Quote:
Originally Posted by Harmon
Jerry Pournelle is a well known science fiction writer (among many other things - an amazing man) who posted an interesting article at his blog about three years ago on the issue of pirating &c. Basically, it involved a site called scrbd,com, the Electric Frontier Foundation, and the Science Fiction Writers of America.
Apparently, the scrbd site had all kinds of unauthorized ebook files on its site, so that it was, in effect, a pirate (I say "in effect" because their actual knowledge and culpability is not at all clear to me, but the practical result seems indistinguishable from piracy.) The SFWA tried to get these files taken down, and perversely, the EFF thwarted them. Meanwhile, there's some kind of side issue involving Cory Doctorow that I have not parsed out yet.
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Scribd is the youtube of text. It has some of everything--legit ebooks, legal documents (pdfs of rulings of court cases), bootleg ebooks, random articles by bloggers (legitimately posted or not), and so on.
The SFWA, acting on behalf of a few of its members, served Scribd a DMCA takedown notice demanding it remove all content it claimed to be infringing on copyrights--over 1500 links. Scribd did so. However, the SFWA didn't have permission from many of the copyright owners to request removal of that content--including Doctorow's
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which is legally available pretty much everywhere online that has ebooks.
Several authors were disturbed to get notices that said, "this content has been removed from Scribd at the request of they copyright owner." Since they'd put the content on Scribd themselves, this was news to them. Boingboing had
much to say about it. The SFWA has
their own writeup
of what happened.
Accusations flew; apparently, SFWA had come up with a list based on keyword searches without bothering to check the specific contents at each link. Potential lawsuits for false DMCA reports bounced around, to which the SFWA reacted by saying basically, "oh, that wasn't a DMCA takedown notice" ('cos if it was, they were guilty of a serious felony by claiming to represent people they didn't), "it was just a polite please-remove-this request." To which Scribd said, umm, we don't remove stuff just because someone asks us.
AFAIK, no lawsuits were filed, but the SFWA's rep still hasn't recovered; part of the fallout was the then-current VP saying, "
I'm also opposed to the increasing presence in our organization of webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free."
Quote:
A scab is someone who works for less than union wages or on non-union terms; more broadly, a scab is someone who feathers his own nest and advances his own career by undercutting the efforts of his fellow workers to gain better pay and working conditions for all. Webscabs claim they're just posting their books for free in an attempt to market and publicize them, but to my mind they're undercutting those of us who aren't giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work.
Since more and more of SFWA is built around such electronically mediated networking and connection based venues, and more and more of our membership at least tacitly blesses the webscabs (despite the fact that they are rotting our organization from within) -- given my happily retrograde opinions, I felt I was not the president who would provide SFWAns the "net time" they seemed to want at this point in the organization's development, or who would bless the contraction of our industry toward monopoly, or who would give imprimatur to the downward spiral that is converting the noble calling of Writer into the life of Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch.
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(April 23 has become
Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch day.)