Kenneth Schneyer's "Life of the Author Plus Seventy" (short story, humor): Legal implications of human hibernation

Three major themes here, often told in a hilarious way:

1. Customer service dysfunction.
2. A parody of US copyright law, particularly w.r.t. Disney case.
3. Legal implications of human hibernation.

Story summary.

A not very successful author has a novel published but it's not selling much. He bugs local library enough to make them buy a copy, but no one is borrowing it. So he himself borrows it, but forgets to return it.

He'll later get a job with a company in a creative role, & is made to sign a curiously twisted copyright clause in the employment contract that gives the company the copyright over his creations for hundreds of years rather than "just" 120 years: when he's about to die, the company will have a right to hibernate him for up to 500 years, so copyright rule of author's life + 70 years applies!

A decade after borrowing the book, library has handed over the overdue & fines collection to a debt collection agency, & he receives his first overdue & fines bill - a couple of hundred thousand dollars. Hilarity ensues as he gets into negotiations with the debt collector, & later tries evading it...

Fact sheet.

First published: Analog, September 2013.
Rating: A.
Added to my "best of 2013" list.

Cory Doctorow's "Pirate Cinema" (novel, free): Political campaign against a "bad" law

This is the story of a political campaign in UK to make the parliament repeal a bad law. Point of the story seems to be: the disproportionately high influence a few Hollywood companies seem to have on legal aspects of internet use is very bad for society. Because their side effects have crippling effect on everything we do on the net.

I didn't find it always believable, but it's by & large readable. A penniless runaway kid in London, with a taste for remixing movies, will lead a revolt against 3-strikes law - if you're caught illegally downloading movies up to 3 times, you & your family lose internet connectivity for a year.

Story takes its time to really get started, so you'll need a bit of patience.

Fact sheet.

First published: 2012.
Download full text from author's website.
Rating: B.
Related: Stories of Cory Doctorow.

Cory Doctorow on "itch to copy is in human genes"

Link.

"Three or four billion years ago, by some process that we don't understand, molecules began to copy themselves. We are the distant descendants of those early copyists - copying is in our genes. We have a word for things that don't copy: 'dead'."

Related: Stories of Cory Doctorow.

H G Wells unhappy with localization of "The War of the Worlds"

Marooned reproduces a letter he "wrote to the editors of The Critic, a British literary periodical, in January 1898".

'my story The War of the Worlds “as applied to New England, showing how the strange voyagers from Mars visited Boston and vicinity,” is now appearing in the Post. This adaptation is a serious infringement of my copyright and has been made altogether without my participation or consent. I feel bound to protest in the most emphatic way against this manipulation of my work in order to fit it to the requirements of the local geography.'

Related: Stories of H G Wells.

China Miéville's "'Tis the Season" (short story, farce, free)

What if Christmas & the icons that go with it were copyrighted, & you needed a license to even say "Merry Christmas"?

A lighthearted look at the silly side of intellectual property rights.

Fact sheet.

First published: Socialist Review, December 2004.
Download full text from publisher's site. [via Best Science Fiction Stories]
Rating: B.

Spider Robinson's "Melancholy Elephants" (short story, copyrights, free)

What if current copyright law that gives owners rights for a finite number of years were to be extended to them & their heirs in perpetuity?

Story argues that much human creativity is actually discovery rather than creation; in fact, it is often a rediscovery. As population rises, years pass, & a bigger percentage of population joins the creators category, rediscovery is going to be even more important. Perpetual copyright bans rediscovery, & is bad for the psychic health of individuals.

Fact sheet.

First published: Analog, June 1982.
Rating: A.
Download full text from author's site or from Baen Books.
Winner of Hugo Award 1983 in short story category.

Richard Stallman's "The Right to Read" (flash fiction, copyrights, free)

Science fiction can be found in mmm... unexpected places. Yes, the author is the Richard Stallman, man behind GNU. And don't even try guessing the place of original publication - Communications of the ACM!!

This is an activists' story - the kind that now-a-days is associated with Cory Doctorow. A copyright dystopia where each reading of an ebook on a computer may requires a small payment, & only pre-authenticated people can read it!

Story is of the dilemma of Dan Halbert, a university student, who needs to respond to his girlfriend's request to lend her his computer because hers has broken down.

Fact sheet.

First published: Communications of the ACM, Volume 40, No 2 (February 1997).
Rating: A.
Download full text from GNU. [via Swapnil Bhartiya at indiansciencefiction Yahoo group]
Related: Stories dealing with copyrights & patents.

** Cory Doctorow's "Printcrime" (short story, science fiction)

An extreme case of Hollywood's persecution of file sharers. This future world has printers that can print anything (presumably given the description in a file) - an expensive medicine, jewelery, etc. Lobbying of design owners have ensured that these machines are outlawed in this dystopic society.

