Good Things and Copyrights

From Jeff Verona's review of Say . . . Why Aren't We Crying?:

"'The Lethe Man' by David J. Schwartz gives a fresh face to the old sf trope of amnesia, as an alien (or is he?) learns about human love from soap operas and a crazy girlfriend. The individual ingredients could be a recipe for disaster, but Schwartz has the skill to render them into an insightful and unusually touching piece."

The week I've been having, it was really nice to read that.

One other nice thing: I've been solicited for a fiction piece from a small literary journal, the second such based on "The Ichthyomancer Writes His Friend with an Account of the Yeti's Birthday." No pay, but really, at this point that doesn't matter. It's encouraging to know someone's enjoyed your work that much.

Back to interpreting the implications of Copyright Law for Libraries. Incidentally, this is a really interesting site for creative folks to look at and think about, with the tightening of copyright in recent years. I'm all for copyright, believe me, but there are instances where it becomes more encumbrance than protection. Considering that something like 95% of books go out of print within a year, who exactly is losing money when works of obscure and limited appeal are brought into the public domain? If Disney wants to hang onto Mickey, that's fine. (They squeezed all the life out of those characters long ago, anyway.) But for other works, someone should have to step forward and assert their copyright, rather than having everything languish in the heap of works which have limited mass commercial value but may be useful to historians, other researchers and folks who just like to discover really cool overlooked old books.

Ng. (Not Ana, the other one.) I don't think that's very coherent. More on all that later, as it's become my obsession here.