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have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
The affordance of a computer — the thing it’s designed to do
— is to slice-and-dice collections of bits. The affordance of the
Internet is to move bits at very high speed around the world at
little-to-no cost. It follows from this that the center of the ebook
experience is going to involve slicing and dicing text and sending
it around.
Copyright lawyers have a word for these activities: infringe-
ment. That’s because copyright gives creators a near-total monop-
oly over copying and remixing of their work, pretty much forever
(theoretically, copyright expires, but in actual practice, copyright
gets extended every time the early Mickey Mouse cartoons are
about to enter the public domain, because Disney swings a very
big stick on the Hill).
This is a huge problem. The biggest possible problem. Here’s
why:
[CHART: HOW BROKEN COPYRIGHT SCREWS EVERYONE]
* Authors freak out. Authors have been schooled by their peers
that strong copyright is the only thing that keeps them from
getting savagely rogered in the marketplace. This is pretty much
true: it’s strong copyright that often defends authors from their
publishers’ worst excesses. However, it doesn’t follow that strong
copyright protects you from your
readers.
* Readers get indignant over being called crooks. Seriously.
You’re a small businessperson. Readers are your customers. Call-
ing them crooks is bad for business.
* Publishers freak out. Publishers freak out, because they’re in
the business of grabbing as much copyright as they can and hang-
ing onto it for dear life because, dammit, you never know. This
is why science fiction magazines try to trick writers into sign-
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