The SoapVox

If you remember the post about Places to get free ebooks, you’ll probably remember Chris’ comment about Scribd having lots of copyrighted content that was illegal to distribute.

Well, I guess the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America organization read that comment by Chris too, because they nailed Scribd with a DMCA takedown notice. Perfectly fine, right? Well…no, not really. Why? Well, because from what BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow (a pretty good SF writer himself) found out, the SFWA set itself up to be nailed on court by a whole lot of people by not doing things right.

The SFWA decided that they’d send a takedown notice about all works by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg that were published on the site…so far so good…except…they didn’t take the time to actually see which works by those two authors were on the site; instead, they just made a search for the names and every file that contained the name of either of the authors was added to the list they sent Scribd…and as Cory said:

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 [Cory Doctorow's] Creative Commons-licensed novel, “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.”

The problem with the halfassed job SFWA made is that they have exposed themselves to be sued by all the people whose works were published to Scribd knowingly and whose works were taken off the site because of being included on SFWA’s list, because courts have been pretty harsh on people and companies that abuse the DMCA.

As you read further down Cory’s post, you’ll realize that he’s pretty damn upset about the whole thing, not only about the fact that SFWA (he was president of it at some point in time) put itself on such a stupid position, but because, as he says, SFWA is attempting against Cory’s livelihood, because he depends on his publishing his works online as his advertising to sell actual paper books…and his readers aren’t happy about what happened with Scribd:

…the page that used to host my book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom now reads, “The document ‘Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom’ has been removed from Scribd. This content has been removed at the request of copyright agent Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.” Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was the first novel released under a Creative Commons license, and I’ve spent the past four years exhorting fans to copy my work and share it. Now I’ve started to hear from readers who’ve seen this notice and concluded that I am a hypocrite who uses SFWA to send out legal threats to people who heeded my exhortation.

So…not only does SFWA do stuff it isn’t entitled to do (Cory has told them several times that SFWA is not entitled to do copyright enforcement for him), but actually affect the pocket of its members by destroying their reputation by their stupidity…nice, ain’t it?

Go read Cory’s article at BoingBoing, it’s well worth the time invested.

Tags: Books, cory doctorow, dmca, dmca takedown notice, science fiction, scribd, sfwa

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