Spam is on the rise, viruses abound, protect your computer or face having it messed up by some faceless entity! Fire! Fear! Foes! Alert! Man the Baricades! The barbarians are at the gate! Harlan Ellison is suing AOL over information that was transfered through their machinery in an attempt to block plagairism of his work!
OK, relax, its not that bad. I've just been more aware of these things since my recent virus attack a couple of months ago. There's not a day that goes by now that I don't get a alert that some virus or other has been blocked from entering my computer, due to my ISP's anti-virus/anti-spam programs, and the similar programs I now have installed on my main computer. My spam is now up to something close to 450 e-mails a day, with only 3 to 12 non-spam messages a day. My telephone rings every few minutes with telemarketers, whose calls get killed by my answering machine most of the time. Life is rapidly becoming a series of filters that we use to buffer ourselves from the nastier elements of our daily lives in civilization. And Harlan ought to be able to sue AOL to force them to remove the stolen works and provide the names of the offenders to the authorites if the pilfered stories were posted on an AOL website. That sort of thing needs to be stopped, quickly!
But Harlan's swiped stories were posted on Usenet, not AOL. AOL only carried the files from uploaded to destination, like a phone company carrying a call. Should the local phone company be held responsible for a crank call made through it's system? This time, I think Harlan is chasing the wrong game. His lawyers have led him on a persuit of the deepest pockets, not the guilty parties. If Harlan wins this one, every ISP would be open to lawsuits over the content of information that simply passes through it. That's as if New York City were to be sued for allowing the September 11th terrorists to operate an airplane over the city's environs!
If you are fans of Harlan's, please write him a nice e-mail or letter asking him to tell his lawyers to go after the people who stole his work rather than the people who carried the signal. Any lawsuit against AOL should be for hosting stolen works, not hosting e-mail or file transfers. Even if you aren't a fan of Harlan's, a polite note of disagreement with his lawyer's aims wouldn't be wasted effort. Despite his reputation, Harlan Ellison will listen to reasoned, polite arguments. He simply doesn't suffer fools gladly, that's all. I don't have his e-mail address to offer, but I'm sure that there is a public address that one could use. Google it, if necessary. And remember at all times that Harlan is doing this because he wants to end online plagairism of everyone's work, not because he wants to line his pockets. He has always been a "take no bull" sort of guy, and this was a personal affront to him.
If the truth were to be told, I'm not even that big a fan of Harlan, but I admit that he deserves respect as much as any other writer who has placed his work before the public in any medium. AOL needs to be held accountable for plagairism posted on the websites that it hosts, to the extent that AOL needs to provide information to the authorities for legal action when plagairism has been found in one of their hosted websites. AOL is the world's worst ISP when it comes to forcing the removal of plagairised work, and they need their noses thumped hard, I agree. But to pursue them when the guilty party is clearly someone else is not good for anyone online.
Thanks for your time,
Dan
I now return you to your regularly scheduled reading...
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Serialized Stories & Novellettes
Madak -- Part Six
By James McCormick
Jonathon Blake, a divorced ex cop and washed up private eye who hates
his job, is shaken from his inertia when his son goes missing in
strange circumstances. Having few clues to go on, Blake must first navigates
his way through the world of crime and street gangs before he can begin
to learn what is going on. With the help of a mysterious Egyptian
academic and his strange servant Omar, he pushes forward towards a
confrontation for which no one, it turns out, could posssibly be
preperared.
Connections
By Indrapramit Das
The shockwave rippled silently through space, debris searing through vacuum as the cargo unit exploded. The luminous orb of the planet
peered passively at the unfolding chaos, omnipresent, unmoving, forgotten in the moment. Torpedoes streamed out of the spherical
spacecraft like glowing wasps, gently rippling out to shatter the orbital drones.
Sole Survivor
By Brian Powers
John Latimer, journalist extraordinaire, uncovers a story that can never be
told.
Sharing Day
By Brian Pacula
Try to imagine a society where the medium of exchange is bandwith...
What to Change
By Robert Collins
If you could go back to the past and correct your mistakes, what would you change?
The Killer's Choice
By John Biggs
Sometimes the only significance of a man's life consists of one single act.
The Legend of Sjöwitz
By Erica Blaney
"All water can remember," grandmama explained,
"but it has to be taught to remember to remember."
A Matter of Time
By Robert Moriyama
Al Majius and company have a mad uberwizard and a pack of anti-werewolf
fanatics on their backs, but Time is on their side.
The Mare Inebrium Starter Kit.
--Updated 4/22/2002-- This is a link to all the background information for the Mare
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This is a must read for all Mare Inebrium writers and
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Dan Hollifield Previews: "Tru Calling"
The upcoming FOX sci-fi/fantasy TV series for Fall of 2003 Aphelion has been chosen to preview a new fall TV series from the FOX Network.
Dan Hollifield Reviews: "Milky Way Marmalade"
The new sci-fi/humor novel by Mike DeCerto A quest to save the universe just cries out to include Rock and Roll music. Luckily, this one does.
NEXT ISSUE: Dan Hollifield Reviews: "Thran Reborn: Book One of the Thran Chronicles"
The first of a new series of novels by Aphelion writer H. David Blalock!
Double
Wide
by Jim Parnell The collected wisdom of Bubba WARNING: Contains Language.
Aphelion proudly presents the installments of Double Wide all on
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of Bubba wasn't lost for new readers, so we made a mini-archive
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