SFWA knee-jerk strikes again
Not long after outgoing SFWA vice president Howard Hendrix offended many with his ‘webscabs’ name-calling, current VP Andrew Burt is taking poor aim at Scribd:
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to fraudulently remove numerous non-infringing works from Scribd, a site that allows the general public to share text files with one another in much the same way that Flickr allows its users to share pictures.
Included in the takedown were: a junior high teacher’s bibliography of works that will excite children about reading sf, the back-catalog of a magazine called Ray Gun Revival, books by other authors who have never authorized SFWA to act on their behalf, such as Bruce Sterling, and my own Creative Commons-licensed novel, “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.”
As a result of SFWA’s takedown notice, hundreds of works were taken offline — including several that had not been written by Asimov or Silverberg. It appears that the list was compiled by searching out every single file that contained the word “Asimov” or “Silverberg” and assuming that these files necessarily infringed on Silverberg and Asimov’s copyrights.
Cory Doctorow has a great write up about this on BoingBoing.net. I can’t add much to the conversation, only that it’s another indication that technology moves to fast for some. Yeah, terribly ironic, considering those involved.
Cory Doctorow has given us permission to put copy of his self-recorded audiobook, Eastern Standard Tribe, here on Podiobooks.com. And for those that are new to the site everything we put up on the site — with the rare exception of a smattering of public domain titles — was provided to us either by or with the author’s explicit permission. Yes, we encourage the sharing of the audiobooks you can find here on Podiobooks.com. That’s the whole idea!
September 1st, 2007 at 1:17 pm
DMCA has provisions for using these takedown notices fraudulently.
They could be in BIG BIG trouble.