News You Can Bruise for 2002 August 25

I will never write this story, for a very simple reason which is that my self-esteem is okay, and also I'm no good at writing stories. But some self-loathing yet competent author could implement it and maybe make a little money. It's called "Life of Author" and it takes place in a future in which copyright has been scaled back to last only the life of the author plus fourteen years.

The main character is a mercenary hitman for EvilCorp, a huge conglomorate which owns the rights to much of the world's intellectual property. His job is to bump off authors who won't sign up with EvilCorp, thus causing their works to (soon) pass into the public domain. Of course, authors in the EvilCorp stable are given life-extension technologies and, near the end of their extended lifespans, kept in near-cyrogenic vegetative states to give EvilCorp perpetual ownership over their works. But something goes wrong or there's a twist of some kind; this is where the self-loathing comes in.

Tangentially, Disney is going to release a science fiction version of Treasure Island which looks really cool. It reminds me that I've been meaning to make a science fiction version of Steamboat Willie-- oh, wait, I can't.