• 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?