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Science Fiction Writers Write DMCA Takedowns
TheGreatGraySkwid writes "With an ironic lack of forward thinking, the Science Fiction Writers of America (or, more specifically, their Vice President Andrew Burt) have issued scattershot DMCA takedown notices against numerous items on the document-sharing site Scribd, many of which were not infringing on SFWA copyrights in any way. It appears that a simple keyword search for prominent science fiction names (like 'Asimov' and 'Silverburg') was used to determine which documents were to be singled out. Included in the documents was Cory Doctorow's 'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom,' which was released under the Creative Commons license and is freely available at any number of places. Doctorow is up in arms over at BoingBoing, with several other Science Fiction notables speaking up in the comments."
Well, Mr AC: firstly it won't be angry; and secondly I have found the people at the helm of the SFWA to be very responsive to their electorate. So I believe that the tone and the content of your response are unnecessarily negative, at least until I receive evidence to the contrary from the SFWA. At this point I am quite prepared to believe that this is all just a misunderstanding or an error by one person.
How ironic that Andrew Burt should do this.
Andrew Burt was responsible for the first real unfettered access I had to USENET, back in the days when my telnet access was through a CP/CMS machine, and so telnet into Nyx.net (back when it was still known as nyx.cs.du.edu) was all cluttered with ANSI codes and improper scrolling yet still readable. aburt's Nyx site was where I went to read the anime newsgroup rec.arts.anime that a friend had told me about, and where I was inducted into online writing circles where we wrote our tales and shared our stories freely on the Internet. Though defunct now, alt.pub.dragons-inn and alt.pub.havens-rest were really jumping back in the day.
And Burt was also a more direct champion of writing circles, in his work with Critters. According to the article, he believed that espousing some of the principles of the Open Source movement in writing would lead to more and better writers.
And now look what he's doing. What a shame that it should come to this.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Ray Gun Revival magazine has at least two works that have been removed by Scribd at SFWA's behest merely for mentioning the last names 'Asimov' and 'Heinlein'.
We filed our DMCA counter-notification and are awaiting the mandatory ten day time period.
The story, for me, is recounted here: http://raygunrevival.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?t=139 5&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
I want to respond to the flurry of activity that has resulted from Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) mistakenly identifying several works as infringing copyright. First, some background. There have been discussions within SFWA for several months regarding websites that allow users to upload documents of all sorts for other users to download and share. Many hundreds of copyrighted texts have been put online at these sites, and the number is growing quickly. Some SFWA members complained about the pirating of their works to SFWA's e-Piracy Committee and authorized the committee to do something about it. SFWA contacted scribd.com, one of these sites, about removing these authors' works and generated a list of infringing works to be removed.
Unfortunately, this list was flawed and the results were not checked. At least three works tagged as copyright infringements were nothing of the sort. I have personally apologized to the writers and editors of those works. If you are a creator who has had material removed and has not yet been contacted, please email me at president@sfwa.org.
SFWA's intention was to remove from scribd.com only works copyrighted by SFWA members who had authorized SFWA to act on their behalf. This kind of error will not happen again.
Michael Capobianco
President, SFWA
John Scalzi, freelance troublemaker
I am an SFWA member.
SFWA is an organization of writers (as in, a herd of semi-feral cats). It's not a distribution cartel like the MPAA or RIAA, and it has not, in point of fact, got very much real-world clout at all.
SFWA is, however, a representative democracy. And the current elected executive officers appear to have decided to take this (in my opinion, bone-headed and incompetent) action on their own initiative.
There is currently a flame war raging inside SFWA over these DMCA takedown notices, with some authors supporting them and others calling for the resignation of the board. I'm not going to name names or tell tales out of school, but please don't assume that this is indicative of some borg-like organization of copyright totalitarians taking aim at your liberties: it's more a symptom of incompetence.
(Meanwhile, some of us are maintaining our SFWA membership specifically to fight this kind of stupidity from within.)