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Comic book writer (and Boom! Comics editor-in-chief) Mark Waid gave a great keynote speech at this year's Harvey Awards. It was about copyright and comics and the internet. Of course, a few people immediately accused Waid of promoting piracy and idea theft.

Waid posted his entire speech here, and I think it's a great, thoughtful take on copyright...

culture is more important than copyright. No one's saying we shouldn't be compensated for our work, but we are obliged to give back at some point. Moreover—and I know that in hard economic times like these, it's very hard to remember this—I would also offer that being able to contribute to culture, having the satisfaction of knowing that we've done work that is embraced by others, watching our ideas spread and seed new ideas—if you're calculating overall job compensation, that is not without value.

...and torrenting pirated comics..

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It’s not because people “like stealing.” It’s because the greatest societal change in the last five years is that we are entering an era of sharing. Twitter and YouTube and Facebook—they’re all about sharing. Sharing links, sharing photographs, sending some video of some cat doing something stupid—that’s the era we’re entering. And whether or not you’re sharing things that technically aren’t yours to share, whether or not you’re angry because you see this as a “generation of entitlement,” that’s not the issue—the issue is, it’s happening, and the internet’s ability to reward sharing has reignited this concept that the public domain has cultural value

...and why comic books are awesome:

We are the smartest, most creative medium in America. We put out ideas on a periodical basis bam, bam, bam. We don’t put out a screenplay every three years. We don’t invent a TV show every ten years. There are more ideas in one Wednesday in one comic shop than in three years of Hollywood. We're notoriously bad businessmen, but we are unmatched for creativity and inventiveness, and there are ways to make filesharing work for us rather than cower in fear that it’s going to destroy us.

It's just a smart, level-headed speech, and it's getting a lot of conversations started in the online comics community. You really should read the whole thing.