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Re: Bruce Sterling's E-rights
Re: Information *wants* to be free. I know it came out of Well
discussions (which often include professional writers including John
Markoff, Jon Katz, Sterling, John Perry Barlow
<http://www.eff.org/~barlow/>, Howard Reingold, etc and which are no
more copyrighted than a talk you might have over dinner at say the
Flying Burritto), But I also recall that it may be in Barlow's
Electronic Frountier screed, the one that founded the EFF following the
Steven Jackson Games bust. see
http://www.eff.org/pub/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/not_too_brief_history.html
Oops Not there but a good link to have. Note that you can get all of
Barlow's ACM columns and his song lyrics for the Dead there.
Seriously Sterling explains it best in his 1992 LITA speech, which also
appeared in WIRED *edited and copyight by Wired*. Luckily we have free
access to Bruce's writings other than his novels at
http://gopher.well.sf.ca.us:70/1/Publications/authors/Sterling/ The LITA
talk is "Free As Air, Free As Water, Free As Knowledge"
Just for aggitation sake, let me point out that James Gleick's work is
almost entirely built on his reportage of the work of others. He is not
the inventor of Chaos, merely (or importantly depending on your view) a
popularizer of scientific thought. Should he be required to pay
royalities to each of the people who did the research on which his best
selling book was based?
Serling delineates between his essays, gleanings and reportage and his
fictions. Does that make sense?