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Remember: Rockets Are Wrong.

(Wikipedia Link on the gizmos....)

I've always found this quiz to be extremely uninstructive, and therefore I much prefer the Pournelle Axes.

The last seven or eight books I've read have been e-books on my phone (Treo 650). And I didn't have to pay per page for it, either: Plucker plus Project Gutenberg plus stuff like the Baen Free Library for more recent titles equals a big bookshelf's worth of free-of-charge books in my pocket wherever I go.

And if you like Sci-Fi and Fantasy, Baen sells all of its books in various e-book formats, including .rb. I have an RCA e-Book and it works very well.

You will find this book free online at the publisher's site.

Those of you who have not read Spider Robinson's (free) short story Melancholy Elephants should.

Musical content, works of art, etc. The person who creates these things should have control of how they are distributed.

So what happens once all possible musical works are copyrighted?

Can you invest in an enterprise and make a profit from doing so with copyrights in place?

Not necessarily. If you are starting an independent music publisher, then how do you plan to make sure that your songwriters aren't inadvertently copying songs that they had heard on commercial radio over a decade ago? George Harrison got in trouble for subconscious copying when he started Harrisongs Music.

Indeed, the more arbitrary monopolies you allow people to make for themselves, the easier it is to create opportunities for that investment.

But once you allow enough monopolies, then just about every possibility will become monopolized, leaving no room for further entry. You might want to read a combinatoric analysis or a fictionalized account of how it could happen.

Baen has been selling books without DRM for 5 or 6 years now. Here are some links on the site that illustrate their philosphy:

• http://www.baen.com/press.htm#Dramatic
• http://www.baen.com/press.htm#Library
• http://www.baen.com/press.htm#Rocks

Baen has been selling books without DRM for 5 or 6 years now. Here are some links on the site that illustrate their philosphy:

• http://www.baen.com/press.htm#Dramatic
• http://www.baen.com/press.htm#Library
• http://www.baen.com/press.htm#Rocks

Baen has been selling books without DRM for 5 or 6 years now. Here are some links on the site that illustrate their philosphy:

• http://www.baen.com/press.htm#Dramatic
• http://www.baen.com/press.htm#Library
• http://www.baen.com/press.htm#Rocks

Baen has been selling books without DRM for 5 or 6 years now. Here are some links on the site that illustrate their philosphy:

• http://www.baen.com/press.htm#Dramatic
• http://www.baen.com/press.htm#Library
• http://www.baen.com/press.htm#Rocks

Check out Baen Boooks, at , and take the link to the free library. Putting books on line has helped Baen's sales, not hurt them. Every time thety put a new book on line in the free librasry, sales of that author's books increas - even sales of the book that is available for free.

Baen put a CD into a hardcover book with all the rest of the books in that series on it. Sales increased.

Thrice Upon a Time by James Hogan also deals with this scenario, but has a unique deus ex machina ending that saves the planet.

Because that's the right that the law provides the copyright owner - to give permission (or not) as he sees fit.

Be careful about circular reasoning here, as this article is about research into whether there is a need to change the law. Part of the issue at hand is to what extent the copyright owner should be allowed to make that choice, whether such a choice "promote[s] the Progress of Science".

I guess there is a fine line when a monopoly is involved and everyone is dependant on the supply, but hey we are taking about books, movies and music, etc.

You seem to claim that copyrighted works either are not necessities or are not a monopoly. As for necessity, some form of entertainment is a necessity to preserve sanity. As for monopoly, music is in fact a cartel because of ubiquitous access to published works and the small space of distinct works. When you hear a song on the radio or in a grocery store, you are permanently barred from writing a similar song. There exist only a finite number of distinct melodies in the western musical scale. Therefore, any independent songwriter will likely unwittingly violate a copyright. Does a chilling effect on creating works "promote the Progress of Science"?

again... don't buy it. you don't agree with the vendor's EULA, so don't buy the product.

Then what if there is no alternative? What if the vendor and its affiliates have a monopoly on lawful sale of the product or any of its substitutes? Once the music cartel starts suing independents on grounds of copyright infringement through coincidence of notes, then we're in trouble. Please read "Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson.

In any field.

Required Reading.

That said, they are completely different form factors. I like compact phones (I still have a Motorola V60), and hate talking on a pda form factor. On the other hand, the display of a phone is too small for prolonged reading. So I prefer separate devices.

