Lewis Shiner is one of my favorite science fiction writers and last summer he began making all of his (fantastic!) old short stories available as free, Creative Commons licensed files on his site, under the banner of the "Fiction Liberation Front." Now he's expanded the program.
Cory Doctorow's post on BoingBoing today got me thinking about the state of online literature, partly as an extension of the "Books that are Free" series I'm doing and some musings in the last issue of American Libraries on eBooks and whatnot. Think of this as a brief meditation on the subject full of incomplete thoughts:
Project Gutenberg is interesting and all, and by no means am I belittling the proposition, but the content is of course very pre-internet thanks to currently copyright law. Then as a sort of "forward escape" from the system in place we have Creative Commons, which is very internet centric.
So, newsflash, the system is broken (read/borrow), but now I'm thinking the whole debate will just largely become irrelevant as relevant content begins to slip to the copy-left.
Lets adopt a biological model of communication and quickly see the key to long term copyright survival is in moving towards a more viable, transferable mode. Out of the pond and into the ocean.
