Now It's the Authors' Guild's turn to act silly

Authors are having a lot of trouble adjusting to the new realities of 21st century media. First we had the Science Fiction Writers of America getting their knickers in a twist over unauthorized posting of copyrighted works – and making fools of themselves in the process.
Now it's the turn of the Authors' Guild, an organization ostensibly dedicated to protecting the rights of authors. Their dovecote is all aflutter because of Amazon's new e-book reader, the Kindle 2. The technically aware types at the Authors' have discovered that – horrors! – the Kindle 2 has a built-in speech synthesizer which can read the text of an e-book aloud.
The guild immediately cried foul , claiming this violates the authors' copyrights unless the publish has acquired “performance rights” (i.e. audio books) as well as print rights.
To give you an idea of how stupid this is, consider one simple fact: Text to speech isn't unique to Kindle. Both Windows and Mac machines can read text files and in all probability Linux can as well. In other words, nearly every computer out there is capable of reading a downloaded book. What's more, they have been able to do it for years.
This is truly a piece of multi-dimensional silliness. In addition to the fact that most computers can synthesize speech, there's the simple fact that Kindle, like the other computers, doesn't do a very good job of it. The “speech” sounds like the the Cylons on the original Battlestar Galactica. It's intelligible but painful to listen to in large chunks.
Compared to simply synthesizing speech from text, the problem of producing “real” sounding speech is exponentially more complex. It will take a lot more processing power and a lot of sophisticated software development to lick and that sort of power and sophistication isn't going to show up any time soon in a $300 ebook reader.
There's also the little matter of what constitutes a “performance”. Normally that's understood as reading for an audience, specifically a paying audience of multiple people. Considering that this is feature, to the extent it is used at all, will be used almost exclusively to play text files for the person who owns the Kindle 2.
It's going to be interesting to see if the Authors' Guild will put their money where their mouth is and sue Amazon (and Microsoft, and Apple, and everybody else) over this piece of nonsense. They have sued over such things in the past and in fact won a $125 million settlement http://www.dailytech.com/Harvard+Google+Cannot+Reach+Book+Scanning+Agreement/article13360.htm from Google over its program to scan books from major libraries. However that case was a lot more clear cut.
What's really going on here is another failure to understand and accept the changes in the media. The fact is that the old media in general – including an awful lot of print authors and their publishers are not merely clueless when it comes to the changes sweeping over us, they're scared to death of them.
This fear comes out in various irrational acts, many of which are silly on their face.
This is unlikely to go anywhere, but if the Authors' Guild decides to pursue it, my advice is to sit back and enjoy the show.

FIGHTING SPLOGGERS, TECHCRUNCH, AND PROTECTING YOUR POSTS

While think of wholesale copying in terms of file sharing and novels posted without permission, there are a lot of other ways copyrighted material is misused on the web.

Over at TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld notes that his posts are being ripped off wholesale by sploggers.

Splogs, in case your cave doesn’t have broadband, are spam blogs. They are the parasites of the blogosphere and they leech off legitimate blogs and bloggers to drive traffic to their sites and make money off the efforts of real bloggers. The ‘content’ of such blogs is either noise or stolen.

What Erick is complaining about is stolen content. Sploggers are stealing TechCrunch’s content wholesale and posting it without attribution on their splogs, surrounded by ads. This generates ad revenue for the splogger with virtually no work.

This is not a trivial problem for some blogs. In Erick’s case a single post was reposted in whole or in part nearly six hundred times. In itself that’s not surprising since TechCrunch is a popular source of technology news and comment. Most of these sites merely quoted extensively from TechCrunch articles and a few reprinted the articles in their entirety with attribution and links back to Michael’s site.

However there were a lot of sploggers who used the material as splog fodder. As Erick notes: “And of those, 115—or 25 percent of the original—were plastered with ads, making money off our work without so much as a link.”

It wasn’t just individual posts. Some of the sploggers were stealing TechCrunch posts repeatedly and presenting them without attribution to generate page views and ad revenue.

