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Old 08-26-2008, 10:14 PM   #103
dstampe
dstampe
dstampe began at the beginning.
 
Posts: 50
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Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: Canada
Device: Sony PRS-500
Yes, I think my reaction was more conceern that someone might expect good things to happen and be unprepared for the reality. I'm a perfectionist myself when it comes to releasing any kind of product, so would not want unlimited distribution unit until I'm completely happy with it. But then my field is software and technical/scientific writing, where clarity and correctness matter, not plot. So personal taste does not enter into things to the same extent as for fiction.

Any online writer's workshop would have to be limited to viewing by participants only, or the type of writers that would be willing to participate will be limited. Anything in a public forum (such as this) will almost certainly be archived and searchable, so even though it may feel like a small group to the participants there are many thousand potential viewers. Tossing around ideas is one thing, exposing early drafts of creative work to a critical free-for-all is something else. I wonder how the writing process is affected for writers who are published by Baen's ARC publications? I suspect more care is taken in early drafts than would otherwise be the case.

Partial plagarism issues is a lot more commonplace (even expected) for open-source programming and technical literature. There ideas and structure are the core feature and are somewhat independent of exact wording or names, and it is quite possible to change things a lot without changing the value of the work. For finished fiction works, especially good ones, major changes to the text are unlikely as this would almost certainly destroy the value of the work. So for those text fingerprinting might work.
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