Reddit reviews Year Zero: A Novel

I'm currently reading Year Zero by Rob Reid.

It deals with the fact that, due to how twisted our copyright laws are, and how ridiculous the damages are supposed be when copyright infringement occurs, that the alien civilizations who've been listening in and loving our music are now faced with being copyright pirates to the tune of all possible wealth in the universe.

That seemed pertinent to the subject at hand. Also, the book is pretty funny, in a Douglas Adams kind of way.

Here's the link

That is madness! I've not really perused /r/books that much but that is horrendous even if they are bound legally as 3rd party retailers.

The obvious comparison for me as a musician is digital download vs CD. CD cost more to produce/deliver etc and so is more expensive to cover those costs. I actually can't believe such a scam is going on in the 21st century!

EDIT: Regarding your edit it's this from the Reddit sidebar ads.

This book has a really funny premise.

Year Zero by Rob Reid. It's essentially a book about record labels finding out that aliens have been listening to [and illegally downloading] all of earth's music for decades. When they find out about this, the Alien's realize that they owe Earth an unfathomable amount of money and it would be impossible to ever pay it all. So two aliens hire a lawyer, Nick Carter to handle the case. They hope he can strike a licensing agreement, and the fate of Earth rests in his hands.

I actually haven't finished the book, but it is a really easy read and has a lot of funny pop culture references, as well as fairly legally accurate. The plot is just outrageous, which makes it that much better in my opinion. The idea of it all I think would just make for a great adventure, and would have some great CGI. Would be even better if they got the real Nick Carter to play Nick Carter.

There's a novel out that reflects this issue, just heard about it on NPR.

Basically in the novel humans suck at everything compared to aliens except for our musical abilities and they love our music so much that they sometimes die of happiness when listening to it. According to our copyright laws, the universe owes us more than three times the amount of money that exists in the entire universe so some aliens are out to destroy earth to get out of the debts.

TL;DR book related to this issue, here

I'm no expert on sci-fi, but 'Year Zero' was pretty good. It felt like an american angle on a hitchhiker type story. It's more funny than profound, at least when compared to hitchhikers. Most of it takes place on Earth, and the alien world has to be kept from being viewed by humans because it's beauty would overwhelm and possibly kill them. So it's hardly described at all.

The audiobook is read by John Hodgman, and he does a great job with all the voices. I had no idea he did voices.