Space Piracy

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Raise The Jolly Roger Over The Science Fiction Web.

When someone mentions space piracy, the normal image that leaps to mind is of a sleek star cruiser sliding over some poorly armed freighter with a Han Solo at the controls, swearing and hoping his shields will hold.

However, there is also the sort of space piracy that happens on someone else's web space, as the funsters at The Science Fiction Encyclopedia discovered when publishing god Patrick Nielsen Hayden (as in Patrick won't you please publish my novel Hayden) came across the second edition of this fab CD-ROM on the web at Tartu University's servers.

The only problem was, nobody had authorized the porting of this weighty science fiction tomb to the web. And if they had, it certainly wasn't licensed to our SF-loving chums in Estonia!

The SF Encyclopedia wasn't the only ones to suffer at the hands of this modern day Buccaneer of cyberspace.

There was also a load of SF books ripped off in full including William Gibson's Neuromancer and every novel ever published by Douglas Adams.

Adams commented that he was very disappointed that true SF fans should be abusing the Internet in this way, and pointed out that such blatant copyright theft will mean an increasing reluctantness of name authors/content creators to create for the internet.

The university removed the offending material when it was pointed out to them, but webmaster Jaak Parik then just moved his pirated material over to his own site at http://jp.bumpclub.ee/5.html and thumbed a hearty snook at his western foes.

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum. Well, that Jaak Parik is still sailing the cyberseas, and rattling his pieces of eight at every opportunity. As a concession of sorts, he seems to have programmed his web-site to do the old selective IP-address serving thang- if you surf in from a Western ISP, you get to see jack shit on his site.

But just you try surfing in from an Estonian host (or a spoofed Estonian address) and see what you can see on his site then !

Now, where did we put that parrot?

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