This is not me

Let's face it: our world is far more jacked in than the one William Gibson created in his Neuromancer trilogy. But even his peers didn't foresee the majority of the population owning handheld devices that could instantly access the net.

This means that people can discover a huge amount of information about you through that contemporary god of knowledge, Google. (As a recent would-be iPhone thief discovered.)

Now I don't do these vanity searches myself. I have Google do it for me, with Google Alerts.
And boy, do I have a fascinating and varied life.

I seems I spend my time writing about the American history for Citizen's Voice (the latest column being on Mark Twain), researching the effect humanity had on American rainforests 45,000 years ago, writing books on my favourite 25 horror movies around, and giving advice making US governors answer questions from their legislature.

And that's all on top of making a film.

No wonder I'm an insomniac. My life is too busy for me spend time sleeping!

Why the pirates win

Found this in retweet Twitter feed from Dr Dark - one of my magazine's readers.

If you want to know why people pirate DVDs, it's not just because they're free: it's because you can end up with a better product than if you buy a DVD.

UPDATE: The webcomic The Brads has made the same point, except with ebooks.

Copyright is not evil

Copyright is not evil

It seems that all over the web, there's a growing number of people who think that copyright is a bad thing.

A few years back this was limited to the copyleft movement and filesharers (or pirates if you prefer), but lately it seems that more people in the creative industries and artists seem to view copyright as a bad thing - mainly that it allows large corporations to exploit individuals.

Worse, some take the view that acknowledging the rights of other creative professionals is optional.

This is disturbing because copyright exists to protect artists and creatives from being exploited. These aren't a set of perfect laws, and they're open to abuse, but they enable workers in media to earn a living.

Take this scene, set in a world without copyright laws:

Now, the same scene in the real(ish) world.

People who work in creative professions have the right to be paid, and the right to be credited as being the creator of their work, because of copyright laws.

Businesses also have the right to stop people copying products they've developed. This enables creatives in any field to earn a living, as well as enabling companies earn the money to employ staff and invest in new works.

Abuse and manipulation of copyright laws by businesses and individuals should be stopped. But destroying, or just plain ignoring, copyright laws isn't the way to do it.