Buffy : Season 9

Next Month’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer Has Already Been Pirated

Where do pirates get their digital scans from?

Almost all pirated and illegally uploaded comic books appear on the Wednesday the comic is on sale, sometime mere minutes after the books could have legally been bought off the shelf in a New York store. Iron Muslim, for example, went up at around 10.15am ET yesterday.

The conventional wisdom is that the culprits are comic book clerks who receive comics on Tuesday for Wednesday sale, and are able to scan them in, waiting till the next day to upload them, covering their tracks.

Recently however, David Brothers was able to confirm that the source of a number of Marvel illegally uploaded comics was from an open door directly into Marvel’s ready-for-print files. That the pirated copies prepared well in advance, and as a result missed out some amended errors before the book went print. I understand Marvel closed the security breach. The books are still going up, just from a different source.

But yesterday, something else went awry. And, instead of Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season Nine #8 being uploaded, and made available on a number of hosting sites, issue #9 went up instead. The comic expected to come out next month. Issue 8 is still unavailable illegally.

What does this mean? That somehow the pirates have a way to access Dark Horse comics files. Are preparing them for digital upload well in advance. And somehow one person slipped up. The scan is tagged as being uploaded by “D.T. Rocafella” from the Minutemen group of pirates.