I know (because I ran across it — I think in the discussion resulting form your write-in candidate campaign) that I am not the first person to propose that the private nature of the forum might be responsible for the, ah, immature debating style.

I doubt it’s responsible; it’s possible it makes it easier to continue. That said, one can point to lots of perfectly public message boards that are equally filled with a likewise immature debating style.

Mind you, I have no opposition whatsoever to SFWA opening up the majority of its board to public view (if not public comment). It’s just not going to happen.

From: Jared Friedman
To: (e-mail redacted)
Subject: Re: New scribd feedback
Date: Sep 5, 2007 4:35 PM

Dear Mr. Thales,
I am writing in response to the group which you created on Scribd
to highlight potential copyright violations. First, I would like to
applaud your concern for copyright holders. Contrary to what you may
believe, all of us at Scribd are strong supporters of copyright and do
not wish to see infringing material on Scribd.

I thought that your group was a very clever way of reporting
documents as potential violations. We never expected our groups
feature to be used in that way! After some internal discussion,
however, we’ve come to the conclusion that while reporting infringing
material through groups is clever, it is not the best way to do this
reporting.

The problem with using groups to report copyright violations is that
it allows any user to remove a huge number of documents from Scribd
with only a few mouse clicks, for any reason. Scribd does not have
the time or ability to determine whether documents are infringing, so
if we used a copyright group to determine this, we would need to
simply remove every document added to the group. This gives users an
enormous amount of power. For example, it would not take long at all
for some joker to add every document on Scribd to the copyright
violation group. What would we do then?

It is for this reason that Scribd has a user flagging system. The
way the user flagging system works is simple. When a document has
been flagged as a violation 3 times, it is removed. The author is
contacted and asked to file a counter-notification if they do own the
rights to the document. I like to think that this system strikes the
right balance, by giving users the power to help us police the site
without allowing any one user to abuse our process.

As a gesture of goodwill, we have removed all the documents added to
the copyright violation group. I have since been contacted by users
who asserted that some of the documents which were in the group were
their intellectual property and were not infringing. In the future,
we will not be allowing groups whose sole purpose is to highlight
potential copyright violations on Scribd, as the potential for abuse
of such a system is simply too great.

If in the future you would like to help remove potentially
infringing material from Scribd using our user-flagging system, such
assistance would be greatly appreciated. My thanks for your time and
interest in Scribd.

Sincerely,
Jared Friedman
President, Scribd

On 9/4/07, no-reply@scribd.com wrote:
> New feedback from (name withheld!)
>
>
> Scribd username: MiltonThales
> Profile: http://www.scribd.com/people/view/87048
>
>
> Message:
> I created a group entitled “Copyright Violations”. I encourage you
to review the documents and eliminate any that you do not have permission to publish.
>

The beauty of software — people use it in ways the programmers do no anticipate.

I have created a private group on Scribd and invited my previous contacts to join.
I will add documents that I find objectionable to the group, and then flag them as
“Other TOS violations” using Scribd’s system. Then, if the other users in group agree,
the group will allow us to see if the documents disappear. Pretty tedious, though.

NB: Doctorow has the right to post his own copyrighted material (or CC-licensed material), but does the site have the right to post Azimov’s, Silverburg’s, Heinlein’s, Pournelle’s work without permission?

Copyright holders are so gun-ho about protecting they’re copyrights, they don’t give a flying page about everyone’s fair use, or like yours. Its’ ‘This is my football, so if you want to use it, you’ll make me quarterback/captain’

Funny how that doesn’t last long in the playground.

It’s also got an interesting irony to this. The more bullpucky you spread around the more the smell attracts vermin…or in our case, it attracts fans. I’m now reading YOUR works, and that’s the first time I ever read or even heard of Scrib.

Happens everytime. When will people learn.

When the idiot CEOs are out of office, and the generation of today get into power probably.

- Kevin C. Redden
40+ year SF reader.

Maybe I’m missing it, but I don’t see any acknowledgement that he did know in advance. He’s not distancing himself from it (yet), though he admits it was a mistake in at least one case. I suspect he’s leaving himself room for plausible deniability if he needs to retract all the notices and say they were a bad idea.

1. Author A pays ISP B for web-space to post Author A’s own works. Complainer C asks B to take down A’s site.

2. Pirate P pays ISP B for web-space to post, without authority, the copyrighted works of all and sundry. Author A asks B to take down the pirated copies of A’s works.

