Mark Waid is (not) evil... the Harvey Awards speech and ensuing debate

When Scott Kurtz intriduced comics writer Mark Waid for his keynote address at the 2010 Harvey Awards ceremony, he referenced the phenomenon of "Mark Waid is evil" T-shirts, joking that he wanted to walk up to one of these guys with a shirt that said, "No shit."

When Waid took the podium, he could have used the time to talk about any softball topic. But he chose one of the most divisive topics in comics today: File sharing and the "free" economy.

He delivered a rather good argument, and he presented some ideas that -- whether you agree or not -- were thought-provoking.

When he returned to his table after the address, he and MAD magazine legend, Sergio Aragones, got into a heated exchange, and Waid left the ceremony rather loudly.

Those are the events from the night, as I remember them from my seat near the front of the room.

Imagine my dismay when I read the following from Bleeding Cool's Rich Johnston under the headline "Mark Waid Defends Pirates":

Mark Waid's keynote speech at the Harvey Awards at Baltimore Comics Con last night started by pointing out that copyright was all about putting work into the public domain, rather than preserving it for company ownership, and the concept of public domain should be embraced again. That illegal downloading is inevitable leading to a new culture of sharing. Lines such as "culture is more important than copyright" and "there are more ideas in one week at your comic shop than three years in Hollywood."

Wow.

With a gross misrepresentation of Waids points, two out-of-context quotes and a headline that uses a word ("pirates") that Waid never touched in his speeched (to my recollection), it touched off an epic storm of Net flammage.

Waid didn't say that copyright was "all about putting work into the public domain." He said that the original intent of the law (400 years ago) was to protect the work during the artist's life and facilitate the passing of the work into public domain at the appropriate time.

And whereas he did advocate for the princiapl of public domain at a certain point, he was certainly not saying that all work should be public-domain immediately. "Culture is more important than copyright" was an accurrate quote, but Mark placed it in an overreaching historial context -- into a wider meaning.

Mark is a wonderful writer, but he wasn't much of a public speaker that night.

So, if I may be so bold, I'd like to parse this argument a little more clearly for the benfit of my subscribers (who are welcome to debate the matter further).

Here's Waid's argument, in a nutshell:

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