.
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Re: Do ZOMBIES count for diversity?
I have 3 questions.
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Re: Re: Do ZOMBIES count for diversity?
Hi, there. :)
I don't normally bother with troll comments, but, currently, this one is nearly at the end of the comment section, so I feel more comfortable offering an opinion without it derailing the genuine conversation for the article.
Please, forgive me for answering your sensibly concise questions with such a lengthy response, but I think a comprehensive reply may be of some benefit, for those few readers who might be unwisely inclined to take the troll's claims at face value.
The short answers to your questions are:
Your observation is correct and the troll's talking nonsense;
It's nonsense predicated on false, illogical assumptions and no-one should care about it, particularly;
The longer response is that -- from what I can see -- the troll's comments are just trollish nonsense, making little sense when subjected to any kind of scrutiny.
The first and most obvious contradiction is, for me, the fact that I make comments on another site in exactly the way the troll claims is proof of sockpuppetry here. I used to comment all the time on Torrentfreak, but I got sick of both the excessive trolling (at the time) and the continuing hassle of enabling Disqus' ludicrous number of scripts and wandered off elsewhere.
I still pop up every now and then, but only when it's a topic of particular interest, where I think I might be able to add a comment of greater value or substance. Otherwise, there are large gaps, usually of several months or years in length. I'm reasonably confident I'm not a sockpuppet.
That's also the most plausible explanation for the accused commenters' activity here: they've a particular interest in those particular topics. If the troll you replied to looks hard enough for coincidences -- and considers all such coincidences to be automatic proof of sockpuppetry -- then it's effectively impossible for him not to "prove" himself right, in short order.
The probability that it actually is just a coincidence -- and that, given a large-enough dataset, unlikely coincidences must happen surprisingly often, usually unnoticed -- is something he can't consider without his entire thesis unravelling.
Taking his claims seriously -- for argument's sake -- and looking closely at the accused accounts suggests they are more probably genuine than not: the language and communication styles used are not an easy fit for any of Techdirt's regular columnists, commenters or trolls. The most skilled writers around -- working in any medium -- usually have to fight to not sound like themselves (or another established identity that they're more used to) when they write. Even when they do it well, there are usually hints, here and there, that they're not writing in their 'natural' voice.
This is especially the case when it's multiple comments on very similar topics. The very recognisable writing-styles exhibited over time by TD's very small number of regular trolls is proof enough of that. Even on a 'slow news day', writing sockpuppets as effectively as would be required here requires far more time and mental effort than would be justified by any conceivable benefits in this context.
Also, the number of accounts he has asserted (on numerous threads) to be pro-TD sockpuppets is high to the point of absurdity. Given that some of them have extensive online presences, the amount of work needed to create so many distinct identities -- and have them comment -- seems to exceed anything a few working professionals could easily knock together on their lunch hour.
You'd need people working on this for something close to a full time job. TD's trolls might be able to do it -- since quite a few of them seem like they might be unemployable -- and they certainly have more motive, by way of a false-flag setup, although their writing skills are rather limited for the task. A third-party lobbying firm or government propaganda outfit is also more plausible, although what their gain might be is unclear.
Famously, the first rule of investigative journalism is 'follow the money'. Techdirt gains very little from adding minor fictional commenters, especially those that appear only rarely and largely tend to agree with TD's articles. The troll here has yet to articulate a credible theory as to why TD should even want to do so, much less expend so much time and effort on the job.
They could be said to gain something from creating hostile trolls themselves, since such comments commonly increase engagement among genuine commenters responding to false claims -- although such false-flag activity seems somewhat unlikely, given how far it falls outside of normal modes of leftist operation and ethics -- not to mention the great reputational harm, should such deception come to light. The trollish far-right can easily survive such exposure. The left, not so much.
The troll is just trolling. It's just coincidence. :)
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Re: Re: Re: Do ZOMBIES count for diversity?
I have to say, the trolls are dedicated bunch. I almost admire their perseverance. I have been on and off Tech Dirt for years and I still come and suspect it is the same trolls as always.
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Re: Re: Re: Re:
To be fair, it's not as though they go out of their way to hide who they are.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Do ZOMBIES count for diversity?
"...and I still come and suspect it is the same trolls as always."
Troll, singular, I think. The-random-nickname-of-the-day who used to spam comments in Torrentfreak under the name of Bobmail and half a dozen other nicks he used to have his own back in the debates has always been very recognizable. On Techdirt known as out_of_the_blue/Jhon smith/antidirt and a few other recurring names.
When Torrentfreak adopted forced logins through disqus, 99% of the trolling vanished along with exactly one troll - good old Bobmail, or as I've referred to him since the olden days, Baghdad Bob.
Some ten years ago Mike Masnick referred to him as a particularly idiotic brand of motherfucker, and Baghdad Bob has haunted this place ever since. I suspect it's less that he's dedicated and more that he's, by now, carrying an addiction to grievance which makes most crack cocaine users seem casual.
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Re:
There once was an out of the blue
Who hated the process of due
Each post that he'd made
Was DMCAed
And shoved up his ass with a screw
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Don't use other people's IP
Playing the devil's advocate...
Is this is a risk taken by anyone who bases their creation off of someone else's IP? Maybe he should consider himself lucky Square Enix didn't object and send him a cease and desist order before now.
I know people are fans of things, but the only way to keep copyright maximalists from suing is to not use anything of theirs in any other form.
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