Ethics of Illegal Archiving

Comics piracy is controversial for obvious reasons–because it potentially steals income from folks who make comics. But many legal means of accessing digital comics have their own issues, especially for archival researchers. Without making a case for piracy, let’s discuss digital access issues. 1/13

Each of the Big Two publishers of American superhero comics has their own digital comics platform. DC Comics has DC Universe Infinite and Marvel has Marvel Unlimited. For a monthly fee, both platforms provide access to thousands of historical and contemporary comics. 2/13

Both platforms are a boon for comics researchers, who can access high-quality scans of material that was, until recently, often difficult & costly to access. Academics also use these platforms to teach comics, which allows them to assign a wider variety of material at a lower cost to students. 3/13

However, as archives, DC & Marvel’s digital comics apps have many limitations. First, they’re incomplete. Both apps are missing large swaths of the publishing runs of major titles like Superman and X-Men. Rights issues also create gaps; if a license has changed hands, it won’t be available. 4/13

In addition, most of the available scans in these official archives do not include paratextual materials such as ads and letter pages. For researchers, these paratextual materials provide important contextual information that can alter or deepen the direction of one’s research. 5/13

And unlike the offerings at academic archives and public domain archives like ComicBookPlus, DC and Marvel’s digital comics apps are not fully indexed. You can’t reliably search these archives by subject matter or genre and creator credits are often incomplete. 6/13

Illegal archives–i.e. those created through comics piracy–address some of these issues (while raising many others, which we’ll discuss in due course). Pirated archives, whether accessed via torrents or websites, are often more complete than the legal alternatives. 7/13

Illegal scans of older comics often include paratextual materials and scanners coordinate for completeness of coverage. While these illegal scans are rarely indexed, they are generally clearly organized by title, year, volume, and other markers (such as “in continuity” or “out of continuity”). 8/13

Some comics scanners clearly perceive themselves as performing archival work. This is evident in the naming of the scanning team Digital Comics Preservation and in the comics they prioritize. Wershlet, Sinervo, and Tien document that circa 2010, 75% of DCP’s scans were non-contemporary. 9/13

The ethics of illegal archives are both obvious and opaque. Stealing from artists is indefensible. Yet both historically & presently, most Marvel and DC comics use “work for hire” models, meaning creators don’t earn royalties when their work appears in trade paperbacks or on digital platforms. 10/13

The work for hire system might complicate comics piracy. Folks providing illegal scans of comics are not, in most cases, financially profiting from their piracy. And, especially where older comics are concerned, artists aren’t directly losing sales since they don’t actually own their work. 11/13

But the exploitative nature of the work for hire system doesn’t make stealing okay. Simply put: if fans don’t buy physical or digital comics, Marvel and DC won’t make money from making comics and will be thus disinclined from paying artists to make new comics. 12/13

Which is to say: while comics researchers are sometimes faced with circumstances where materials can only be obtained via illegal archives, accessing illegally distributed material is inevitably an ethical quagmire, the costs and benefits of which should always be rigorously evaluated. 13/13

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