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> forward from that position when it doesn’t work.
> In the 1970s, the record industry shrieked that
> “home taping is killing music.” It’s hard for ordinary
> folks to avoid noticing that music didn’t die. But the
> record industry’s credibility on the subject wasn’t
> exactly enhanced.
Patrick and I have a long relationship, starting when I was 18
years old and he kicked in toward a scholarship fund to send me
to a writers’ workshop, continuing to a fateful lunch in New York
in the mid-nineties when I showed him a bunch of Project Guten-
berg texts on my Palm Pilot and inspired him to start licensing
Tor’s titles for PDAs [PEANUTPRESS SCREENGRAB], to the
turn-of-the-millennium when he bought and then published my
first novel (he’s bought three more since — I really like Patrick!).
Right as bookwarez newsgroups were taking off, I was shocked
silly by legal action by one of my colleagues against AOL/Time-
Warner
for
carrying
the
alt.binaries.ebooks
newsgroup.
This
writer alleged that AOL should have a duty to remove this news-
group, since it carried so many infringing files, and that its failure
to do so made it a contributory infringer, and so liable for the
incredibly stiff penalties afforded by our newly minted copyright
laws like the No Electronic Theft Act and the loathsome Digital
Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA.
Now there was a scary thought: there were people out there
who thought the world would be a better place if ISPs were given
the duty of actively policing and censoring the websites and news-
feeds their customers had access to, including a requirement that
ISPs needed to determine, all on their own, what was an unlaw-
ful copyright infringement — something more usually left up to
judges in the light of extensive amicus briefings from esteemed
copyright scholars [WIND DONE GONE GRAPHIC].
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