The Right to Use Stuff
This short story is a good 1984-ish riff on copyright issues. The premise is that if we continue down the path towards treating IP just like a permanent, physical commodity, rather than as a tool for promoting societal innovation, we’ll find ourselves living in the world of the protagonist– a world in which every book comes with a built-in digital copyright monitor that “reports when and where it was read, and by whom” to a government agency, which duly exacts charges for that “use”.
An outlandish scenario to be sure, yet… (more…)