Judging by the responses, TechCrunch isn’t alone in the problem. Several other bloggers chimed in on the forum to report they have had material stolen by sploggers as well. And indeed anyone who does much web surfing will find these sploggers all over the place. I ran into one last week following up on a mention of one of my articles.

Equally predictably there was a small band of the morally tone deaf who roundly criticized Erick for complaining about being splogged while TechCrunch opposes the RIAA and others who are trying to crack down on free distribution of copyrighted material such as music. Attempts to make the critical distinctions were roundly ignored by the “intellectually lazy” (in another poster's phrase) who just wanted to run up their snark scores.

What follows started as a response to Erick's original post and has been suitably edited, emended, and (perhaps not so suitably) expanded for this post. I’ll start with the practicalities for someone who’s being splogged in this fashion and then we’ll get back to the distinction between this and file sharing.

Note also that none of this deals with bloggers who quote extensively from other blogs with proper attribution and linkbacks. We’re talking about scammers who are making money by stealing other people’s work and using it to generate ad revenue.

The practicalities
I do have a few practical (?) suggestions for anyone whose content is being stolen wholesale.

• The first is to watermark your copy. Not your pages, your copy. Embed the watermark in the text file, not as a separate background layer. That way any robot who scoops it up will also get the "TechCrunch" (or whatever) all over it.
• The second suggestion – which should really be the first – is to personalize your posts. That is, make the material truly yours by things like repeated mentions of your site in your posts, multiple links to related articles on your site, adopting a more personalized slant in your posts, etc.

Sploggers aside, this is a good idea anyway because it helps to distinguish your ‘product’ from all the other blogs out there. Vanilla prose, like vanilla layouts, are much less effective at attracting and keeping readers that something that is truly yours. This is true even in technical blogs.

Blogging is a form of communication that works best when your readers have a sense of who you are. That’s true of web interaction in general. Among other things, it helps to build a sense of community if your readers feel they know you. And community is one of the most important generators of repeat views, word of mouth and all the other happy little marks of blogosphere merit.

These suggestions go to the problem of attribution. The sploggers aren't going to go to the trouble of teasing this stuff out of your posts, especially the rewritten copy. That's too much like work after all. On the other hand, the misguided bloggers who think of themselves as legitimate are likely to make the effort. Which provides a useful distinguishing characteristic. Perhaps the misguided ones are susceptible to a gentle note about blogger etiquette.

There are also a couple of legal-type things you can do without turning into a junior-jackboot version of the RIAA or spending a ton of money.

• The first, and most important, is to copyright your blog. Make sure every post is copyrighted and include a statement of terms of use in the TechCrunch site. This can be as copy-friendly as you want to make it, but specifically deny things like posting without attribution and requiring things like linking. Also include a phrase about the posts being free for non-commercial use. This puts you on a firm footing legally.
• Next, and almost as important, is complain long and loud to Google about all the AdSense ads the sploggers are using to make money off the stolen material. Under the AdSense agreement, Google has broad authority to terminate the agreement – and the ad revenue if it feels the blogger is misbehaving. With luck Google will pull the splogger’s AdSense agreements. Even if Google does nothing on your specific complaints, if enough bloggers complain about the misuse of their posts, Google will be forced to deal with the problem.
• Like any scheme of theft for profit, the sploggers’ greatest vulnerability is the money and the trail it leaves behind. Going after the sploggers advertising agreements is the most direct form of attack and it hits them where they live.
• If you decide to go this route it’s important to establish that there is a pattern of misuse. Google or other ad services aren’t going to care about a single stolen post. However if you can demonstrate that the splogger has repeatedly stolen large chunks of your work and used it without attribution, Google or whoever is going to be a lot more receptive. For one thing they understand quite well that there’s the potential for a lawsuit against them based on a pattern of supporting bad or illegal practices.
• And finally, there's that ol’ debbil the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. File DMCA takedown notices against the egregious offenders with their ISPs or blog services and force them to remove the offending articles. The DMCA makes this extremely easy to do. All it takes is a letter containing the appropriate language and the site or its ISP is virtually forced to comply. You can automate the process and keep doing it every time one of these guys reposts another of your articles. The sploggers will find easier prey soon enough.

