Dear Wired:

Copyright hysteria has taken over.
I recently went to the University of Waterloo photocopy
shop to make a copy of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum
article (Wired 4.09, page 47) -- which was, ironically,
a satire on the silliness of
some aspects of copyright and trademark law -- but the operator
turned me away.  He refused to copy it on the grounds that (and I
quote) "the postcard pictured cannot
be determined to be a real postcard in existence or not".

Information may want to be free, but a million satraps are
scared by the idea.

Jeffrey Shallit
shallit@graceland.uwaterloo.ca