"The People Who Owned the Bible" is a good, brisk satire of intellectual property's cultural dark side. The focus isn't religion, but the implications of owning popular pieces of cultural history.
Which reminds me: any suggestions for copyright literature, perhaps as a subset of the literature of information? I've been assembling some titles, but it's a pretty small field so far. Richard Stallman wrote "The Right to Read". Spider Robinson offers "Melancholy Elephants". K.W. Jeter's Noir contains an, ah, strong defense of IP. Charles Finlay's "Factwhore Proposition" includes copywright within its exploration of the future of librarians in a search world.
A post on Urth suggested considering Gene Wolfe's The Doctor of Death Island (1978) for copyright reasons, but I haven't had a chance to dig up my copy to check.
(via BoingBoing)
Snow Crash features an attempt to protect trade secrets on a neurological basis. And while I don't have my copy to hand, there's also Karl Schroeder's Permanence if memory serves.
Posted by: Steven | January 12, 2005 at 20:10