In Great Britain, where I live, Parliament recently passed the Digital Economy Act, a complex copyright law that allows corporate giants to disconnect whole families from the Internet if anyone in the house is accused (without proof) of copyright infringement it also creates a "Great Firewall of Britain" that is used to censor any site that record companies and movie studios don't like. Loaning books has been around longer than any publisher on Earth, and it's a fine thing.Ĭopyright laws are increasingly passed without democratic debate or scrutiny. It's ridiculous to say that people who want to "loan" their electronic copy of my book to a friend need to get a license to do so. It's just stupid to say that an elementary school classroom should have to talk to a lawyer at a giant global publisher before they put on a play based on one of my books. I hate the fact that fans who want to do what readers have always done are expected to play in the same system as all these hotshot agents and lawyers. What's more, there's just not that many of these negotiations-even if I sell fifty or a hundred different editions of Context (which would put it in top millionth of a percentile for reprint essay collections), that's still only a hundred negotiations, which I could just about manage. I'm in a pretty good position when it comes to negotiating with these companies: I've got a great agent and a decade's experience with copyright law and licensing (including a stint as a delegate at WIPO, the UN agency that makes the world's copyright treaties). It's nice that they can't just take my stuff without permission and get rich on it without cutting me in for a piece of the action. I like the fact that copyright lets me sell rights to my publishers and film studios and so on. Here's what I think of it, in a nutshell: a little goes a long way, and more than that is too much. The Creative Commons license at the top of this file probably tipped you off to the fact that I've got some pretty unorthodox views about copyright. See the end of this file for the complete legalese.
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