Entire PLAYBOY Magazine on DVD

It's a bad news, good news thing.

Good news for cartoon fans. All 600+ issues of PLAYBOY magazine will be reproduced on DVD. Cole, Silverstein, Wilson, Gerberg, Dedini, Interlandi, Hoest -- they'll all be there, in this new page by page DVD -- similar in format to the NEW YORKER DVD set.

PLAYBOY is, along with the NEW YORKER, a seminal publication of 20th century magazine cartooning.

The bad news is for the people who created the content. None of the creators of any of that content will be compensated. Not centerfolds, not writers, not photographers, no one.

And the new owners of NATIONAL LAMPOON will follow suit. (I wrote about LAMPOON and the business practices of its new owners on August 4, 2006 here.)

The COMPLETE PLAYBOY DVD will make money, sure. But only for the men and women in the PLAYBOY business offices. This is wrong.

Some thoughtful comments from Tom Spurgeon here.