Ok, a slightly twisty, bumpy road for you to follow this morning:

• I’ve been following @jdistraction on Twitter for some time now, but haven’t actually made it all the way to her blog. You know how it is; too many things to read every day as it is, and so forth and so on, but I may just be too lazy to get there, too. I don’t know.
• So, today, she tweeted a link to her blog, advising of a picture there in need of a caption (well, apparently in need of everyone’s captions), and solely because her blog is called Zebra Sounds, I had to go check it out.
• So, I liked it. I subscribed to it in Google Reader, and Google Reader, as is its habit, served me up with the last ten posts. So, I looked them over. The earliest one of the bunch has the following:
• And now for something completely different… I subscribe to a news letter that recently arrived in my inbox with this headline: “Want to see the personalized stationery of Hitler, Houdini and Elvis?” I thought, “Absolutely, are you kidding?” because that’s how I roll. (For real.) I love this site. Have fun.
• Well, how I  roll is I click on random stuff, so I clicked through. And I found this:
• http://www.letterheady.com/post/394592390/dada
• As one commenter noted “Dada had stationery. Who knew?” But the really interesting bit was this (blown up a bit, and it’s not a very high resolution image to begin with):
• 
• I wasn’t really able to make much of that, but it did seem likely that someone named [G. or C.] Ridemont-[something French-looking] had something to do with dada (a movement with which, I must admit, I’m not very familiar). I did a search for [dada ridemont], and got a handful of hits, which garnered a name for me:
• Georges Ridemont-Dessaignes
• There, I am at a dead end, as M Ridemont-Dessaignes has a sum total of two hits on his name, and both of them are in French. (You do know that the technical term for a person who speaks more than one language is “polyglot,” right? You do know that the technical term for a person who speaks only one is “American,” right?)
• So, to sum up:
• At one time, there was an organization (?) whose name was D (subscript) O (superscript) H (superscript).
• The superscripts may be 4 and 2, respectively. Then again, they may not.
• This organization had something to do with dada (?).

And just to reiterate, if “Doh!” could be linked (however flimsily) to dada, that would just be too cool!

Any art majors out there who want to enlighten me?

• Piracy isn’t really stealing, because the so-called victim of the piracy never loses anything.

• Piracy isn’t a violation of copyright law, because you’re making a copy for your own personal use, and that’s legal.

• Copyright law was never intended to protect the artists, it was intended to protect the printers.

• The only people rooting for the preservation of copyright law are the big corporations, because all it does is perpetuate their profit model.

• Copyright law is immoral because a worker who creates an original work for an employer never holds the copyright to it.

• Copyright law is immoral because so-called “content” is information and information should be free because it is in the best interest of the common good.

• Since the incremental cost of digital distribution is near zero, the price of digital work should be near zero.

• Artists will always produce art, whether they get paid for it or not, because it is in their blood.

• It is immoral for any artist to make more off their art than I declare reasonable.

• Blah blah blah blah blah …

But rule number one, life’s Standing Order Number One, is “Always identify the problem.”

The problem here is very simple, and it has nothing at all to do with the fairness or validity or history or purpose or origins of copyright law.

It’s the piracy, stupid!

In actual point of fact, none of the arguments above, and most of the arguments I haven’t listed, have anything at all to do with the problem, which is that we seem to have raised an entire generation who want something for nothing. Yes, I know. That’s a generalization, and it’s as unfair as any such statement, but it has become increasingly obvious that there is a generational divide in operation here.

Want to know where the ducks are? Look to where the shotguns are pointed. And in the battle over piracy, the guns are pointed squarely at copyright law. Why? Because it’s the one thing standing between the pirates and their victims. And what does that mean? That we, as artists, as creators of intellectual property, must protect the existing copyright law. It may not be perfect. It may not be what it was intended to be. It may not exist for the reasons we think it should, but the fact of the matter is that, as it stands now, copyright law is an impediment to the progress of the pirates.

Of course copyright law protects the printers, when they are the copyright holders.

Of course copyright law prevents information from being free. Your social security number, bank account number, and current bank balance are information. Are you going to make it free?

Of course artists will always produce art, but will you ever get to see it?

The only way to guarantee the continued production of any art, whether it is fiction, painting, drawing, or hand-decorated mud pies, is to see to it that the creator is granted full protection under law from the theft of that art. If the artist chooses to transfer that copyright, as part of some contract, to a printer, publisher, or other third party, that is their right.

Stop talking about whether piracy is theft or not.

Stop talking about whether copyright is moral or not.

Start asking yourself this:

What is a world without any art going to look like?