Famous CC-licensed novel taken down by SFWA

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Precisely. But you need to take them down whoever points them out, not insist on it being someone with "properly constituted authority", which was eBay's approach. The way it worked with eBay, by the time you'd jumped through all the hoops they put in your way, the auction was over. I speak from personal experience, as a software author who's frequently seen his software illegally copied and sold on eBay.

That's problematic, too.

"Properly constituted authority", in the form of copyright holder or authorized agent is reasonable evidence that the work in question is pirated. Complaints by others are not, and you must either take it down regardless, and have problems if it wasn't infringing, or do the research to determine whether the complaint was valid.

I suspect eBay was trying to avoid the latter.
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Dennis

[nekokami]

John Scalzi reports that Scribd had a pretty relaxed piracy policy based on his own experience with them: http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/2007/...fwa-thing.html

I think it's a pretty good overview of the whole business.

I still think Scribd themselves, and other sites like them, could validate text as it goes up if publishers would make a validation reference site available.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by nekokami

John Scalzi reports that Scribd had a pretty relaxed piracy policy based on his own experience with them: http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/2007/...fwa-thing.html

I think it's a pretty good overview of the whole business.

I think you may be right.

I still think Scribd themselves, and other sites like them, could validate text as it goes up if publishers would make a validation reference site available.

Get the publishers to get together and do that. The process would bear a strong resemblance to herding cats.
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Dennis

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Get the publishers to get together and do that. The process would bear a strong resemblance to herding cats.

Sigh. Yeah, I know. If print actually had an organization like RIAA, it might have happened already... but then again, I'm just as glad they don't.

Wait, what about Google Books? Don't they have all the text in machine-readable format, even if they only show you a scanned page on search?

[Andanzas]

Just out of curiosity, I searched the book I am reading right now and the copyright is right there, in the summary. You don't even need to open the document to see it.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Andanzas

Just out of curiosity, I searched the book I am reading right now and the copyright is right there, in the summary. You don't even need to open the document to see it.

Yep. Every book in creation issued since copyright became common will have a copyright notice and date.

But the mere presence of a copyright notice does not mean the work is illegally posted. See the Baen Free Library, or any of the stuff offered under a Creative Commons license.

Not to mention the fact that Mr. Pirate could easily strip copyright notice out of an electronic edition if he though you were looking for it.

Back to square one...
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by nekokami

Sigh. Yeah, I know. If print actually had an organization like RIAA, it might have happened already... but then again, I'm just as glad they don't.

I think the RIAA has done more to damage the record industry than file sharing ever did.

Wait, what about Google Books? Don't they have all the text in machine-readable format, even if they only show you a scanned page on search?

What Google Books shows you depends upon their deal with the provider. In some cases, it's full text. In some cases, it's a snippet.

In the latter case, I don't know offhand if they have the full text but just don't show it.

But yes, Google Books is the closest thing to an existing validation repository I know of.
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Dennis

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I think the RIAA has done more to damage the record industry than file sharing ever did.

See, that just shows you've been paying attention.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

What Google Books shows you depends upon their deal with the provider. In some cases, it's full text. In some cases, it's a snippet.

In the latter case, I don't know offhand if they have the full text but just don't show it.

Let me point out two facts, y'all can make of them what you will:
1) Google can search the contents of the books they have scanned.
2) Images are really hard to to text searches of.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by NatCh

Let me point out two facts, y'all can make of them what you will:
1) Google can search the contents of the books they have scanned.

They can, and I've used the facility.

2) Images are really hard to to text searches of.

You have to OCR them first. But how much pirated stuff gets posted as page images?
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Dennis

[nekokami]

Other than those pix of the latest Harry Potter book, you mean?

I'm just being silly. Books aren't usually shared that way, you're right.

[NatCh]

Okay, so they can do searches, and image files have to be OCR'ed to allow searching ... what do those two facts suggest when you put them together?

