Sony and the Future of Copyright

By Jerry Pournelle

November 21, 2005

(Sony and the Future of Copyright :  Page 1 of 1 )

Column 303 (Continued from the Previous Week)

On Snippets

Eric Pobirs proposes this thought experiment. He buys legal copies of all episodes of Stargate. Then he extracts "snippets" to make up an album called "My Favorite Stargate Scenes," which he puts up on the Internet along with click-through advertisements. Is this ethical? Is it legal? And isn't this pretty well what Google proposes to do, except that the reader does his own editing/compilation of "favorite passages"?

I Have Seen the Future

The Shulz/Doctorow argument begs another question.

At the moment it is more convenient to read a paperback book than to read the work on a computer, whether that be a PDA, laptop, desktop, TabletPC, or a screen on a cell phone. It is not necessarily more convenient to read a hardbound book than to read the text on a TabletPC. Indeed, for the visually handicapped (as all of us will be one day), the ability to change text size and screen brightness is quite valuable—and you can read a TabletPC or PDA in the dark.

By 2015 and probably earlier, things will have changed. By then we will have devices costing no more than the equivalent of $100 (I would guess under $50, but that doesn't change the argument), weighing less than a paperback book, capable of playing audio, showing video, and displaying text in a pleasing manner. Battery life will be hours to days. It will hold hundreds of books obtained from iTunes and iStore and competitors, as well as videos and songs. These books can be updated by the author to remove typos (Larry Niven and I have for decades been hand correcting a critical typographical error in the first edition of The Mote in God's Eye). They can contain maps and illustrations including animations or even cut scenes employing actors to allow better visualization of characters, costumes, and complex actions.

Nokia has a device remarkably similar to what I've described coming out sometime after November 10th, called the BYTE.com > Chaos Manor > 2005