Which leaves us with the purported hypocrisy of being angry at sploggers while supporting, or at least tolerating, file sharing and such. I've preached from the very beginning in Heresy Pornography and Treason that while free copying of material is an inevitable part of our brave new online world, theft for profit is not.

For the morally tone deaf among you: I'm saying it's unstoppable, not that it is all right. As an author I've had stuff ripped off and posted on the web (in Russian, no less!) without payment or permission. I may not like it, but I recognize I can't stop it and I'm not losing any sleep over it. Okay?

But that's not what's going on here. Unlike people randomly reposting TechCrunch articles with or without attribution, people who steal content to sell it, whether directly or by loading their stolen content with AdSense ads, are in a different class, both practically and, at least in my mind, morally. Sploggers can be stopped because there's a money trail.

But what, some of you ask, about the torrent sites that are loaded with ads? Why aren’t we upset about them? First, I don’t know anyone who has any particular soft spot for the ad-supported sites. A lot of people will reflexively defend them when they come under attack by the RIAA or other copyright Nazis, but you’ll notice that shutting down even a popular site doesn’t arouse one-tenth the rage that the RIAA going after welfare mothers and teenage girls does.

Yet like the sploggers these sites are terribly vulnerable. Why doesn’t the industry mount a concerted campaign to shut them down instead of more-or-less randomly going after the most popular file sharing sites? After all, the sites are vulnerable because unless they're doing business through the late, unlamented, Russian Business Network they can be tracked and shut down.

Why aren't they being shut down en masse? Because the RIAA and their ilk have chosen instead to conduct a campaign of legal terrorism aimed at intimidating the average downloader in the hope of scaring them out of the practice. In other words they're crazy as a gang of bedbugs and not behaving rationally.

And copiers for profit should be stopped. Copying and reposting without economic gain is, perhaps, homage. Reposting for profit is theft and should not be tolerated.

WHACK THE GOPHER IV: THE FINAL CHAPTER

Except it isn't of course. The response I've gotten to these posts suggests we're going to be revisiting the issues as developments warrant. So let's just say it's the final chapter for now.

So, after parts I, II, and III of this series, the logical question is "what can we do about it?"

There is a lot we can do, but none of it is aimed at stopping people from posting copyrighted fiction on free sites. That ain't gonna happen, no matter how much the dinosaurs bellow in the swamps.

However that is a long, long way from saying copyrights are useless and authors can't expect to get paid for their work. Copyrights are not useless and authors can not only expect to get paid, most of the smart ones can expect to make more money in this brave new world than in the old.

The bad news is that genre fiction is going to be available for free on the internet. There is simply no way to stop it. SFWA can file all the DMCA takedown notices it wants. Individual authors can sue if they want. Crazed Luddite SFWA vice-presidents can rant about "netscabs" (on other people's pages because they're too technophobic to have one of their own). And none of it matters. People will continue to post copyrighted works for free. For every one you can shut down there will be two, or ten or 20 more.

The technology has simply moved beyond the kind of control publishers had a hundred years ago. Live with it.

(There is also going to be a sea change in the way genre fiction, especially science fiction and erotica, are going to be distributed in this country. This will probably mean the death of a lot of major publishers, and the transformation of the book store into something nearly unrecognizable. There are a lot of complex reasons for this and it really deserves a post of its own.)

The good news about all this is there is going to be a lot more genre fiction available to readers at a lot lower prices and as a class the authors are going to be a lot better compensated.

One way or another, most genre fiction is going to be sold over the internet. You'll either buy it directly on your own computer, or you'll get it in electronic or print form from something like a print on demand kiosk. You may even download and print books on your home system. That's not as big a job as you might think. To see what I mean DAGS "Blue Squirrel".

The Real Solution To Piracy

But while you can't stop free distribution you can stop is piracy for profit. Whether it's designer knock-offs, DVD movies or online fiction, if someone is paying for it, it's a lot easier to control.

"Stop" is a misnomer. You can't really stop piracy. But you can crack down on it hard enough to keep it down to an acceptable level.

