Copyright

All the stories you find on this Web site are copyrighted by me. I reserve all the rights, except those listed explicitly below.

I hereby grant any individual permission to download, store and reproduce these stories in their entirety in electronic form, for personal use, provided the copyright message at the bottom of each story is maintained. Furthermore, permission is granted to print the stories on a personal printer, as long as it is only for personal use.

Any other use of the story requires explicit permission by me. Specifically, these stories may not be posted on a Web site or in a newsgroup, or sent in an Email message (but feel free to post or send a link to the story page instead) without permission. However, please don't hesitate to contact me at altan498@gmail.com to ask permission, since I will be very reasonable about this. Be sure to use the word “STORIES” in your subject line, or your Email will be thrown out with all the junkmail I get!

In general, I will be happy to give permission to use my work except in extremely offensive contexts. If you are going to make a load of money off them, I'd want a share of that, but usually I won't insist on royalties or anything like that.

Ocasionally, I may post my work in newsgroups. On such ocasion, I grant permission for the work to be distributed and archived in ways that are normal for the particular newsgroup. Posting to a newsgroup does not, in my opinion, releases a work into the public domain, and any post I make contains an explicit statement to this effect.

Public Domain

Copyright law exists to protect authors, and is supposed to balance the needs of the individual author for control and reward with the need of the society as a whole of access to works of art and literature. Current copyright law allows me and my heirs to put restrictions on texts I write until 50 or 70 years after my death. People have different, and sometimes very vocal, opinions on this law.

Personally, I believe the prime purpose of copyright law should be to give the author of a work a fair chance to get rewarded for his or her work, that being a stimulus to produce more works. However, if you have not gotten your reward in some reasonable amount of time, the chances of getting it later would be extremely slim. I do not believe that control over one's work has ever been or should be the prime focus of copyright law.

Therefore, however much I would like to get rich one day, and however much I would want to dictate everyone exactly what they can and cannot do, as a small protest agains the current copyright law, I hereby declare that I will put my works into the public domain 15 years after its creation. Please note that each story contains the month and year of its creation, so determining the 15 year period is not a problem.

June 30, 2001
Altan