3. Pirate-friendly site proprietor F pays ISP B for web-space, in which F runs a service on which anyone may post anything without paying anyone, and from which F derives revenue by selling advertising. Pirates P1, P2, … post myriad unauthorized copies of many authors’ works. Author A asks F to take down the pirated copies of A’s works that P97 posted.

Maybe I just don’t understand, but it seems to me that the DMCA take-down procedure is intended to protect B, not F. B took F’s money to provide web-space, so B has an obligation to provide it, unless there is some other overriding obligation. There’s no corresponding obligation on the part of F to continue providing web-space to P97.

It’s sort of the difference between (a) the rental-car company that rents a car to someone with a valid driver’s license and credit card, who then uses the car in a bank robbery, and (b) the individual who leaves his car unlocked, with the engine running, in the vacant lot where the Crips hang out, and then the Crips take it and use it in a drive-by shooting.

Brilliant. And by “brilliant,” I mean idiots.

This never would have happened if John Scalzi were president.

I’m a new author that published a story in Raygun Revival. The magazine is small press and pays $10 a story (which I donated back to the mag). The primary reason I wrote the story was to get my name out there, which makes it kind of depressing to read this. Fewer people will be reading my work.

“Despite what may have been said or implied, SFWA did not send DMCA takedown notices for the works that were removed from scribd.com. There are certain procedures involved in filing a DMCA notice, and the communication between SFWA and scribd.com did not fulfill any of them. The owner of scribd.com took those works down on his own responsibility as owner of the website and his claim that he did so because of a DMCA notice from SFWA was in error.”

Yep. Basically saying, “Aw, gee! If those boneheads at Scribd misread the line in VP Burt’s email where he said that this wasn’t idle musing, but a DCMA takedown notice, that’s their problem.”

Furious!!!

”
3. The rest of the internet observes that Andrew Burt hasn’t apologized and fallen on his sword, and Michael Capobianco hasn’t ordered him to resign. They have concluded that SFWA approves the DMCA and the takedown order.
”

I think some of us observe that individual SFWA officers seem to have more unfettered latitude in their actions in the name of SFWA than we expected.

And a person can borrow a book from a library, take it to Fedex Kinko’s, and make themselves a copy !

The Scribd site lets any uploaded document to be downloaded with a single click. They also use some kind of viewer. If the single click is turned off, and if any text selection is cancelled if the view changes, then at least a reader would have to copy the document view by view, like going to Fedex Kinko’s.

Fortunately, ethical irresponsibility has a way of coming around to bite you in the ass. It’s only a matter of time until abusers get countersued into oblivion.

John Scalzi, I don’t usually counsel people to ignore fuggheads, but that one’s just a vexation to the spirit, and his conversation’s about as meaningful as a low-fi AM radio in an echo chamber.

Somebody want to tell Braxton S. Cook that censorship is what governments do? What I’m doing here is called moderation. These are Boing Boing’s comment threads, not the private SFWA forum on SFF Net. If he wants to post here, he can damned well mind his manners.

In fact, it’s no easier to forge e-mail than to send fraudulent paper mail on unauthorized letterhead, so this isn’t really a new problem. Furthermore, I can assure you that material is taken down and end users are restricted from Internet access every day based on e-mail for which no electronic signatures have been verified and no contact has been made with purported senders. These things are done with the knowledge and advice of legal counsel.

It may be the case that Americans will sue at the drop of a bit, it seems unimaginable to my legally uneducated mind that a web site owner could be sued for ceasing providing resources to distribute somebody’s written material unless they had contracted to distribute it and breached that contract by no longer doing so. If that were truly an issue, this site would be vulnerable to suit for every comment it didn’t publish, wouldn’t it?

There is a difference between having copyrighted works on one’s site, and having them up without permission. I have my disagreements with Andrew Burt, but I would be careful about implying he’s violating other people’s copyrights on the Critters site without proof.

Maybe they were afraid they’d have to notice that some material was infringing, and then they’d have to do something about that.

In any event, their protestations to the contrary, they have no integrity, and no respect for author’s rights.

The report of Michael Capobianco’s response, that the “takedown” was the FAULT of scribd.com (in response to a threatening message from Andrew Burt) is bizarre. Has he been watching too much Fox TV lately? If you get a threatening letter from an organization, you just might overreact to it!

My comment was a follow-on to a principal of Scribd stating in this thread that they “bend over backward” to accommodate authors even without a formal DMCA note; my own personal experience with them did not bear that out.

