When I joined the project, it really just consisted of Darren, a few research questions about comic book scans and scanners, and a handful of screen grabs from torrent sites like The Pirate Bay and Demonoid. “The first step,” Darren told me, “is to gather data. Any day now these sites are all going to be shut down and we’ll lose all the data.” My job was to collect records of as much of the activity from a few main pirate groups as possible using Paparazzi! or print save. This wasn’t too hard in principle: comic scanning crews operate on a more or less organized schedule, with weekly upload packets that also seem to track the activity of independents. For any given week, I had to find one-three records held on a torrent site’s webpage with the relevant information about what was in the torrent file in plain text. Now, when looking for contemporary records (e.g. weekly uploads from 2010-2012), this was simple enough. But the further back I went, the rougher it was to find evidence of scanning crew activity, and the more disorganized that activity became. Meanwhile, Darren would shoot me emails with links like these, urging me to hurry up, because any day now we were going to lose access to everything. I found myself Googling deeper and deeper, visiting stranger and stranger torrent sites, and viewing pages that probably hadn’t been seen in years. But it was worth it. Over the course of about a month, I managed to find more or less consistent weekly records stretching all the way back to the early months of 2005, which is the earliest evidence I ever managed to find of any organized comics piracy. My eyeballs were bleeding, but I was pleased with myself.

For the next phase of the research, Darren brought Max Stein in to help us organize this mountain of data. We figured we would start by inputting all that we had into simple Excel spreadsheets with a few important fields: date uploaded, title of comic, issue, volume, year of publication, format note, scanner name(s), crew, uploader, size of torrent file, language, and any extra comments I might have. Max was instrumental in help automate the process–he took these hundreds of PDF files representing tens of thousands of lines of information and converted them into plain text files. Suddenly, I no longer had to re-write every single entry; instead I could just copy and paste.

Still, the process took months. Shannon joined the project, and together we spent the summer taking on the arduous task of transcription. This was the most gruelling part of the job, but it was still a great job–part of what I was getting paid to do was think critically about comic culture! By about this time last year, the grunt work was done and Darren had lined up a few writing gigs for us. I thought we would dive right in, but it would be months before we started creating a draft. First came the literature review.

But I’m probably approaching the limit of what should go into a single weeknote, so I’ll just have to say to be continued. Meanwhile, this week saw a return to school, and the semester looks like a hectic one already.

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If you didn’t just view the linked trailer, let me blitz through the premise in a couple of sentences: in Antiviral, when a celebrity gets sick with something, from measles to malaria, they call up any number of companies to come and buy a blood sample off of them. Treated very much like a celebrity lending their name to a fragrance, the company then sells consumers the experience of having the same illness as their beloved star. So if your favorite actor contracted herpes, you can pay someone at a clinic to be infected by the same strain of herpes, distilled from the actor’s blood. Here’s where it gets interesting: before selling the disease, the clinic uses a pointlessly creepy machine to render the strain non-contagious. This is effectively copyright protection for illness, to make sure that only the licensed clinic can infect people with the illnesses they sell. When this concept was introduced to Antiviral, my head swam with excitement. How brilliant, how cool, to frame disease in terms of preciousness and IP—just one of the implications was that in the reality of the movie, the IP movement had effectively made possible what medical science has failed to do since time immemorial: halt the spread of sickness.

The main character of the film is a salesman who works for one of these star sickness clinics who infects himself with the illnesses while at work, takes them home in his body, extracts his own blood and then uses his own pointlessly creepy machine to break the DRM (disease rights management) blocks on the viruses so he can pirate them. Fantastic!

Then the whole thing disappointed me when this character was revealed to be after just one thing: money. Yes, the pirate in Antiviral is framed as the ultimately unscrupulous profiteering thief, willing to sink so low as to infect himself with dangerous sicknesses and turn them into contagions just to turn a buck for himself. Even more disappointing: our pirate in the film is part of a sick and twisted network of other profiteers who take the grossness factor even further, using celebrity DNA samples to grow “cell steaks”—literally cloned tissue they sell as meat at specialty butcher shops. These people are portrayed entirely as worshipping at the altar of the almighty dollar, willing to sell each other out, torture, or murder one another if it will get them the celebrity illness samples they need to run their businesses. In Antiviral, piracy is a criminal enterprise run face-to-face with ethics on par with the mob in a Scorcese flick.

There are so many things going on in this movie that simplifies piracy down to base criminality that bugs me. It isn’t that I think piracy is a good thing, just a complicated and nuanced thing. This film attempts to characterize piracy in North America in the present day (Antiviral doesn’t take place in the future, just a parallel reality). What it describes is a highly organized and stratified network of pirates working in different realms of the same kinds of copyright violation who all meet in person on more or less a daily basis and none of whom have any sort of loyalty to one another. Oh, and they all do it just for money: there’s an organized industry, a formal business to their illicit activities. Here’s something closer to the reality of the North American pirate in the 21^st century: loosely affiliated individuals working with little to no profit motive in a flat, almost non-existent organizational structure who never meet face to face or even learn each other’s real names and operate with almost zero external expectations for productivity placed upon them by anyone else. How can the discourse on piracy, stuck now for many years, move forward when absolutely no effort is being made on either side to understand the other?

Also last week Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom returned from hiatus with its season two premiere. In one scene, a major cable news network head is denied access to a SOPA meeting on Capitol Hill. Complaining on the denial of access to the meeting, the president of the network says, “Do you know how much money we lose to piracy every year? $10 billion? $100 billion? Let’s say it’s $10 billion. I want the $10 billion.” This show probably has it about as near reality as we can get: the effects of piracy are, to date, totally untraceable and immeasurable in any kind of reliable fashion, but all the industry knows is it must be losing some money and it must be piracy’s fault. Never mind any evidence to the contrary that suggests as media sharing evolves, so too must media production and economically-based media distribution.

It’s major media outlets like HBO or the Hollywood film industry that shape the public face of the discourse on piracy, and the face they’ve drawn is a circle with two dots and a downward-turning crescent. Their rhetoric is reductive and dismissive when it’s brought forward, and it’s rare to see the issue playing a central role in a media product. Instead, we have throwaway lines or concepts that would completely validate the archaic industry stance on the issue—if they weren’t so poorly written or uninformatively crafted.

I’m not done with this subject (or rant, it seems)—probably more next week when I’ll try to get into IP and academia.

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