While writing a novel I almost completely stop reading books in the same sub-genre for the duration.

Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life.

Back in the pre-internet age there were pirate publishers, especially in the third world, who would print physical copies of books, sell them, and never inform the author/their agent/their publisher just trousering the money. I think we can agree that this was piracy?

What I really think is that our current model of copyright is fundamentally broken. We badly need to replace it with a different system for remunerating creators, which gets it the hell out of the face of the public (who were never aware of it to begin with in the pre-internet dead tree era). Unfortunately, the current copyright model is enshrined in international trade treaty law, making it almost impossible to work around.

While writing a novel I almost completely stop reading books in the same sub-genre for the duration.

I like lassic British spy thrillers. Seriously. If the cold war was still on, that's something I'd be writing.

I have a CS degree and a history that includes working as a software developer and being a computer magazine columnist back during the 1990s. I guess I simply paid attention to the social effects of the IT revolution as I lived through it.