I personally think its a shame that the PDA seems a dying breed.

In an unprecedented move, 16 labels sued the company today in court, claiming that the company violated antitrust laws by allowing the distribution of "all music not controled by the label cartel"

Unfortunately, the events of your satiric story are plausible. Instead of the record labels, it would be the music publishers, claiming that independent recordings are unauthorized covers of commercial songs. A music publisher even sued an artist over "subconscious copying" and won. In fact, with the finite number of possible melodies in the Western musical scale, we're bound to reach a point where nobody outside the music publishing cartel can compose and publish music at all. Then we get into this situation, which will make you think differently about Febreze Scentstories.

I want do be able to reprogram my computer to do new and creative things from my own imagination.

NMPA/Harry Fox Agency owns your imagination. There exist a finite number of distinct melodies in the western musical scale, and a lot of them are taken already. The short story "Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson hints at where this is headed.

One of the moderately dumb things ST has done (but not close to being the dumbest, alas) is to decide that they had to explain why Klingons didn't always have those latex ridges. The real explanation, of course, is that TOS series didn't have the budget for prosthetics. But apparently there's an official explanation, alluded to on the DS9 Tribbles episode and movie 6. (For some strange reason, this explanation has never been circulated, though it's supposed to come out in a future Enterprise episode.) This is dumb, because it means they can't bring back any of the human-looking aliens from TOS. Including my personal favorite, the Iotians.

Then again the Iotians are sort of a ripoff of Anderson and Dickson's Hokas, so what the heck.

Incidently, that link goes directly to the first chapter - it is one of Baen's first experiments with putting books still in print online.

--
Evan

A whole lot of free content from name writers' backlists, and if you're read the first several books in a series and you want to read the new one which is on sale, they will be very happy to sell it to you, either in dead tree or electronic formats.

NO DRM, and standard word processor document formats

I personally have purchased several books in electronic format from them that I probably wouldn't have bought otherwise.

Go check it out.

The only way you lost thousands of dollars is if, in fact, every single individual who obtained your material would have, under other circumstances paid for it, which is a simplistic assumption. When the record company makes such claims sales figures suggest they know they are lying. Can you demonstrate, for example, that an author loses money when a book is checked out of the library?

What the RIAA is doing thru these lawsuits is attempting to maintain an obsolete business model and an obsolete star system. If they had been less stupid, they would have seen this coming and built a new business model years ago instead.

As for residual royalties, you might consider the example of science fiction - fantasy author Mercedes Lackey. A couple of years ago, she agreed to let her publisher make a couple of her works available for free download. Her very next royalty check, from her other publisher, for the oldest series in her backlist, was three times what it had been consistantly for the previous ten years. We're not talking bar tab here, unless you are buying rounds for the house. She used the check to buy a nail gun, an air compressor to power it, and high grade lumber to build a wall of bookshelves - mid to high three figures.

It reminds me more of Code Three by Rick Raphael.

http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200501/0743498747___ 3.htm

On the OP's criticism "of those interminable fantasy or SF series that are pumped out at regular intervals for cash": Fans of Sci-Fi and Fantasy genre fiction should all be aware of the Baen free library , a simple and admirable approach to genre fiction. Check out the first (few) books of a series free, and if you like it, you can buy the rest on paper or electronically and in a non-DRM'd format. Finally a publisher who gets it!

So, if you're a fan, check out the site, and if you're a writer looking to get published in Fantasy/Sci-fi fiction, look to Baen first and foremost as a geek-friendly and utterly avant-guard publisher. I will grant that I've only paid for 1 e-book from Baen heretofore (having read 4-5 freely), but that would definately have been 0 sales instead of 1 if they had not instituted the free library, so I still hold that the concept works and is fair. This is a system where you only pay for quality genre writing and I think that's exactly what a lot of readers have been waiting for.

I have always loved "SF on a grand scale" as Greg Benford would put it; the Lensman and Skylark series of Doc Smith, and Benford's Galactic Center series are some of my favorites.

Slightly offtopic, have you tried the following?

