Liberal Values Defending Liberty and Enlightened Thought

This story came out late yesterday, too late for the weekly round up here in Sci Fi Friday. Boing Boing reports on possible abuse of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Boing Boing charges them with abusing the act to remove numerous text files from works from Scribd, which they describe as  “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.” Cory Doctorow writes that some of the works affected do not infringe upon legitimate copyrights:

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.”

The way they describe the current rules, the DMCA only requires someone filing a complaint state that the work they’re complaining about infringes on richts and internet service providers have to remove the material or face liability for hosting it. Apparently the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America searched out text with strings such as “Isaac Asimov” and “Robert Silverberg” and assumed that such works infringed upon their copyrights. Apparently works which mentioned their names but not written by them were included in the search and there were demands that they be removed.

A statement from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America was added to the original post apologizing. The letter concludes:

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.