We are making available here, in a single posting, all of Eric’s columns from Jim Baen’s Universe on copyright.
We hope you enjoy this collection of the
Salvos Against Big Brother:
A Matter of Principle
by Eric Flint
I’m going to be writing a regular column on the subject of electronic publishing, and the challenges it poses to modern society—as well as the opportunity it provides. This column will take up a number of related issues, including such matters as the proper length of copyright terms, the nature of Digital Rights Management and why we are opposed to it, and the largely mythical nature of so-called “online piracy.”
We decided to keep this column separate from my general editor’s preface for each issue—see “The Editor’s Page”—because we think the issue is important enough for a separate column of its own. Furthermore, there will usually be a number of specific matters relevant to each issue of the magazine that I will need to address in “The Editor’s Page” that would simply get in the way of this discussion.
We’re calling the column “Salvos Against Big Brother” because that captures the key aspect of the problem, so far as Jim Baen and I are concerned. Both the publisher of this magazine and its editor believe that so-called Digital Rights Management (DRM)—by which we mean the whole panoply of ever more restrictive laws concerning digital media, including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)—are the following:
(more…)
This loyal minion just updated the bibliography page to reflect recent changes including links to the e-book editions of the Grantville Gazette on the Kindle Store and the Barnes and Noble Nook store, as well as links to Eric and Dave Freer’s new ebook anthologies of stories “The Flood was Fixed” and “Crawlspace”. Check it out.
-_ Rick
SUPERSTARS WRITING SEMINAR, Las Vegas, Nevada April 30-May 1, 2012
This is a three-day seminar I’m running along with several other bestselling authors (Kevin Anderson, Brandon Sanderson, Dave Wolverton and Rebecca Moesta). The seminar is designed to teach new and developing writers everything they need to know about commercial fiction publishing and the business aspects of being a professional author.
We’ve done two of these already, the first in Pasadena in 2010 and the second in Salt Lake City in January of this year. If you’d like to see testimonials from previous seminar participants, you can find them here: http://kjablog.com/?p=1746
Early bird prices will become available as of May 1. The seminar is being held next year, in 2012, so there’s still a full year to make your plans. The dates fall on a Monday through Wednesday. We normally run the seminar on weekends, but by running in on three weekdays we can take advantage of much lower lodging prices in Las Vegas. The cost of holding the seminar is a bit cheaper also.
The next few books I have coming out, either as author or editor, are the following:
This month: Eric Flint, 1636: The Saxon Uprising just came out.
May 2011: Christopher Anvil, Rx For Chaos. This is a mass market paperback reissue.
June 2011: Eric Flint and Dave Freer, The Sorceress of Karres. This is a mass market paperback reissue.
July 2011: Eric Flint, Ring of Fire III. Virginia DeMarce’s 1635: The Tangled Web is being reissued this month in a mass market paperback edition.
October 2011: Eric Flint, Worlds. This collection of some of my short fiction is being reissued this month in a mass market paperback edition.
November 2011: Eric Flint, 1635: The Eastern Front. This is a mass market paperback reissue.
January 2012: Eric Flint, Grantville Gazette VI.
MARCON, Columbus, Ohio May 27-29, 2011
This is my next convention appearance. I’m the Guest of Honor. For more information, here’s the URL: http://marcon.org/wordpress/
For those of you with Kindle e-books, I recently put up a collection of my short fiction in the Kindle store at Amazon. The title of the volume is The Flood Was Fixed & Other Stories>. Some of these are reprints from various magazines but others have never been published before. Included in the collection are three stories that were my initial stab at developing what eventually became the novel Boundary.
Dave Freer and I also put up a collection of stories we’ve written together over the years in the Kindle store. The title of the collection is Crawlspace & Other Stories. It includes the long novella “The Genie Out of the Vat” which is the first of the stories in the Rats, Bats & Vats series.
The stories in Crawlspace are available for individual purchase as well. Right now, the individual stories in The Flood Was Fixed aren’t available separately, but we’ll be adding that before too long.
We’ll also be making the collections available in several other e-book formats, within a short time. We’ll post that here when it’s done.
April 13, 2011: I just turned in the last manuscript items for the anthology Ring of Fire III, which is coming out in July. The next thing I’m working on is my short story for Grantville Gazette VI, which is being published in January, 2012.
This is a three-day seminar I’m running along with several other bestselling authors which is designed to teach new and developing writers everything they need to know about commercial fiction publishing and the business aspects of being a professional author.
Superstars Writing Seminar
Pasadena, California
March 19-21, 2010
http://superstarswritingseminars.com/
— Edited 18 Feb 2007 –
Well, that was an interesting experiment, but we’ve switched back to internal WP comments. We did enable threading. Thanks for your patience with us.
– Loyal Minion
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We have moved the comments over to the cool, THREADED, comments system at INTENSE DEBATE, written by the same wonderful people who wrote wordpress, the platform this site runs on.
You do not HAVE to create a new login in order to enter comments, but you get a bunch of neat features at ID if you do. The new system includes open-id login, gravitars, threading, reply-by-email, rss feeds for individual posts, and a bunch more.
We hope you enjoy it.
-_ Loyal Minion