Hate Life, Will Travel

I’ve been writing science fiction shorts for a workshop I’m doing, trying to get back into fiction writing, and I thought it might be cool if I put some readings up.

Here’s me reading my short story “Transcript of the Best, Most Powerful Symposium Presentation That Is Strong, Funny, and Promises To Respect You In The Morning”

I hope this turns out okay – this is my first time doing anything like this, soooo… let me know. Troubleshooting if you find anything would be good, too.

If this goes well, I’ll start putting others up, maybe early versions of stuff I’m working on, and so forth.

And I’m an author.

Here’s the problem: copyright doesn’t serve any of the semi-noble purposes it was intended to.

I’m writing a book and I wanted to use some great old photos I found. But the magazine they were in had long gone out of business and the photographer, as best I could determine, was dead. None of the big archivers (Corbis, Getty, etc) had bought up an archive that owned the photos.

So we had two choices: skip using them or scan them from the printed material and run them ourselves, and if someone came forward and claimed the rights, we’d have to either pay them off or go to court. We skipped.

These are fifty-year old photos with no locatable owner. And that’s one example – I have a whole folder here with photos I can’t figure out how to clear. It’s crazy. No one’s helped by this situation.

Why? So Disney can keep Mickey Mouse out of the public domain. The public domain is great! Everyone wins with public domain! I’m seriously thinking about releasing all my short stories (and anything else I can pull this off for) under a Creative Commons license just to avoid inflicting anything like this on future generations.