Hello
Interesting site name - # hostname, How did you get such a pretty domain name?

Actually, EST's been in the can for a year or so (though I'll probably have to do one more rewrite once my editor's through with it).

But I *am* working on a large number of projects right now: a feature for Wired; a feature for Biz 2.0; /usr/bin/god (novel); Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (novel); Unwirer (story, with Charlie Stross); Master of Innerspace (story, with Bruce Sterling); and WiFi is Not a Crime (Yet!) (whitepaper).

Yeah, I'm a little overextended. People who are thinking of asking me to work on something for them, or read their book, or sit on their board, or whatnot: take note.

Cory, you're working on Eastern Standard Tribe, /usr/bin/god, AND a collaborative SF story simultaneously? I admire your ability to multi task, but isn't this going to slow down the authorship of all three?

Don't take this as criticism, but I couldn't help but think of the Thomas Hardy Monty Python sketch.

Well, I suppose the four-person collaborations set up by Ellen Datlow on SCI-FI.com come to mind as online collaborations, but they weren't done on a weblog.

Good question. A significant background point of Heinlein's Friday was that a single company held a decades-long monopoly on the power cell that was universally ruled 'cause they _hadn't_ patented it and no one could reverse engineer it. But I wouldn't call it a focus of the story (and it was essentially today's IP laws.)

There was a short story in SF Age called something like "The Ballad of Suzy Nutrasweet" by, I think, Paul DiFillipo.

Seems inevitably like something Pohl & Kornbluth would've covered, but nothing's coming to mind, but it's been a while since I've read them.

How much science fiction is there which has intellectual property issues as its main focus (or a significant focus)? I can think of Karl Schroeder's _Permanence_, Neal Stephenson's _Snow Crash_, Bruce Sterling's _Islands in the Net_ offhand. Spider Robinson's "Melancholy Elephants."

Most of the other stuff I can think of only has brief allusions - Joe Haldeman's _Worlds_ has a reference to being able to afford copyright on some articles, there's Virgil's smuggling his work out of the lab in Greg Bear's _Blood Music_, a reference to a mercenary being licensed in Paul McAuley's _Red Dust_. Some discussion of patents in _Neuromancer_.

I think this might be a net-first -- an act of auctorial exhibitionism that no one has ever attempted before.

I'm hereby invoking Kottke's Law** -- which states that when you claim a first on the Internet, someone will step up to prove you wrong with prior art. I dimly remember a collab weblog along the lines of the Unwirer project, but can't remember the details... and I didn't link it in my outboard brain either. Anyone? A few people participating in NaNoWriMo http://www.nanowrimo.org/ wrote their novels in realtime as weblogs, but I don't remember any NaNoWriMo collaboration by weblog.

**Hey, someone has to give it a name...