LawMeme LawMeme Yale Law School  
LawMeme
Search LawMeme [ Advanced Search ]
 
 
 
 
Melancholy About the Future of Copyright
Posted by Ernest Miller on Thursday, September 05 @ 08:17:02 EDT Copyright
Celebrated science-fiction author Spider Robinson spins a short yarn about the dangers of excessive copyright in a not-too-speculative future (Melancholy Elephants). Interestingly, the story was written in 1984, well before many of the latest copyright law outrages (though not before the terrible Copyright Act of 1976). The story itself comes courtesy of Baen Books.

Baen is not only a wonderful publisher of excellent fiction, but has established the Baen Free Library. This library features a number of free books in electronic format, "no conditions, no strings attached." According to the librarian (and science fiction author), Eric Flint, this program has successfully resulted in more book sales (Prime Palaver #6). I quite enjoyed Flint's novel, 1632, which relates the tale of a West Virgnia town that is shifted from the year 2000 to 1632, and from North America to Central Europe. Not only do you have all the pleasures of high tech meeting low tech, but the interesting results of modern American values challenging medieval ones. Download a free copy in one of five formats (Free Library Books by Eric Flint). [via BoingBoing and Copyfight]

 
Related Links
· More about Copyright
· News by Ernest Miller


Most read story about Copyright:
Top Ten New Copyright Crimes

Options

 Printer Friendly Page  Printer Friendly Page

 Send to a Friend  Send to a Friend

Threshold
  
The comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content.

Leges humanae nascuntur, vivunt, moriuntur
Human laws are born, live, and die

Contributors retain copyright interests in all stories, comments and submissions.
Everything else copyright (c) 2002 by the Information Society Project.

This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions
set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later.
The latest version is currently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/.

You can syndicate our news with backend.php

Page Generation: 0.181 Seconds