F... F... S!!!

If you pick up the (unfortunately out of print) philosophy texbook Thought Probes, you'll find several excellent short stories, together with good commentary on their philosophical implications. It includes "The Cold Equations," "Cloak of Anarchy," "The Star," and numerous other excellent, substantial, reasonably short texts and the commentaries are thought provoking for the teacher as well as students.

They say elephants never forget... and have you ever seen an elephant who looked happy?

In Spider Robinson's short story "Melancholy Elephants," he points out a huge problem with perpetual (or even lengthy) copyright, coupled with perpetual storage (memory). It stifles innovation, and worse, leads to stagnation in the arts.

There are a finite number of aesthetically pleasing ways to arrange a finite number of notes, a finite number of colored pigments, or a finite number of words. Remember the monkeys and Shakespeare? Without intending to -- without ever having been exposed to an earlier work -- it is quite possible that portions of a new creative work will substantially resemble portions of an earlier work. And that's enough to qualify as plagiarism.

Shakespeare's work was "substantially similar" to other, already-existing creative works... suppose he'd been subject to litigation for that?

We need to be able to forget.