A man using it illegally is caught & severally punished. When he returns after spending a decade in prison, he is determined to ensure that when he next goes to prison, it's something worthy of imprisonment! He will now be printing these printers themselves, & flooding the society with them.

This sentiment - of unjust punishment for minor crime, & of protagonist's retaliation by actually doing something worthy of punishment, is also found in Larry Niven's "The Jigsaw Man".

See also the fanfic rejoinder to Printcrime - Peter Anderson's "The Copper Responds".

Fact sheet.

First published: Nature Magazine, January 2006.
Rating: B
Download full text.

Note: Why is this post so short?

Henry Kuttner & C L Moore's "The Proud Robot" (short story, science fiction): A robot in love with itself

Apart from great entertainment, this hilarious story touches upon issues that are still relevant: frivolous patents to curtail competition, unconventional ways of distributing video that both annoys the content owners & hurts their bottomlines, & DRM (yes - DRM in a 1943 story!). While its technology is unrecognizable today, some of the issues remain relevant.

But the best part of the story is humor - story to be read with suspended credulity.

Corporate fight.

The story is set substantially later than 1980 in New York city. This is a world where movie theaters have all shut down. People prefer watching TV at home. Broadcasters hand out TV sets for free, but charge based on number of hours the set is tuned in.

Two big operators are Vox-View Pictures, owned by Harrison Brock, & Sonatone Television Amusement Corp, owned by Ella Tone. The story is about their corporate fight - because Sontatone has invented a new device called "Magna enlarger" that changes the market dynamics, hurting Vox-View. Sontatone has also taken enough patents on the device to ensure the competition just cannot build a competitive device!

What does Magna do? It takes the incoming broadcast, & makes it suitable for viewing on large screen. Sonatone have (re)opened a lot of movie theaters - all powered by Magna. Expensive ones show feeds of Sonatone, cheap ones show feeds of Vox-View. Of course, Vox-View doesn't get any share from theater earnings of its feed.

There is a part that probably involves suspension of belief because of the age of the story. Watching broadcast on large screen in a cinema house has become fashionable, & Vox-View customers have been canceling their subscriptions - adding to its vows.

And Sonatone has enough political connections that a court case will likely be lost. Vox-View needs a technical solution that doesn't violate Magna patents. It will eventually end up inventing DRM. But for that, we need to introduce Gallegher - an eccentric drunkard, but a brilliant inventor.

But wait a moment. There is an irrelevant romantic thread behind this corporate competition. James, Ella's son, wants to marry Patsy, Harrison's daughter. And she is not interested. Hence the pressure tactic. But the story would still be the same without this marriage talk.

The complication.

Harrison had hired Gallegher to work out a technical solution - at a time when Gallegher was in a drunken state. When the story opens, Gallegher is just sobering up. And finds himself in company of this no-good narcissist robot Joe. He has a vague recollection he built the robot for some purpose, but cannot recollect why!

This is the state where he gets a visit from Harrison, reminding him of the project. He will also get another visitor - Kennicott, from whom Gallegher had recently purchased some diamonds. Powdered form of those diamonds has apparently ended up inside Joe! Kennicott wants his payment - $12,000. Gallegher makes a promise & goes out to understand the project.

While at Vox-View office, he will get a visit from Joe. How did Joe come to know he was there? Following dialog fragment enlightens us:

"How'd you know where to reach me?"
"I vastened you," the robot said... "I vastened you were at the Vox-View studios, with Patsy Brock."
"What's vastened?" Gallegher wanted to know.
"It's a sense I've got. You've nothing remotely like it, so I can't describe it to you. It's like a combination of sagrazi and prescience."
"Sagrazi?"
"Oh, you don't have sagrazi, either..."

Anyway, Joe has come to inform Gallegher that Gallegher is now working for Sonatone rather than Vox-View!! "when Ella and James Tone came to the laboratory, ... I hypnotized them," Joe explained. "I made them think I was you. ... I signed the contract - it's your signature, by the way..."

Why did Joe do this? "they offered a hundred thousand, and two thousand a week for five years. But I merely wanted enough to pay Kennicott and make sure he wouldn't come back and bother me." You see, he didn't like Kennicott!

There will be a court case, but Gallegher cannot come out free because Joe is refusing to cooperate.

The resolution.

Dejected, at home, Gallegher will eventually make Joe hypnotize himself. Because that way, Joe can perhaps appreciate hidden parts of his beauty - accessible only via his subconscious! It's during this state that robot will tell Gallegher why he was created: "You were drinking beer, ... You had trouble with the can opener. You said you were going to build a bigger and better can opener. That's me." OK - so we know Joe is a can opener!!

