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automatically re-copyrighted and got another 95 years of exclusive use (that\'s wrong). 
 
So this is where copyright breaks: When copyright lawyers try to treat readers and listeners and viewers as if they were (weak and unlucky) corporations who could be strong-armed into license agreements you wouldn\'t wish on a dog. There\'s no conceivable world in which people are going to tiptoe around the property they\'ve bought and paid for, re-checking their licenses to make sure that they\'re abiding by the terms of an agreement they doubtless never read. Why read something if it\'s non-negotiable, anyway? 
 
The answer is simple: treat your readers\' property as property. What readers do with their own equipment, as private, noncommercial actors, is not a fit subject for copyright regulation or oversight. The Securities Exchange Commission doesn\'t impose rules on you when you loan a friend five bucks for lunch. Anti-gambling laws aren\'t triggered when you bet your kids an ice-cream cone that you\'ll bicycle home before them. Copyright shouldn\'t come between an end-user of a creative work and her property. 
 
Of course, this approach is made even simpler by the fact that practically every customer for copyrighted works already operates on this assumption. Which is not to say that this might make some business-models more difficult to pursue. Obviously, if there was some way to ensure that a given publisher was the only source for a copyrighted work, that publisher could hike up its prices, devote less money to service, and still sell its wares. Having to compete with free copies handed from user to user makes life harder -- hasn\'t it always? 
 
But it is most assuredly possible. Look at Apple\'s wildly popular iTunes Music Store, which has sold over one billion tracks since 2003. Every song on iTunes is available as a free download from user-to-user, peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa. Indeed, the P2P monitoring company Big Champagne reports that the average time-lapse between a iTunes-exclusive song being offered by Apple and that same song being offered on P2P networks is 180 seconds. 
 
Every iTunes customer could readily acquire every iTunes song for free, using the fastest-adopted technology in history. Many of them do (just as many fans photocopy their favorite stories from magazines and pass them around to friends). But Apple has figured out how to compete well enough by offering a better service and a better experience to realize a good business out of this. (Apple also imposes ridiculous licensing restrictions, but that\'s a subject for a future column). 
 
Science fiction is a genre of clear-eyed speculation about the future. It should have no place for wishful thinking about a world where readers willingly put up with the indignity of being treated as \"licensees\" instead of customers.  
 
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In Praise of Fanfic 
 
(Originally published in Locus Magazine, May 2007) 
 
I wrote my first story when I was six. It was 1977, and I had just had my mind blown clean out of my skull by a new movie called Star Wars (the golden age of science fiction is 12; the golden age of cinematic science fiction is six). I rushed home and stapled a bunch of paper together, trimmed the sides down so that it approximated the size and shape of a mass-market paperback, and set to work. I wrote an elaborate, incoherent ramble about Star Wars, in which the events of the film replayed themselves, tweaked to suit my tastes. 
 
I wrote a lot of Star Wars fanfic that year. By the age of 12, I\'d graduated to Conan. By the age of 18, it was Harlan Ellison. By the age of 26, it was Bradbury, by way of Gibson. Today, I hope I write more or less like myself. 
 
Walk the streets of Florence and you\'ll find a copy of
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