Month: July 2026

OR: Is copyright wrong?

Ugh.

I love/hate copyright. I totally embraced the idea of the Creative Commons because it allowed artists to share their work as they saw fit, even earn money back for their creative efforts if they chose. Or, more radical, give it away for free.

The lack of consistent recognition and application of “copyright” globally has resulted in a hodgepodge of regulations that honestly just get in the way. Amazon is among the greatest offender of this, if only because of their global reach. They have made my my reading life a living hell.

Before I left the US, using Amazon to get both physical and the early digital books (digital incunables?) was relatively painless. Yes, I used other bookstores where I could — especially for out of print or obscure titles — and was happy to do so. The situation began to change for me shortlyafter I attended Rare Books School at UVA¹ and David Seaman loaned me a Sony device that ran the Microsoft ebook reader. While I was there, I managed to get to read Dracula and saw how what I had learned in class could be put to use. This was important, as the ebook format wars were just getting started.

Of course, along with the format wars, there was the “copyright” issue, the proverbial 800-pound monster in the corner (insert your favorite metaphor here). At its best, copyright is a patchwork of agreements and regulations that not everyone adheres to and it rapidly got worse with the digitization of works across the globe.

The first-hand observer version: it was in Germany that I first encountered the problem. I could not use the US Apple Store for purchasing apps and software, the VPNs didn’t work. Netflix and Amazon had the same restrictions. So I had to create new accounts. Things were slightly better in France, at least, because being in the EU, those new accounts were still functional. Of course, ANYTHING from the UK was problematic.

Now that I’m in Canada there are still more changes. Apple recognizes the new ID set up in Germany, Amazon required me to change my location, so everything from the previous “wish lists” disappeared and I had to start over with new ones. Using Prime Video required a third ID but weirdly the lists work. Netflix shows me French and English listings, but I’m not sure if it’s showing me US titles or EU ones, but no new ID needed.

But the books — it’s frustrating as hell not being able to get a title, especially when trying to replace ones that were left behind in the US, either digitally or physically.

It all comes down to the publishers — it always has been a struggle between the creator and the distributor, ever since the very first printing presses were unleashed nearly 600 years ago.

1. I was there for one of the very first workshops on the use of XML for creating flexibly encoded digital texts for multiple display formats, an integral part of creating digital libraries for physical libraries such as the ones I worked in at University of Wyoming and University of Alaska, Fairbanks. ↩︎

OR: Was that on your Bingo card?

Year 02026¹ continues to ask that we hold its beer. The headline greeting me at 03:00 today was weird. The dreams from which I awoke were weird. The world has surely gone mad — that, or I have. Or both.

Or neither? Perhaps it’s always been just this weird all along and the madness is thinking otherwise?

Between this, the “Weekend at Mitch’s²” scenario that has been playing out for the past three weeks, the Maine Democratic Party’s trainwreck³ in realtime, and the ever-eroding conditions of Fearless Leader’s mental and physical health, the curse of intersting times lies heavy upon us — seemingly more than other earlier times.

Of course, for every generation, the Apocalypse is always nigh, the Nuclear Clock creeping ever close to some new scenario of annihilation. We can see it in the stories we tell ourselves, our fiction, our sci-fi and horror films, all the fantasies we conjure up, turning them into commodities, and call amusement.

I guess it only ends with the death of the Sun… though this present consciousness will probably not be aware of it — the timeline is too short.

1. https://longnow.org/clock/ ↩︎
2. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098627/ ↩︎
3. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/08/maine-democrats-graham-platner-senate ↩︎