(2003-01-27) Melancholy Elephants

MelancholyElephants is a Spider Robinson story about the implications of extending Copy Right in perpetuity. Artists have been deluding themselves for centuries with the notion that they create. In fact they do nothing of the sort. They discover. Inherent in the nature of reality are a number of combinations of musical tones that will be perceived as pleasing by a human central nervous system... Thanks to our technology, better than half of us have no Meaningful work to do; fifty-four percent of our population is entered on the tax rolls as artists. Because the synthesizer is so cheap and versatile, a majority of those artists are musicians, and a great many are composers. The raises the idea of a Copyright Music Hack.