The reason is that there's a money trail. If you can't locate the pirate through the work posted, you can locate them by following the money. That's why outfits like the RIAA have been a lot more successful at shutting down the commercial pirates than the file sharers.

The legitimate publisher has some advantages as well. One of the big ones is convenience. Why go to the trouble of searching out a pirate site, when you can go to someplace like Amazon and get everything you want in one place?

Today the incentive is money. Novels are expensive. When books are instantly available for, say, a dollar each, it becomes much less of incentive. In fact for most people it drops below the action threshold.

And yes, we can make novels available for a dollar or so each without significantly cutting into the author's royalties. In fact the late G. Harry Stine and I were in the process of forming just such an online publishing venture several years ago when Harry's untimely death ended the project. Our rather extensive calculations indicated that not only would the authors make as much money as they do now, but the profits to the publisher would be quite nice as well. Most of the cost of a book today is eaten up in an unwieldy system of production and distribution - but that's a subject for another post.

One of the reasons is that as cost goes down, sales go up. I firmly believe that low-cost books will sell enough to swamp the effects of pirate postings - which, as we saw in a previous post in this series, probably aren't resulting in that many lost sales anyway.

So, low price means high sales and less piracy. We've seen this happen before, specifically in the software industry. Back in the early 1980s Borland stood the software business on its head with Turbo Pascal, a full implementation of the Pascal programming language, complete with a nice little Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for the amazing price of $35. That was perhaps a tenth of what competing versions of Pascal were selling for and Borland sold a ton of copies.

What was interesting about this was that unlike most of its high-priced rivals, Turbo Pascal wasn't copy protected. Borland made no attempt to stop anyone from copying the disks. Phillipe Kahn, Borland's saxophone-playing president, figured that by keeping the price so low - for the time anyway - he removed most of the incentive to steal Turbo Pascal.

It's worth noting that except for games, most software companies have followed Kahn's lead. Software copy protection as a field isn't dead, but it is generally moribund.

Okay, that's not the whole story. And the way it isn't the whole story is interesting in itself. Kahn did one other thing with Turbo Pascal: He provided a neatly printed manual, which was (misnomer alert) perfect bound (/misnomer alert) like a paperback book. That meant that if you opened it flat to copy it, the spine cracked and the pages fell out. What Kahn did (and having met the guy I'm sure he did it deliberately) was to provide a way to add value to a legitimate purchase that the pirates couldn't match.

Changes in the product

But what about fiction? It doesn't need a manual, after all.

No it doesn't, but that's the other part of the change we're facing. The nature of what authors sell is going to change as well. Increasingly, it won't be just a book or a story, it will be membership in a community.

Successful works of genre fiction tend to build communities naturally. You can see the proof walking the halls of any science fiction convention. Savvy authors are going to use new media tools to capitalize on this to build not just sales, but a loyal following and to provide other products as well.

To see a very early example of this, stop by Baen Publishing's web site and pay special attention to the "1632" universe in all its ramifications. 1632 was originally the brainchild of Eric Flint, who also manages the Baen Free Library. It is the story of a West Virginia coal mining town suddenly plunked down in Germany at the height of the 30 Years War. It is alternate history at its finest and most fun and the original novel has been followed up by a sprawling collection of novels and short story collections. It has also spawned a very active fan base, many of which hang out at the Baen web site, especially in the forum called "Baen's Bar."

The development is still nascent, but with a little imagination it's easy to see how something like the 1632 phenomenon could provide even more value to the readers - value that a lot them would be willing to pay for.

Changes in the authors

The other thing this encourages is a completely different approach to writing genre fiction. While there will undoubtedly be authors who will continue to do things the way we do them now, the ones who will be most successful will be the ones who embrace the notion of community-building around their fiction.

In a sense this is a throwback to the 19th Century when popular authors like Twain and Dickens made more of their money on lecture tours than they did from the sales of their books. However the effect will be enhanced, amplified and zoomed up by the use of everything from web sites and blogs to YouTube videos and MySpace pages.

The author becomes the focus of community and the only thing the free posters will do is build that community further.

