If you haven't been following the Lane Hartwell situation Derek Powazek has a really good wrap up of events up to this point.

Lane has just released her statement about the situation and it has caused me to reaffirm my complete support of her and her actions. Many people have said they're happy when others steal their works because it means the work is good enough to steal or they're happy when people steal their works and then create new works because hey new stuff is cool. That's great for those people. I encourage those people to release all of their works under the appropriate Creative Commons license and be happy and merry and bright with all the sharing and the stealing. I don't mean that sarcastically. If you don't mind your work being taken and re-used that's great but here's my issue: the creator, gets to choose if people can take and re-use his work. If someone posts his work on the internet and explicitly says that all rights are reserved then all rights are reserved by that artist. End of story. If the artist releases his work under a creative commons license that allows use or perhaps the artist even just says, basically, sometimes people steal my work but cool sometimes cool stuff comes out of that theft so I'm just going to say "ok take my stuff" that's fine, but each and every person creating original work, in my opinion, gets to make that decision.

And I think that saying "people on the internet are going to steal so suck it up" is bullshit. That's kind of like saying "people in the real world are going to commit armed robbery so suck it up." Yeah, some people on the internet steal stuff just like some people in the physical world steal stuff. That doesn't make it right in either instance.