Night off

[rolanni]

So the power went down at 4:45 last night, just when I was starting to fill in the DMCA form because Yet Another person thinks it’s Perfectly OK to steal from us.  I was in a foul mood, because, well, people stealing from us — and instead of writing, I’d be form-filling, and it’s not like I have enough time in the day to write anyway. Then the power went off and that was Just. . .Ducky.

Which, as it turned out, it was.  Steve hooked up the reading lamp in the living room to the Big Green Battery and we read together on the sofa for the next five hours.  Very pleasant and cozy.  We should do this more often.  Possibly without requiring the destruction of innocent utility poles as a prompt.

In other news — The Catechism of Cliche — or at least parts of it.  Go, read, enjoy.  Then get thee to the Dalkey Archive Press and purchase for your own The Best of Myles, which collects all the “Cruiskeen Lawn” columns from the Irish Times, giving you access not only to the Catechism, but to the sordid details of the Ventriloquists War, news of The Brother, and all the various schemes launched by Myles na Gopaleen, the Da, to make money.

Also highly recommended are the na Gopaleen novels The Third Policeman and At Swim-Two-Birds.  The former is a science fiction novel disguised as a literary novel.  The latter is a writer’s novel, detailing the adventures of  a young, layabout writer, whose characters, fed up with his sloth and his bad treatment, turn on him.  Both are very, very funny.

And now — no, wait!  Everybody saw the article about the “Rosie computers” during the war, right?  Here, in case you missed it — worth a read.

And now I better get some coffee and get on the road.

Originally published at Sharon Lee, Writer. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[isabellag.livejournal.com]

I want more info on DMCA & somebody trying to steal from you - what's all that about, hmmm?

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

Writers are stolen from with depressingly and increasing frequency. Ebooks make this very easy. Some people are simply misguided. Most (IMHO) are, um, scumbags. This latest nice person is selling on Ebay Kindles pre-loaded with -- was it 6,000 novels? I think it was 6,000. So that the person buying the Kindle wouldn't have to go to the trouble of actually tracking down things to read. As if all things to read were interchangeable. But I digress.

Anyhow he, the vendor, claims to be the "copyright holder or resale agent" of all those books. And some of them are ours, of which he is most certainly NOT the copyright holder and if he's a "resale agent", then damnitohell, I want my royalties.

And Ebay of course, can't police everything that people sell within its precints. And the law puts the burden of proof in the instance of pirated intellectual property on the IP owner. So, if I want this guy to stop selling our books illegally, on Ebay, this week, then I have to file a DMCA notice. For each infringed work.

I need a secretary.

Or possibly a Legal Department.

[isabellag.livejournal.com]

Or a big, big stick. How dispicable.

[isabellag.livejournal.com]

Sorry. That should be 'despicable'. Or 'disgusting'.