-The "Reality Dysfunction" trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton
-David Weber's Honor Harrington series (first two novels available online at the Baen Free Library), starts with "On Basilisk Station"
-The Gap series by Stephen R.Donaldson
-The Miles Vorkosigan Series by Lois Mc Master Bujold

You need to find a better publisher. Might I sugest BaenIt's been plugged elsewhere, but they realy deserve props. About 40 titles for free, and most of the rest of their titles at a very cut price. No DRM, available as .lit, html, MobiPocket, REB. DOC and RTF formats. Easy, and they know that people are more likely to buy a book they've read.

My read of choice is a Rocket e-book. Baen supports the formats, there's enough out of copywrite stuff out there to keep me satisfied.

Amongst these authors are some of the highest selling sci-fi authors around, as well as hugo and nebula winners.

Additional free e-books can be obtained at Baen's free library.

Free Library

My personal favourite is "Mutineer's Moon", in fact I liked it so much that I bought the entire series including "Mutineer's Moon" in their dead wood editions. If you're a sci-fi or fantasy fan you really should check it and the other books here out. No DRM either.

Actually, what I thought the demo proved was that you could provide a list of Band Names as a filter making it much more difficult for people to find those bands. If Sharman included filters that could not be turned off, that filtered out a list of *AA bands, those bands would be more difficult to locate on KaZaa. If the tool becomes more difficult to use for a given purpose, the use of the tool for that purpose will probably decrease.

Do not mistake me; I am aware of the limitations and am no fan of filtering. It is spotty at best and has the nasty side-effect of catching legitimate content that should be allowed to pass.

Filters are not perfect...but if Sharman makes KaZaa more difficult to use for finding specific bands or specific songs, then, by logical extension, the downloading of those bands or songs should decrease. Will those files/bands still be available? Probably, but unless you know the "magic" search parameters to input to find them, you are going to have a more difficult time finding them.

Personally, I'm against the downloading of music that has not been explicitly given gratis to the public. If KaZaa, and the community that supports KaZaa, truly see KaZaa as a fantastic tool for all sorts of non-infringing uses (and I absolutely and unequivocally believe that P2P software should not be illegal just because percentage of users use that tool for illegal activities - even if that percentage approaches 100%) then we should get behind efforts to block copyrighted works that the copyright owner does not want distributed. Hopefully, the copyright owner will be burned by their own attempts to so tightly control their property that they will loosen up. If they do not loosen up, they will lose customers. One way to ensure they lose customers is to strongly curtail (or eliminate) your purchase of *AA-backed bands. The combination of filters with a reduction in purchases will hopefully be the stick that smacks them upside their head and makes them realize that they cannot continue to treat their customers this way.

As a software developer, a Linux user, and someone who would someday love to publish pencil & paper RPG gaming materials to the web, I take licensing and copyright issues very seriously. I want to believe that should I release my property to the web that the license I choose to release it under will be honored and that I will be compensated for my efforts (great examples that inspire hope include the Baen Free Libary).

If you want people to honor your license (GPL, BSD, whatever) and respect your copyright then you need to honor the license and copyright of even those you oppose.

I think the MPAA and RIAA types, as well as their counter-parts in other countries, should take a minute to read through this essay by Eric Flint:
http://www.baen.com/library/

A short quote from the essay:
"My own opinion, summarized briefly, is as follows:

"1. Online piracy -- while it is definitely illegal and immoral -- is, as a practical problem, nothing more than (at most) a nuisance. We're talking brats stealing chewing gum, here, not the Barbary Pirates.

"2. Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc.

"3. Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market -- especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people -- is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The "regulation-enforcement-more regulation" strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom."

And this is from an artist who stands to lose from piracy, not a consumer who won't lose his house because he make the mortgage payment due to loss of sales. If he gets it, and even convinced his publisher to get it, why can't other entertainment types?

Does NOT publish all their books online for free...
just a great many of them at the author's choosing.
They do however, have the rest for SALE at webscriptions

The only time that mass scale petty thievery becomes a problem is when the perception spreads, among broad layers of the population, that a given product is priced artificially high due to monopolistic practices and/or draconian legislation designed to protect those practices. But so long as the "gap" between the price of a legal product and a stolen one remains both small and, in the eyes of most people, a legitimate cost rather than gouging, 99% of them will prefer the legal product.

The only time that mass scale petty thievery becomes a problem is when the perception spreads, among broad layers of the population, that a given product is priced artificially high due to monopolistic practices and/or draconian legislation designed to protect those practices. But so long as the "gap" between the price of a legal product and a stolen one remains both small and, in the eyes of most people, a legitimate cost rather than gouging, 99% of them will prefer the legal product.