[nekokami]

Er... that Google has OCR'd their scanned pages? We knew that already, didn't we?

[NatCh]

Preceding discussion suggests that everyone may not have realized that.

[pglaskowsky]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I get outraged over deliberate piracy. I don't get outraged when a site hosts material it doesn't know was pirated.

Was Scribd aware that a lot of material it hosted was pirated, and did nothing about it because the material made the site more attractive?

If so, I'm outraged. But I don't know that's the case, and neither do you.

Yes, I do, because I've seen some of the traffic that flowed from SFWA to Scribd, and I sent some good pointers myself-- and published them on my blog. Scribd seems to have progressed to the point of accepting that certain users are pirates and wiping out their entire collections of uploads, but it's still turning a blind eye toward individual acts of book piracy.

Go to Scribd today and search for "science fiction" or "tolkien" and you'll see what I mean. The pirated books from these searches have been brought to Scribd's attention, yet they still remain.

I concur. But riddle me this: Scribd should not host material that violates copyright. How does Scribd tell?

To me, it's more important to note that Scribd allows bulk uploading from unregistered users, does not require even an email address for registration, and does not always respond to clear evidence of large-scale piracy.

I'm glad they're cleaning up their act-- at the moment it looks like there are merely hundreds of pirated documents out of the tens or hundreds of thousands on their site, whereas there were thousands or tens of thousands before-- but they're still running the kind of site that facilitates copyright infringement. When they fix that, I'll be satisfied, even if individual violations get through. I agree, no site can really stop that.

No one disputes SFWA's right to ask that infringing copy be taken down. What is being complained about is the remarkably stupid manner in which they did so. Their method of generating the list they used in their DMCA order was apparently to search for anything that contained the words "asimov" or "silverberg". The majority of content affected was not infringing.

This is entirely wrong. Doctorow himself posted the list that was retroactively turned into a poorly-considered DMCA notice. Andrew Burt told me, and the SFWA board, that he DID attempt to review all of those documents individually, and in fact there were many more documents on the original version of the list; what went to Scribd was (he says) pared down substantially. He admits he made several mistakes and should have been more careful. You may reasonably assume he WILL be more careful, if and when he resumes sending such notices.

There are at least four, possibly as many as ten non-infringing works on that list. There are about FOUR HUNDRED infringing works on the list. All of those are gone now, and as far as I know, all the legitimate documents are back online.

Generally I think we're in agreement here, but there are a lot of facts about the situation that just haven't gotten wide-enough distribution.

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[LaughingVulcan]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Yep. Every book in creation issued since copyright became common will have a copyright notice and date.

But the mere presence of a copyright notice does not mean the work is illegally posted. See the Baen Free Library, or any of the stuff offered under a Creative Commons license.

Not to mention the fact that Mr. Pirate could easily strip copyright notice out of an electronic edition if he though you were looking for it.

Back to square one...
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Dennis

I agree as far as copyright notice not necessarily implying that the work has been infringed. And that most works will have a notice and a date. However, a work does not have to have a notice to be copyrighted.

From http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#noc

The use of a copyright notice is no longer required under U.S. law, although it is often beneficial. Because prior law did contain such a requirement, however, the use of notice is still relevant to the copyright status of older works.

Notice was required under the 1976 Copyright Act. This requirement was eliminated when the United States adhered to the Berne Convention, effective March 1, 1989.

....

Use of the notice may be important because it informs the public that the work is protected by copyright, identifies the copyright owner, and shows the year of first publication. Furthermore, in the event that a work is infringed, if a proper notice of copyright appears on the published copy or copies to which a defendant in a copyright infringement suit had access, then no weight shall be given to such a defendant’s interposition of a defense based on innocent infringement in mitigation of actual or statutory damages, except as provided in section 504(c)(2) of the copyright law. Innocent infringement occurs when the infringer did not realize that the work was protected.

So there can be innocent infringement, but just because it doesn't carry a notice doesn't mean that it's not under copyright.