Pirate Cinema

Introduction

A commercial interlude

Today, October 2, 2012 is the hardest it will ever be to copy things. It will never get harder. It only gets easier from here. Our grandchildren will marvel at how hard copying was in 2012. "Tell me again, Grandpa, about the years 2012, when hard-drives with the capacity to hold all the music, movies, words, photos and games ever weren't three for a buck in the check-out aisle at the grocery store! Tell me again about when not everyone knew the magic trick of typing 'movie name' and 'bittorrent' into a search engine!"

I can't stop you from copying this book (even if I wanted to). I can't force you to buy it in order to read it (even if I wanted to). All I can do is ask you to consider purchasing it if you enjoyed it. There's links below for buying the book in print or ebook form. All the ebooks are DRM-free because they come from Tor Books, who, as of summer 2012, publish all of their books without DRM (this is one of the reasons I love them!).

If you don't want a print edition, and if you're happy with this ebook, you can still send some money my way by donating a copy to a library or school (http://craphound.com/pc/donate/). This will also make you a class-A dude.

You don't have to buy the book from an online seller, either. Here's a tool (http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780765329080) that will find you independent stores in your area that have copies on their shelves.

Read this first!

This book is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license. That means:

You are free:

to Share -- to copy, distribute and transmit the work

Under the following conditions:

For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link ‹http://craphound.com/pc›

Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get our permission

More info here: ‹https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/›

See the end of this file for the complete legalese.

The copyright thing

The Creative Commons license at the top of this file probably tipped you off to the fact that I've got some pretty unorthodox views about copyright. Here's what I think of it, in a nutshell: a little goes a long way, and more than that is too much.

I like the fact that copyright lets me sell rights to my publishers and film studios and so on. It's nice that they can't just take my stuff without permission and get rich on it without cutting me in for a piece of the action. I'm in a pretty good position when it comes to negotiating with these companies: I've got a great agent and a decade's experience with copyright law and licensing (including a stint as a delegate at WIPO, the UN agency that makes the world's copyright treaties). What's more, there's just not that many of these negotiations -- even if I sell fifty or a hundred different editions of this book (which would put it in top millionth of a percentile for bovels), that's still only fifty or a hundred negotiations, which I could just about manage.

I hate the fact that fans who want to do what readers have always done are expected to play in the same system as all these hotshot agents and lawyers. It's just stupid to say that an elementary school classroom should have to talk to a lawyer at a giant global publisher before they put on a play based on one of my books. It's ridiculous to say that people who want to "loan" their electronic copy of my book to a friend need to get a license to do so. Loaning books has been around longer than any publisher on Earth, and it's a fine thing.