olve slicing and dicing text and
sending it around.

Copyright lawyers have a word for these activities: infringement.
That's because copyright gives creators a near-total monopoly
over copying and remixing of their work, pretty much forever
(theoretically, copyright expires, but in actual practice,
copyright gets extended every time the early Mickey Mouse
cartoons are about to enter the public domain, because Disney
swings a very big stick on the Hill).

This is a huge problem. The biggest possible problem. Here's why:

[CHART: HOW BROKEN COPYRIGHT SCREWS EVERYONE]

* Authors freak out. Authors have been schooled by their peers
that strong copyright is the only thing that keeps them from
getting savagely rogered in the marketplace. This is pretty much
true: it's strong copyright that often defends authors from their
publishers' worst excesses. However, it doesn't follow that
strong copyright protects you from your *readers*.

* Readers get indignant over being called crooks. Seriously.
You're a small businessperson. Readers are your customers.
Calling them crooks is bad for business.

* Publishers freak out. Publishers freak out, because they're in
the business of grabbing as much copyright as they can and
hanging onto it for dear life because, dammit, you never know.
This is why science fiction magazines try to trick writers into
signing over improbable rights for things like theme park rides
and action figures based on their work -- it's also why literary
agents are now asking for copyright-long commissions on the books
they represent: copyright covers so much ground and takes to long
to shake off, who wouldn't want a piece of it?

* Liability goes through the roof. Copyright infringement,
especially on the Net, is a supercrime. It carries penalties of
$150,000 per infringement, and aggrieved rights-holders and their
representatives have all kinds of special powers, like the
ability to force an ISP to turn over your personal information
before showing evidence of your alleged infringement to a judge.
This means that anyone who suspects that he might be on the wrong
side of copyright law is going to be terribly risk-averse:
publishers non-negotiably force their authors to indemnify them
from infringement claims and go one better, forcing writers to
prove that they have "cleared" any material they quote, even in
the case of brief fair-use quotations, like song-titles at the
opening of chapters. The result is