I made a mistake. The author of Noir is KW Jeter. J and K, are the initials of a much more famous author.

There was a novel published about 10 years ago by an author named J K Jeter called Noir. In it, copyright had become so important that the punishment for violating it was to have your brain removed from your body and kept conscious in a jar with no sensory input and no way to communicate with the outside world. When I read it it seemed kind of far fetched. It seems a little more plausible these days.