Luke Coleman

This is the LAST WEEKEND to back the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, The Lost Cause. These kickstarters are how I pay my bills, which lets me publish my free essays nearly every day. If you enjoy my work, please consider backing!

Back when every book had a printing press in its history, every record a record-pressing plant, every film a film-lab, “making or handling copies of creative works” was a pretty good test to determine whether someone was part of the entertainment industry. Even if it turned out they weren’t, the kind of person who has a record-pressing plant can afford to consult an expert to make sure they’re on the right side of the law.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st Century. We started using computers for everything. And computers work by making copies.

The mere act of reading this article created dozens — if not hundreds — of copies of it. These copies flashed in and out of existence in network buffers, switches and routers, graphics buffers and RAM, in multiple content distribution network caches and in your browser’s cache.

You make a thousand copies before breakfast. That doesn’t make you part of the entertainment industry.

It’s a near-dead-certainty that much of what you do violates the black letter of copyright law. We could simplify copyright until everyone who uses the internet for anything could easily grasp its contours and stay within them. But any copyright that is made simple enough for kids doing their homework and people using a dating site to follow would be way too crude for me and the various parties in my supply chain to follow.

-The Internet's Original Sin