I want Mark Waid and Darwyn Cooke to just be in charge of the whole comics industry.

I'm going to wait until the manga version of the speech.

I can see it now, a young comic artist is trying to get into a graphics arts college in Tokyo, to meet the love of his life that he barely remembers from when he was in Kindergarten ...

I work in the video game industry, and I almost got fired for saying essentially the same thing. Like it or not, piracy happens, and it's getting easier and easier to do. Crappy commercials (like "You wouldn't steal a car...") aren't going to change anything, and neither is getting draconian about it. Entertainment companies are going to have to change, and the change might be painful, but there really is no alternative.

Waid is absolutely right - culture is more important than copyright. There is no reason, though, that it has to be all or nothing. Online sharing as he suggests doesn't turn off the copyright switch. A comic author or artist can still enforce his or her rights against those who would take and profit from a posted work - the comics community doesn't have to turn into the RIAA. Like many other authors in copyright, you have to do a cost-benfit analysis and figure out what uses you want to go after, and which you allow to happen. Photographers have been doing it for years - enforcing against newspapers and companies that use a photo without license for advertising, not enforcing against the kid who copies a photo to include in his science fair poster.

Part of the problem is that the law doesn't discriminate between a kid violating your copyright and a corporation violating your copyright, other than indemnifying the corporate execs from serving jail terms for their actions, while the kid rots in jail.

You're supposed to defend your copyright against all known violations - although this can include granting a waiver for past actions or a temporary license of use.

Copyright should go back to what it was during the time our Constitution was created - period.

@6: That's Mark Waid's assertion. And I'm more likely to listen to him than to some random jackass on the internet.

@6 Yeah I question that assertion too. I love comics, but come on...