Holly Phillips and I will co-edit Tesseracts Eleven, the next volume of the award-winning anthology series for Canadian science fiction and fantasy, founded by Judith Merril. We’re open to public submissions from Canadians and Canadian residents, in either French or English, at lengths up to 7,500 words. The deadline is December 31, 2006.

Send your manuscripts to the address below, and follow them up with an electronic submission to tess11@edgewebsite.com. When formatting your electronic manuscript, adhere to the excellent formatting guidelines set out for submissions to Strange Horizons.

Tesseracts Eleven
Attention: Series Editors
c/o Tesseracts Eleven Submissions,
P.O. Box 1714,
Calgary, Alberta, T2P 2L7
Canada

My latest column for Locus Magazine is out: How Copyright Broke. In this essay, I explore the fallacy that the public should treat the books and other media they buy as “limited licenses” and not as their property, and why telling your readers that they don’t own the books they buy will never succeed:

When it comes to retail customers for information goods — readers, listeners, watchers — this whole license abstraction falls flat. No one wants to believe that the book he’s brought home is only partly his, and subject to the terms of a license set out on the flyleaf. You’d be a flaming jackass if you showed up at a con and insisted that your book may not be read aloud, nor photocopied in part and marked up for a writers’ workshop, nor made the subject of a piece of fan-fiction.

At the office, you might get a sweet deal on a coffee machine on the promise that you’ll use a certain brand of coffee, and even sign off on a deal to let the coffee company check in on this from time to time. But no one does this at home. We instinctively and rightly recoil from the idea that our personal, private dealings in our homes should be subject to oversight from some company from whom we’ve bought something. We bought it. It’s ours. Even when we rent things, like cars, we recoil from the idea that Hertz might track our movements, or stick a camera in the steering wheel.

When the Internet and the PC made it possible to sell a lot of purely digital “goods” — software, music, movies and books delivered as pure digits over the wire, without a physical good changing hands, the copyright lawyers groped about for a way to take account of this. It’s in the nature of a computer that it copies what you put on it. A computer is said to be working, and of high quality, in direct proportion to the degree to which it swiftly and accurately copies the information that it is presented with.

I had an op-ed in Monday’s Daily Trojan, the campus paper at USC, about the ominous anti-P2P message that USC’s administration sent to the student body:

“Copyright infringement occurs whenever someone makes a copy of any copyrighted work – songs, videos, software, cartoons, photographs, stories, novels – without purchasing that copy from the copyright owner or obtaining permission some other way.”

This is simply untrue – if it’s true, we should lock the library doors and arrest any professor who turns up with handouts or anyone who forwards an e-mail. Copyright infringement occurs when you make an unlawful copy of a copyrighted work. But oftentimes when you copy in the course of scholarship, you make a copy in accordance with the law.

Link

See also:
USC’s bizarre, non-legal copyright policy
Universities put Hollywood ahead of students

Bruce Schneier and Bruce Sterling are coming to the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School at the end of September as part of my Fulbright Chair.

Bruce Sterling will be here on September 25 at 2PM, at the Annenberg School’s room 204. Bruce is one of the great science fiction writers of the age, but he’s also an incisive critic, journalist and scholar. From books like The Hacker Crackdown (the first commercially published book released simultaneously for free on the net), which chronicles the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to last year’s Shaping Things, a mind-blowing treatise on the ways that network-aware materials and products will forever change the way the world works. Bruce resides in Belgrade with his wife, Serbian radical writer/filmmaker Jasmina Tesanovic. (Seating for this event is limited to 50 people, first come, first serve — get there early!)

Bruce Schneier will be here on September 26th at 7PM, at the Annenberg School’s room 207. Bruce is a world-renowned security expert, whose Applied Cryptography and Secrets and Lies are the Bibles of the infosec trade. But Bruce has a bigger agenda: with books like Beyond Fear, he’s taken on the subject security and freedom — whether they’re opposite poles of an axis, or whether freedom is a prerequisite for security. Bruce is a compelling speaker who makes this abstruse stuff accessible to civilians. No one is better at explaining how to be a wise consumer of security, and there’s never been a time when that was more important. The next time you take off your shoes or surrender your water-bottle to “fight terrorism,” the things Schneier has to say will put it all into infuriating perspective.

Sterling talk:
Sept 25, 2PM-3:30PM
University of Southern California, Annenberg School, 3502 Watt Way
Room 204

Schneier talk:
Sept 26, 7PM-9PM
University of Southern California, Annenberg School, 3502 Watt Way
Room 207

Link to Schneier announcement

Update: Tracy LaQuey Parker points out that her book “The Internet Companion”, published by Addison-Wesley in 1992, was published online shortly before Bruce’s Hacker Crackdown.

Last week, I received the most remarkable letter from Jamie, a US Navy seaman stationed on a ship in the Mediterranean Sea. Because my novels are Creative Commons-licensed, he is able to download them and print them out onboard ship, and pass them around to his comrades. The absence of quality reading material on the ship has turned Creative Commons texts into hot items on the ship:

Just like to thank you, from some undisclosed (for operational security reasons, doncha know) location in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, for keeping my sanity. I’m in the US Navy, and my ship got surge-deployed without warning a couple weeks ago to “help” with the situation in Lebanon. On a ship underway, there’s no room to keep books — unless they’re the ancient, creaking John Grisham paperbacks in the ship’s library – and no time to get some anyway if you’re scrambling around for the couple days of warning you have trying to get your bills set up to pay themselves and telling your landlord you’re vanishing for an “open-ended” period of time. So, the ability to download your stuff from craphound has permitted me to feed my addiction to the printed word without having to have someplace to store the physical artifact of the books. Of course, I actually printed out Someone Comes and Down and Out, the two I don’t own dead-tree copies of yet, and stuck ’em in a binder, where they’ve been passed from person to person in my department, helping keep the other sci-fi junkies similarly sane.

[three days later]

Thought you might like to know that what started as “Jamie feeds his print addiction” has turned into something else entirely. The sci-fi addicts rapidly finished off the two novels I’d printed out and bindered, and I had the binder with me in the engine room, reading to pass the time, when one of the other guys asked what I was reading.

A couple hours later, the only noise in the place was when one of the half-dozen guys sitting around would look up and ask, “Hey, who’s got page 41 of Down and Out?” It was… well, I’m not sure I can express how weird it was. These are men who aren’t normally readers, much less consumers of slightly wacky science fiction, and they’re now getting impatient with each other to finish chapters so they can find out what happens next.

It’s starting to change the very *tone* of where I work on the ship, six hours on and six hours off: instead of the ever-present three B’s of talk to pass in the time in the plant — beer, babes, and bodily functions — it’s discussions of which novel (or short, since we’ve now got printouts of every piece of fiction on craphound.com stuffed into a file cabinet) we liked best, and why, and what makes this stuff cool, and where can we get more like it, and even starting to talk about the copyfight, and why that’s important.

I spent about two hours last night as I was reading glancing up every so often, and grinning like an idiot every time ’cause there were five guys whose talk usually revolves around how drunk they were this one time head-down in some pretty intense reading.

Thank you. This is really something else.