Turns out - this revelation of purpose to Gallegher has taken away Joe's volition; he must now do what he is ordered. We will be told that the solution to Vox-View's problem is built into Joe: "You made me capable of a certain subsonic tone that Brock must broadcast at irregular time intervals over his televiews".

We are told humans cannot feel these subsonics at audio amplification at homes, but the response at a bootleg theater's volume is different: "They can be felt as a faint, irrational uneasiness at first, which mounts to a blind, meaningless panic."

Soon, bootleg theaters will lose their audience. And, by association, the expensive Sonatone theaters showing their own feed too will lose their customers. Heroes win!

See also.

1. Henry Kuttner & C L Moore's "Vintage Season": Another story that makes use of a device to create subsonics to create a sense of terror in people.
   

Collected in.

1. "The Best of Henry Kuttner".
2. Raymond J Healy & J Francis McComas (Eds)' "Adventures in Time and Space".
3. Isaac Asimov & Martin H Greenberg (Eds)' "Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories 5 (1943)".

Fact sheet.

"The Proud Robot", short story, review
This story has also been published as by Lewis Padgett, joint pseudonym of the two authors.
First published: Astounding Science Fiction, October 1943.
Rating: A
Related: All stories by Henry Kuttner, C L Moore & as Lewis Padgett.

Bruce Sterling's "Kiosk" (novella, science fiction): A better version of Cory Doctorow's "Printcrime"

Main plot is the same as in "Printcrime", but a bit too long (I started getting bored near end): material printers - kind of (3D) anything physical copying machines, given a computer file describing its looks - are common. And patent owners are threatened - if you could somehow get the file describing your computer, & just print it to get a brand new computer! But the patent owners have a strong lobby with the governments - so consumers are generally denied access & artificial barriers are erected to access.

Note the idea is not completely far fetched. RP machines found in many modern engineering labs can produce the equivalent of a soft mold given a design description as a computer file. Well - in practice, it doesn't always work as simply as it should, but that is just a matter of software interfaces.

But both these stories assume the printer will get out an assembly too, not just component parts that current RP machines do! Virtually every product you see around comprises of multiple smaller components tied together. At least I haven't heard of anything even approaching automatic assembly from a computer file - but given time, I suppose it might be done. After all, Eric Frank Russell & Maurice Hugi's "Mechanical Mice" has a device that can collect needed material from environment & build robots with a strong survival instinct!

In fact, in both stories, printer can print itself - so you basically move towards a post-scarcity economy.

Sterling's variant has two versions of such printers - a lowly consumer version that is not common but available, & does essentially what normal RP machines do. E.g., a child can buy a card, put it in a machine, & out comes the toy. Second version has access far more severely restricted - not only does it produce unbreakable stuff, it can recycle this stuff too!

Full text of this story is available for download.

Story summary.

Borislav is a smart businessman, & owner of a small kiosk in some neighborhood. Very good at spotting consumer trends, & has a knack of having happy customers. He also owns a "fabrikator" - a device that can take the description of a product's looks in the form of a card, & produce the thing described. The material used to build the thing is a kind of wax - not very durable. But this lack of a durability is a feature, not a bug!

See - the customers are kids, & would rather have a new toy every few days! Or young girls who don't mind replacing the hairpin with a newer design every few days!

It's a reasonably well run business, when a government bureaucrat with authority to blow public money buys out everything in the kiosk - for some foolish research program.

A few days later, Borislav is back in business. With a better material copying machine - it makes stuff that is utterly unbreakable, but only in a single boring color. In addition to toy customers, he now get people who want to build knives, kitchenware, farming tools, ...

And the machine recycles stuff - so you can bring back what you don't like, for a refund on material!

He gets famous. But there is a catch. He had brought this machine from underground market. It cannot be legally had. You get some fun with that.

Ultimately, he strikes a deal with a politician - government will set up a commission to study the machine! Business goes on as usual, only legally in the name of testing. Only, his old customers no longer can access the machine - sounded like the fate of Reardon Metal in Ayn Rand's "Atlus Shrugged".

Borislav has also made copies of machine, to be used to make more copies, & hidden them in jungles. Eventually, he will lead a revolution to make these machines legal. You get standard gorilla warfare. Eventually, the world changes & such printers are legal.

Collected in.

1. Gardner Dozois (Ed)'s "The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection" (2008).
   

Fact sheet.

"Kiosk", short story, review
First published: F&SF, Jan 2007.
Rating: B
Passed first round of nominations for Nebula Awards 2007 in novella category.
All stories by Bruce Sterling.