For the next couple of weeks (or until I get tired of it), I will send a FREE copy of any one of my seven ebooks to you, on the following conditions:

1. You MUST make five copies and send them to five of your friends. (Bear in mind, of course, that I have no way to police you on this. You could totally cheat me, and just kick back and read the book and eat bonbons without ever making a single copy. So, yeah… honor system, ok?)
2. You must make ONLY five copies and send them blah blah blah. (Again, under the eagle eye of your own honor. (Did you see what I did there? Guilt. Oh, yes.))
3. You MUST email me at levi@levimontgomery.com and tell me which ebook you want. Also, tell me whether you want an EPUB, a MOBI, or a PDF.
4. You MUST use “I wanna be a pirate” as the subject. This is to ensure my spam filter doesn’t eat your message.

And that’s all there is to it!

So Arrr! Get those messages into the bottles, mates! (And there’s only one of me (thank everything you thank for things!), so give me a day or so before you send out your Dobermans, ok?)

I’m going to assume you’re familiar with it (if not, go read this article at Wikipedia, which I’m fairly certain is not the “my own Wikipedia page!” she may have been fantasizing about a year ago), so I’m not going to link to all the places you can read the juicy details. I’m not going to rehash all the arguments about piracy and intellectual property and so on. Instead, I’m going to ask a different question:

What if she was telling the truth as she saw it?

What if she really, truly, honestly did believe that what she was doing was fair, legal, moral, ethical? What if she really did think “Well, it was on the Internet. Didn’t you want it published?” (oops – that’s a link. Sorry.) What if she really did think, not just that no one would catch her, not just that no one would complain, but that everyone involved would be thankful to her for publishing their content? For “correcting” period spellings? What if she really did think that asking for an apology was like asking your fairy godmother to apologize for twinking her magic wand and making you famous?

I know this is a hard thing to imagine. I know the next place you want to go is “Well, how could anyone be that stupid? That ignorant?” Because… well, indeed, how could they? But set that aside, too. The place I want to go is “Imagine it’s true.” Imagine you were just minding your own business, curating the internet, collating all this fine public domain content, delivering it to a whole new audience, and maybe making a few bucks in the process. Hey, you’re rolling in the daisies, you know? You’ve even got advertisers paying you to do all this. Then one morning, you wake up to find that the entire Internet has been dropped on your head (oh – sorry).

Now what? Now your empire is collapsing, some very angry people are talking about you, some of them have very deep pockets and legal staff standing by, and by this time next year, you’re going to be hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. Now your name is a verb (ok, that link I’m not sorry for – that’s too funny not to pass on). Now people are using your verb in the wild. Now you’re sitting in a mewling little ball under your desk, all your arms and legs wrapped tightly around yourself, going “But what did I do? What did I do?”

If Judith Griggs is a pirate in the true, intellectual-thief-stealin’-yer-stuff sense of the word, if she knew she was walking a plank that was due to come to an end sooner or later, then I say “Shove her! Shove her! Into the shark pool with her! Off with her head! (Metaphorically speaking, of course)

But if she really, truly, deeply believed that “the internet is considered public domain,” if she really, truly, deeply believed that what she was doing was all right…

Then I feel a little sorry for her.

(Hey, Judith? Sorry, this content is mine, mine, mine! Copyright 2010 Levi Montgomery mine, mine, mine! Keep your cut-and-pasting mitts off mine, mine, mine!)

• 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?