Joel Rose at NPR did a profile on Rob Reid and his recent novel, "Year Zero". The book starts from the premise that aliens suck at making music and thus take their music from us. That's all well and good until someone decides that this is a massive galactic case of copyright theft, and hilarity ensues.

Yeah, that had my eyebrows going up, too. However, Reid isn't writing this stuff from an outsider perspective. In past lives he's been an entrepreneur and had a hand in the founding of listen.com which eventually led to Rhapsody - an online music service that is still operating (albeit in different form) today. Reid has also gotten some notice for his TED talk titled "The $8 Billion iPod" In this talk Reid lambastes the Cartel for its massively out of proportion sense of its own self-worth.

If anyone has read the book (or listened to the audio, read by John Hodgman, which is getting good reviews) please drop a comment and tell us what you thought of it.