AS IF!

While scanning the information super highway looking for something to pontificate on, I came across a rather interesting group of individuals that many of you have probably heard of. It is the group AS IF! (Authors Supporting Intellectual Freedom) and if I am reading the information correctly, it was formed when the board of trustees at Austin's St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Texas turned down a $3 million gift because the donor wanted Annie Proulx's short story "Brokeback Mountain" removed from the optional reading list for 12th-graders.
They maintain a blog, but it has not been updated for a while - but the link to the original story can be found here
What interests me about this story is that is runs completely opposite of another story that I read about a few months ago about some zany New Zealand author named Brian Edwards who thinks that libraries are committing 'grand theft' by loaning out books. He has since removed the post from his blog because he took a pretty severe cyber-beat down, but parts of it can be found here.
While these two stories touch on different themes of Intellectual Freedom and Intellectual Property, it gave me warm fuzzies to read one and chills o read the other.