Kurt picked a fragile LCD out of a box of dozens of them and smashed it
on the side of the table. "Exactly!" he said. "This is garbage -- it's
like the deleted music that you can't buy today, except at the bottom of
bins at Goodwill or at yard sales. Tons of it has accumulated in
landfills. No one could afford to pay enough people to go around and
rescue it all and figure out the copyrights for it and turn it into
digital files and upload it to the net -- but if you give people an
incentive to tackle a little piece of the problem and a way for my work
to help you..." He went to a shelf and picked up a finished AP and
popped its latches and swung it open.
"Look at that -- I didn't get its guts out of a dumpster, but someone
else did, like as not. I sold the parts I found in my dumpster for money
that I exchanged for parts that someone else found in *her* dumpster --"
"Her?"
"Trying not to be sexist," Kurt said.
"Are there female dumpster divers?"
"Got me," Kurt said. "In ten years of this, I've only run into other
divers twice or three times. Remind me to tell you about the cop
later. Anyway. We spread out the effort of rescuing this stuff from the
landfill, and then we put our findings online, and we move it to where
it needs to be. So it's not cost effective for some big corporation to
figure out how to use or sell these -- so what? It's not cost-effective
for some big dumb record label to figure out how to keep music by any of
my favorite bands in print, either.
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