[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by pglaskowsky

Yeah, SFWA screwed up by being far too casual in making its list and invoking the DMCA.

So a few documents were taken down that shouldn't have been.

But where's the outrage at Scribd for having published thousands of pirated books to begin with?

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.

Now, do you suppose Cory Doctorow is going to get all huffy about how Scribd is evil? I doubt it. Doctorow doesn't believe in the concept of copyright at all, although he's willing to use it when it suits his political purposes.

And you have that direct from Cory's mouth? Nothing I've seen publically posted gives me that impression.

Pournelle thinks Doctorow "looks down on working writers", conveniently overlooking the fact that Doctorow is a working writer, and has been full-time freelance since 2005. He also passes over the fact that his collection "The Prince" is available as a free download through the Baen Free Library, which he agreed to in the first place. That might make some of his other comments look a little disingenuous...

I suspect Scribd is going to be a lot more careful in the future. Scribd is getting legal counsel from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is probably giving them pretty good advice about its duties under the DMCA and other laws. That's all anyone expects-- that Scribd should obey the law, which includes respecting intellectual property.

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

If the site is of any size and volume, it's simply not possible to vet every upload, especially when the question is "Is this a work under copyright that should not be posted here?"

Harlan Ellison was having a long running battle with AOL about pirated copies of his stuff appearing on AOL hosted sites. Given the size of AOL and the volume of stuff they host, how does AOL prevent someone from illegally posting Harlan's work?

Answer: they can't. All they (or any other site) can do is take it down when it's pointed out to them. They can't keep it from being posted in the first place.

You people who've been flinging mud at SFWA should be ashamed of yourselves. There's no question SFWA screwed up, but their offense was pretty trivial compared with the rampant lawlessness at Scribd that SFWA was trying to deal with.

No, SFWA should be ashamed of itself (and is.)

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.

It wouldn't have been all that hard for SFWA to target the actual infringing material, but they didn't. They used a shotgun. Collateral damage? Who cares?

Well, SFWA cares now...

I don't fling mud at attempts to protect rights. I fling mud at stupidity.
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Dennis