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Hailed by Bruce Sterling as 'a political activist, gizmo freak, junk collector, programmer, entrepreneur, and all-around Renaissance geek', the Internet's favourite high-tech culture maven is celebrated with the first collection of his infamous articles, essays, and polemics. Irreverently championing free speech and universal access to information - even if it's just a free download of the newest Britney Spears MP3 - he leads off with a mutinous talk given at Microsoft on digital rights management, insisting that they stop treating their customers as criminals. Readers will discover how America chose Happy Meal toys over copyright, why Facebook is taking a faceplant, how the Internet is basically just a giant Xerox machine, why Wikipedia is a poor cousin of "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", and how to enjoy free e-books. Practising what he preaches, all of the author's books, including this one, are simultaneously released in print and on the Internet under Creative Commons licenses that encourage their reuse and sharing. He argues persuasively that this practice has considerably increased his sales by enlisting readers to promote his work. Accessible to geeks and non-techies alike, this is a timely collection from an author who effortlessly surfs the zeitgeist while always generating his own wave.

ISBN 1892391813   Pages 213 ISBN13 9781892391810 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Tachyon Publications   Weight (grammes) 218 Imprint Tachyon Publications   Published in San Francisco Format Paperback   Height (mm) 200 Publication date 01 Jan 2008   Width (mm) 125 DEWEY 814.6   Spine width (mm) 17 DEWEY edition DC21   Academic level General

		Foreword for Content by John Perry Barlow
		Microsoft Research DRM Talk		3
		The DRM Sausage Factory		27
		Happy Meal Toys versus Copyright: How America Chose Hollywood and Wal-Mart, and Why It's Doomed Us, and How We Might Survive Anyway		39
		Why Is Hollywood Making a Sequel to the Napster Wars?		45
		You DO Like Reading Off a Computer Screen		51
		How Do You Protect Artists?		55
		It's the Information Economy, Stupid		59
		Downloads Give Amazon Jungle Fever		63
		What's the Most Important Right Creators Have?		67
		Giving it Away		71
		Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet		77
		How Copyright Broke		83
		In Praise of Fanfic		89
		Metacrap: Putting the Torch to Seven Straw-Men of the Meta-Utopia		95
		Amish for QWERTY		105
		Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books		109
		Free(konomic) Ebooks		133
		The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights		139
		When the Singularity Is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil		145
		Wikipedia: A Genuine HG2G - Minus the Editors		159
		Warhol Is Turning in His Grave		171
		The Future of Ignoring Things		175
		Facebook's Faceplant		179
		The Future of Internet Immune Systems		185
		All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites		189
		Read Carefully		197
		More...

"Essential reading for any writer who wants to have any chance of understanding what's going on - and who perhaps wants tohelp shape the future." -- Writer's News January 2009

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