The U.S. Constitution gives that right. You do recognize those rights as granted by the U.S. Constitution right ?

Actually, it doesn't. The US Constitution (Article 1, Section 8) gives Congress the power to temporarily secure rights to works of Art and Invention. A reason is given, but I don't recall the exact verbiage. It's along hte lines of "We'll secure these rights temporarily for the Creator, so in the long run we'll have the work for all of society".

We inherited our IP legacy from the Brits, and philosophically it is identical to the Brits.

Further, excellent, reading on the subject can be had here.

A huge amount of land, with a huge amount of natural resources to exploit. (And "exploit" is the word; they paid little attention to environmental issues.)

An iron grip on their citizens.

Financial policies designed to drain hard currency from the West at every chance, while giving soft currency in return. (On the black market, rubles were dramatically less valuable than the official exchange rate. The official rate was a fantasy.)

The first thing to be said is that the "greenhouse effect" isn't something new, brought about by human activities. It's a natural phenomenon that has existed for as long as the Earth has had an atmosphere. All objects above zero degrees Kelvin radiate heat. As an object gets hotter, the peak of the frequency band that it radiates (where most of the radiated energy is emitted) shifts toward shorter wavelengths. Thus, a warm hotplate on a stove radiates mainly in the infrared band, which while invisible can still be felt as heat. As the hotplate is heated more, its radiation peak moves up into the visible region to red and then orange. The Sun radiates a lot of energy at ultraviolet wavelengths, shorter than the visible. The atmosphere is transparent to certain bands of this, which reach the Earth's surface and are absorbed. But since the Earth is a lot cooler than the Sun, this energy is reradiated not at ultraviolet wavelengths but at the much longer infrared, to which the atmosphere is not as transparent. Atmospheric gas molecules that consist of three or more atoms typically absorb energy at characteristic wavelengths within the infrared band, which heats them up, and consequently the atmosphere. Note that this excludes the diatomic gases N2 and O2 that form the bulk of the atmosphere (78 and 20 percent respectively), and also the monatomic traces, argon and neon.

This, then, defines the notorious "greenhouse gases" that are going to stifle the planet. The one that gets all the publicity is carbon dioxide, which human activities generate in five main ways: making cement (CO2 being driven out of the limestone used in the process); breathing; rearing animals; using wood (which once harvested, eventually decomposes one way or another); and burning fossil fuels. This translates into the release of about 3 million liters on average of CO2 per human per year, for a grand yearly total of 1.6 x 1016 liters, or 30 billion tonnes. 144 (1 tonne = a "metric ton" = 1,000 kilograms = 0.984 ton.) The other gases, while present in smaller amounts, have a greater relative absorptive capacity that ranges from fifty-eight times that of CO2 in the case of methane to several thousand for CFCs, and the amounts of them have been increasing.

This all sounds like something that should indeed be a cause for concern, until it's realized that the atmosphere contains something like 1,800 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide already from such sources as volcanoes, the outgassing of oceans, and the natural functioning of the biosphere. In other words, all of human activity adds less than two percent to the gases that nature puts out anyway. And then it turns out that all of these gases put together add up to a minor player, for the greatest contributor by far is water vapor. Although the exact figure varies from place to place and season to season, water vapor is typically present at ten times the concentration of carbon dioxide; further, it is active across the whole infrared range, whereas heat absorption by CO2 is confined to two narrow bands. Without this natural greenhouse mechanism, the Earth would be about 33 deg C cooler than it is, which would mean permanent ice at the equator. Estimates of the contribution of water vapor vary from 95 to 99 percent, thereby accounting for somewhere around 32 deg C of this. The remaining one degree is due to other gases. The effects of all of human activity are in the order of two percent of this latter figure. But, of course, you can't put a tax on water vapor or lambaste your favorite industrial villains for producing it, and so water vapor never gets mentioned in the polemics. Even professionals uncritically buy the publicized line. An astronomer reports that in an impromptu survey, six out of ten of her fellow astronomers replied "carbon dioxide" when asked what was the major greenhouse gas. 145

I there

I don't know about reference books, but fiction books can be well served in this way.

