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Scans Daily was a community hosted on the LiveJournal social networking/journaling site, where members could post scanned pages from comics new and old, and then others could come in and comment. There were somewhere between 8,000 and 9,000 members with LiveJournal accounts watching the community, and an unknown amount of watchers without accounts. The community had been around since December, 2003. On February 27th, 2009, LiveJournal pulled the plug on it for copyright violations. There's a lot of speculation and finger pointing going around, and I don't intend to get into any of that, but the general consensus is that it was a post with scans from a Marvel comic released the same day that led to the suspension. Since then, some individual members of the community have received emails from LiveJournal's Abuse Team regarding posts they had made. I feel sympathy for these people. Here's why.
There once was a little game called the Sims. Perhaps you've heard of it, yes? I'm talking old school Sims. Version one. Dis graw is freddishay. The game itself was quite addicting, playing god with the little people, but what truly made it awesome and gave it the legs it had was the ability to create user content. We could make skins, to make the little people look however we wanted, we could make them furniture, we could even hack the programming itself and affect game behavior. It was awesome. And Maxis, the makers of the Sims, really didn't care. They released programs to help us make skins, wallpapers, and floors. They even leaked, unofficially, game specs to facilitate the hacking.
There were lots of websites offering user made content. One of the earliest was called the Skindex. They were a niche site, only hosting comic book and sci-fi themed skins when I found them - this was before we learned how to make the objects - but, more importantly to my part of the story, they were taking submissions. I looked at the skinning tutorial Maxis released, and thought "I can do this", and I did. The first few skins I made were pretty awful, Kitty Pryde's gloves didn't match, for example, but I got better. I made a lot of skins, and I made a lot of friends at the Skindex. I became the resident object hacker. Making content kept me interested in the game a lot longer than I would have been otherwise.
Other skinnable games came out, like Morrowind and Freedom Force, and some of the Skindex artists branched out. Me, I stuck with the Sims. The guy who started the Skindex, Jared, expanded his site into weekly reviews, and a grand, expansive, comics character database project, utilizing the knowledge of all the uber-geeks who'd gravitated to our message boards. But it was Freedom Force that was ultimately our undoing.
One day, a couple of years into the Skindex, a C & D letter from Marvel's legal department landed in Jared's mailbox via registered mail. They found him fairly easily because he used his real info to register the domain. This was not a pirate site, we weren't hiding anything. And unlike some Sims sites, the Skindex content was available free of charge. The letter threatened dire legal consequences, and asked for monetary damages up front. Despite Jared not living in the US (Indeed, a good half of the site contributors weren't American.) he didn't see that he had any recourse. The letter demanded the removal of everything Marvel, the skins, the images, everything, and not just from his server, they acted like he was responsible for the content hosted on satellite sites run out of places like the Netherlands and Taiwan. They also threatened to subpoena the personal information of all contributors and message board members. The reason for the letter, we later learned, was because Marvel was working on their own MMORPG, which never came out, incidentally, and they thought the Marvel skinned characters running around the multiplayer part of Freedom Force were too close to what they had planned.
Now, it's highly debatable whether they could or even would go through with their threats. The skins were shaky ground, as far as copyright infringement went, but the small cover scans and occasional partial panel scans used for the reviews most certainly fell under fair use. But, Marvel had deeper pockets. Jared was trying to start his own comic book store, and he and his wife had their first baby on the way, so he pulled all the Marvel content. The satellite sites (including mine) that were run by US citizens old enough to have something to lose in a lawsuit followed. Some of the European and Asian sites kept their Marvel stuff, as they were mostly run by minors. (And good luck scaring the guy from Hong Kong with US copyright law.) Still, poof, there goes a huge chunk of all our content, just like that. (The Skindex had a way of attracting Marvel Zombies, above all other publishers. Or maybe it was that the large teams Marvel had, like the X-Men and the Avengers, with many costume changes were just more fun to skin.)
As I said, we were on shaky legal ground with the skins, and we knew it. But there's something about a nasty C & D that just drains all the joy out of something that you're only doing for love of the subject. After the C & D the whole place dried up and blew away, not immediately, but it was never the same. The heart was gone.
Speaking for myself, it killed my interest in making anything for the Sims for a long time, or even playing. It also dampened my enthusiasm for comics in general. It doesn't matter whether you're legally in the wrong, and know it, or whether you should have seen it coming. When something like that happens, it hurts. And that's why I feel for the people getting the nastygrams from LJ Abuse now. It's easy to forget that there's a big, soulless corporation there when their product is something that you have an emotional attachment to, and when the soulless corporation rears their head it's like being kicked by your childhood teddy bear.
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