Now, as I said, since I didn’t send them a formal DMCA note, I didn’t get my feathers all ruffled (i.e., I recognize perfectly well that from a legal point of view they could ignore me). At the same time I thought it worth noting that in my experience, Scribd didn’t live up to its own stated position.

I will note that apparently after I posted my commentary on my site, my works were taken down off Scribd, when the account of the fellow who uploaded my work (and apparently the work of a few hundred others) had his account suspended. I don’t know if one was the cause of the other, but I am naturally delighted to see Scribd take some action in this regard.

In other words, agree with the moderator.

You can give your consent to this kind of stuff in two ways: actively, with your vote; or passively, by not acting at all.

I’m quite honestly horrified at the thought that this might continue… but I have hope that sanity will ultimately prevail. Still, like any good pessimist who’s lived through the Bush administration, I’m forming back-up plans in my head. (There have been an awful lot of good authors coming out of the UK lately…)

My nm s Brxtn Ck, f y mst knw. ‘m nt shmd t stnd p fr th thrs trly hrmd hr nd vn th SFW. m nt wrtr bt hv bn hg fn f scnc fctn nd fntsy fr mst f my lf. hv bn hrrfd by wht hs ccrrd hr. t frst, t ws lk wtchng yr grndprnts rg. dmr ppl n bth sds f ths ss. s thght bt t thgh, cm t ndrstnd tht lt f ths drdng Dr. Brt nd SFW wr th ns wh std t gn frm th ntrty gnrtd by ths “scndl.” Scrbd s fgnng njry t tk th fcs ff f thr ctvts vr th pst fw mnths n ctvly fclttng cpyrght vltns by mkng t vry dffclt fr lgtmt cpyrght hldrs t gt wrks rmvd frm th st. Cry Dctrw nd thrs r fgnng njry t gn ntrty t prmt thr wrks. Ths wntng t dwnld ny cpyrghtd wrk fr fr r fgnng njry bcs f SFW sccds thy wn’t b bl t gt nythng thy wnt fr fr.

Lst n ll f ths r ths thrs whs wrks wr llglly pstd t Scrbd, prtctd by th nrs rqrmnts Scrbd mpsd n rdr t gt thm tkn dwn, nd wh lst MNTHS f ptntl ncm s rslt. gr tht Cry Dctrw hs th rght t frly shr hs wrks nywhr h lks. Th ppst ds nt sm t b th cs fr ths wh dn’t wnt t frly shr wht thy wn.

Scrbd shld rqr pstrs t prv thy wn th cpyrght t mtrl thy r pstng, nt rqr wnrs t srch th ntr st fr ny nstnc f cpyrght vltn nd thn prcd wth rthr lngthy nd cstly prcss t nsr tht ll f th DMC rqrmnts r mt n rdr t gt thm tkn dwn. “Prv y wn t bfr w pst t,” shld b Scrbd plcy. thrws, cpyrght wnrs wll nd stff tht scrs th nt lkng fr llgl cps nd nthr stff f lwyrs drftng p DMC ntcs n rdr t gt thm tkn dwn. Tht Scrbd s dfndng thr mthds sng th FF lrdy tlls m thy hv n plns t chng th wy thy d bsnss. T prtct th rghts f thrs wh dn’t wnt t shr thr mtrl n ths st, t shld b tkn dwn.

ll f ths s jst my pnn. Tk t t fc vl. Sm wll strngly dsgr nd thrs my b prsdd t chng thr pnn. ‘m jst tryng t pnt t tht nt ll fns wnt t stl th wrks f thrs nd tht , fr n, spprt n thr’s rght t chllng Scrbd whn t pts th ntrsts f ts mmbrs vr th lgl rghts f th wnrs f th mtrl pstd n thr st.

Dd SFW rr? Sr, dn’t thnk vn Dr. Brt wld cntnd h dd nt mk mstk n nt flly vttng th lst. Hw mny f y hv nt md mstk? Hs mstk n n wy xcss th grgs hrm Scrbd nd ts mmbrs dd t lgtmt thrs wh jst wnt t cntrl wht thy wn. f crs, MNTHS f hrm s th rslt f thsnds f cpyrght vltns n n wy cmpr t th fw dys f dwntm sffrd by Cry Dctrw, wh ftr ll, s th trly njrd n hr, rght?

As to what Dr. Pournelle does or does not know to be true, I have learned to avoid as much as possible making any presumptions about other folks knowledge of what is and isn’t true.

