I got into a little twitter scuffle tonight with a cartoonist who, in my opinion, makes his living by doing mash-ups of other people’s IP. It’s a popular thing to do among webcomic circles more and more these days. It used to be that every once in a while we would come up with an idea that skirted copyright infringement and say “Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” Then we would spend the money to produce the tee shirt and hope we flew under the radar. Sometimes people got C&D letters. Sometimes they didn’t.

But over the years, this practice has become so commonplace that attitudes have changed. Not only does nobody fear the C&D coming form a property holder, we’ve stopped pretending that we’re doing the wrong thing. We throw around phrases like “parody” and “fair use” without fully understanding what those terms mean legally.

And now, things have gotten so far out of hand, that we even get upset when someone steals our stolen ideas. And that’s what I got into a twitter scuffle about tonight. A cartoonist who did a mash up of Doctor Who and Peanuts, got outraged that another tee shirt company made a “The Doctor is In” shirt, and encouraged his readers to send in emails. Really? It’s come to this?

Look, I’m not trying to take the moral high ground here on this stuff. I’ve done my fair share of co-opting popular culture. When Lucas made the prequels and they sucked balls, I came out with the “Joss Whedon is my Master Now” tee. And I was one of the first people to try to make a buck off of the “Han Shot First” shirt. I understand the practice all too well. But it’s one thing to try to make a buck off a larger cultural meme, and another to claim that you’re the only person who’s allowed to do it.

When you make an Ellen Ripley shirt that reads “Believe me or not”, you don’t get to take the moral high ground when Snorg Tees decides they’re going to rip you off. A tee shirt that features Cheetara dressed as a prostitute that reads Thundercats Ho doesn’t work without the Thundercats reference. So unless you paid for a license to make Thundercats tee shirts, you got no grounds for complaint.

And here’s the kicker, most of the time, it’s not that difficult or expensive to get an official license for this stuff. Not always.

Thinkgeek has had such a demand for their fake April fools Star Wars products that they just paid Lucas for a license to make them officially.

It can be done.

So yes, Teefury stole your joke comparing AT&T to the Death Star. Maybe you even made the joke first. But if the joke is dependent on two established IPs to be funny, was it THAT great of a joke to begin with? Is it THAT hard for you to come up with ideas?

Food for thought.