6. Trespassing

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From my childhood, I remember. Halloween as a night of trespass—of wrongful entry into the lands of another—because in the coal mining town where I grew up, trick or theaters who were not treated often went around to alley behind the offending house, entered the back yard, and dumped the garbage can over, spilling the trash on the rear garage driveways. But probably the most familiar instance of trespass is burglary—the felony of breaking into and entering the house, office, etc., of another with the intent to steal Hyper-readers are textual burglars. They break into electronic texts and once they have found the source codes hidden from sight, steal them away with their cut & paste tools and reassemble them (minus the serial numbers so to speak) in their own home pages. As Sirc implies in his chapter, hyper-readers are ardent plagiarists. The situation is so bad among hyper-readers that copyright lawyers have been called in to adjudicate the boundaries of texts.