You may make or avoid assumptions as you prefer (though I would have judged you to be fairly fond of them), but that doesn’t mean the question is formally unanswerable.

If you (that’s the impersonal for-example you) are (1.) reading threaded messages on a forum, and (2.) in them, you’re repeatedly given information by your professional peers and colleagues, and corrected on your errors of fact, and (3.) you’ve been participating in the discussion for the entire life of the thread, and (4.) you’ve specifically responded to many of those messages, including the ones in which you’re given information and/or corrected on your errors of fact, and (5.) you have no reason to disbelieve your professional colleagues, and (6.) you likewise have no reason to doubt that they know what they’re talking about, and (7.) the things they’re saying are logical and consistent, and reasonably in agreement from person to person, and (8.) while otherwise arguing freely, you’ve offered little or no contradictory information or statements of fact in response to theirs, then you can fairly be said to know the facts they’re telling you. And if you subsequently disregard that information because it impedes the argument you’re making, then you may fairly be described as showing no regard for the truth.

Braxton, thank you for the thoughtfulness of your argument. I will, I’m afraid, offer one outright contradiction: Cory didn’t sound shrill. He sounded angry.

Onward.

Given the amount of unwarranted and acrimonious crap various SFWAns have thrown at Cory, and the slurs some of them have cast on his honesty and motivations, it’s odd to think of SFWA feeling miffy and slighted because Cory didn’t express enough personal concern about their welfare.

And indeed, why should he? Nothing he did or said diminished their ability to defend their copyrights. His objection was to SFWA sending bogus takedown notices on works that didn’t infringe copyright law, and/or whose authors hadn’t empowered SFWA to act as their representative. That had no effect whatsoever on legitimate takedown notices.

I don’t for a moment deny that some person or persons in SFWA might be feeling touchy about it just the same. I’m not sure a subject exists of which I’d confidently say that no one in SFWA feels touchy about it. You’ll probably have noticed that yourself.

Todd, there can’t be publication without responsibility. What saves sites like Scribd isn’t the difficulty of keeping track of their volume; it’s the law’s reluctance to go after small-scale offenses, and the sites’ lack of resistance when challenged.

I believe that various SFWAns have proposed to crossbreed automated search capabilities with a database of copyrighted works by SFWAns who want unlicensed e-texts taken down. That strikes me as a better way to get the job done.

It still shouldn’t fall to the author, SFWA, or the author’s agent to monitor for abuses. IMO, text sites ought to build a shared database of titles of texts that have been pirated, their normal length and/or file size, who owns them, who represents the owners, and one or two distinctive character strings per work. It’d be like the shared lists of known spam addresses.

I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for text sites to do it.

Thanks for the kind words, Bob. I usually try to look at issues from all of the sides, not just the one in the article. I will even go so far as to dig out the sources referenced in an article just so I can see if the reporter has slanted the facts from them in any way. I am still unsure why this particular issue turned me into a raging madman. Perhaps it was old age. I am 53 today. Perhaps it was the attacks on Jerry, a writer at the very top of my heroes list. Perhaps it was the vehemence of those arguing for Cory and the others wronged by this ill-conceived list. I can only say I got angry and it is very hard to argue cogently when one is angry. That was the first rule they taught me when I joined the debate team in High School back in 1969.

You said, “I mean, he could have just been mad and shooting his mouth off, like other people in the argument. His intent does not have to have been to inflame the issue.”

Oh, most definitely! A lot of things were said, as my son’s acting coach would say, “With deep emotion!” I don’t have a problem forgiving him that – today. Friday, I was angry and seeing things very much in black and white. I assumed since I would not have used fraud if I had been so wronged, that he would not either. I seem to have forgotten the true meaning of the word assume. I was definitely one this past weekend.

You also said, “One other point is that Cory Doctorow did in fact state how he felt this action was harmful to him, that it undid his work to encourage taking the Creative Commons license seriously as an alternative to copyright, work he felt he’d put significant effort into and a goal he believes in strongly and sincerely.”

I cannot dispute the truth of that. I’m not sure being ideologically harmed is the same as being materially harmed, however. I’m not saying a good lawyer could not make a case for it, I’m just not sure if there were material damages here. I would think he would have to prove that the loss of having the item posted on Scribd cost him money. I will agree he was wronged by the loss. Even if it could be proved that he lost money, I think fraud also requires intent to defraud, something not evident here. Again, I’m not a lawyer, so take it as my reasoning for why I assumed what I did, not as legal advice.

Interesting little perk, eh?