This has been posted before on slashdot but see here: ebooks

As far as recipies, I figure you can get them online for free anyway (legally) with a normal google search, adding some books or not won't change that. Besides, the only time anyone I know has bought a recipe book is as a gift from some giftstore when they didn't know what type of souvenir to get someone.

Maybe google could do this like libraries, ie "check out" the copy of the book while someone is reading it, and only allow x people to read exerpts or the whole book or whatever at a time, where x is the number of copies google bought.

Actually, having books online for browsing increases sales.
This is what has happened with the Baen Free Library, and it's also happened with my own books, and books from some some other publishers. It may not be universally true for every type of book, however. For instance, some college textbooks are so overpriced that students really are motivated strongly to photocopy them, etc. This book, for example, is $134, which is just insane.

• Calender + audible reminders
  
• Contacts (instant access to anyone in the company's contact info is nice)
  
• Ebooks (great free sci fi library)
  
• freehand idea sketches
  
• Secure/portable password storage
  
• calculator (TI/HP emulators)
  
• quick excel spreadsheets.
  

• remote control for my digial camera
  
• photo album
  
• wikipedia on a 1GB SD for casual reading/reference
  
• tv remote
  
• synced movie listings, tvguide
  
• mp3 player
  
• if you can get power from the airplane divx movies are a possibility.
  
• anything else a computer that fits in your pocket might be usefull for.
  

Without copyrights, it is not unreasonable to speculate that the only books that would ever get published in print are those that are sponsored by some organization that would not be relying on sales of the book to recover their losses (since there would be no protection like what authors currently have with copyright).
Baen must not be making any money.

As a "last request" of a dying company, I am sure that Jim Baen would like to say:
There was a school of thought, which seemed to be picking up steam, that the way to handle the problem was with handcuffs and brass knucks. Enforcement! Regulation! New regulations! Tighter regulations! All out for the campaign against piracy! No quarter! Build more prisons! Harsher sentences!
Alles in ordnung!
I, ah, disagreed. Rather vociferously and belligerently, in fact. And I can be a vociferous and belligerent fellow. My own opinion, summarized briefly, is as follows:

1. Online piracy ? while it is definitely illegal and immoral ? is, as a practical problem, nothing more than (at most) a nuisance. We're talking brats stealing chewing gum, here, not the Barbary Pirates.

2. Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc.

3. Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market ? especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people ? is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The "regulation-enforcement-more regulation" strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom.

I could not have said it better myself.

How about a script that produces a random anticopyright story, such as The Right to Read or Melancholy Elephants. I'm certain RMS wouldn't object, as long as you stick the license text on the end; I doubt Spider Robinson would object either, given the nature of the story.

Try reading Baen books. (You can even sample them for free - whole books are available at Baen Free Library)

The political opinions of the authors run the gamut from Socialist (Eric Flint) to slightly right of Attila the Hun (John Ringo, Tom Kratman).

Two books that you might enjoy are Freehold (Mike Williamson) and A State of Disobedience (Tom Kratman)

This seems to be pretty standard with Science Fiction authors (although I can't fathom why). Try navigating Baen's website sometime for a perfect example of a functional but aesthetically poor website.

I have to say, Webscriptions is a really good deal. You get a month's worth of releases for $15, and you can get most of the books months before that particular set of books is released. So, for example, if you were dying to get your Rats, Vats, and the Ugly fix, after getting hooked by reading the sample chapters that they have online, you could read the rest of the book, RIGHT NOW.

Baen operates on the "rats pushing levers to get crack" model of publishing - they give away free product because once you get addicted, you'll gladly pay to buy dead-tree and e-book versions of new stuff. Not everybody can do this, but Baen has been getting it right so far...

As mentioned in slashdot before, Baen publishing puts out Webscriptions and also gives away ebooks for free on the net and they also provide a CD in several of their books with a large number of novels included. All of the free ebooks in the free library and on CD can be shared but not sold.

Here are several ISO images of Baen's free science fictional goodness, please leave up your bittorrent client for others to share.

As mentioned in slashdot before, Baen publishing puts out Webscriptions and also gives away ebooks for free on the net and they also provide a CD in several of their books with a large number of novels included. All of the free ebooks in the free library and on CD can be shared but not sold.

Here are several ISO images of Baen's free science fictional goodness, please leave up your bittorrent client for others to share.