The world will be different, the demands on the authors will be different, but in many ways, both socially and financially, it will be a much more rewarding world for those who are willing to adapt.

WHACK THE GOPHER III: The Return of the Mutant Grandson

While the economics of posting copyrighted work for free on the internet should determine the effort to respond to it, that is not the thing that ultimately determines an effective response.

That is possibility. In other words, can you shut the posters down at any price, not just an economically justifiable one?

The short answer is no.

It doesn't matter whether the free posting of copyrighted work is legal - which it assuredly is not. It doesn't matter if it is moral - which it arguably is not. It doesn't even matter if it causes economic loss to the authors - which is apparently does not. What does matter is whether it can be stopped.

And it can't be. It's as simple as that. And this is point where SFWA vice-president Andrew Burt and his ilk are utterly, completely clueless.

(Burt, of course, is the one who guided the SFWA into filing a massive takedown request under the DMCA against a site in an effort to get them to remove copies of works by Robert Silverberg and Isaac Asimov. The thing turned into a farce when it become obvious that many of the works on the list were not by Silverberg or Asimov and at least one of them had been made freely available under the Creative Commons license.)

Given the structure of the internet there is simply no way to stop the free (in both senses) exchange of copyrighted works, be they music, games or the science fiction stories. There simply are far too many people posting them from far too many places all over the world.

This should be obvious, especially in the light of the Recording Industry of America Association's (RIAA) campaign and its results. RIAA has shut down dozens of web sites displaying pirated music, destroyed a couple of companies (notably Napster) which encouraged the practice and gotten judgments and big fines against dozens of people allegedly exchanging music. All of this, please note, at a cost of millions of dollars.

And the effect on the copying and exchange of recordings? Just about none whatsoever. For every site shut down, for every pirate sued, another, or two or ten spring up to take its place. After years of effort the RIAA is even further from its stated goal of stopping free exchange of copyrighted work than it was when it started. (The RIAA's claims to the contrary won't stand examination. They claim that they've slowed the growth of file sharing, not stopped it or reversed it. Even that claim is highly suspect considering how explosively file sharing grew in the years before the RIAA launched its terror campaign. For one things, explosive growth tends to slow naturally after a few years.)

Well, there has been one effect. In four years, the RIAA has gone from being a relatively unknown mouthpiece for record companies to one of the most hated outfits in America. This is due to a combination of idiotic arguments and fascist legal tactics which have turned even people who've never downloaded a song against the RIAA. Granted that's an accomplishment, but I don't think it's a positive either for the organization or the record companies it represents.

All this is so blatant that even the RIAA now admits the program can't stop piracy.

(The place where the RIAA has been most successful is shutting down paid services that encouraged the practice. That's significant for the real solution to the problem - and the subject for Part IV of this series.)

Half bright ideas

Now as I said before, Burt is misguided but he's not an idiot. He's also computer savvy enough to come up with his own approach to the problem. Burt proposed a half-bright scheme called Shades of Gray involving widely distributing damaged copies of works to swamp the (irony) 'legitimately pirated' (/irony) ones. His theory is that online readers won't be able to trust the copies they find online so they'll buy the books.

The scheme is half-bright because Burt apparently didn't consider what the people who wanted to post these works would do in response to this kind of sanctioned electronic vandalism. The first thing that will happen, of course, is that the pirate community will develop filters to detect the grayed copies. The response will be to develop more sophisticated graying methods - at considerable expense, and the pirates will respond with more sophisticated filters. The result is an arms race and to date such races have typically gone to the pirates.

Again the music and movie industry's example is instructive. They have poured huge amounts into developing copy protection schemes for DVDs and those are being broken almost as fast as they're put into use.

The failure of the DMCA

Even the DMCA, which started this particular thread of nonsense, is pretty much ineffective. As we saw with the SFWA idiocy, a DMCA notice will make a site take down a work, whether it is actually by the person who claims to have written it or not. But the DMCA can't prevent someone from re-posting the same work, especially if they do a little massaging first.

Let's take my story from Analog a few years back "And He Did Ride" about a rather bewildered young man who is sent onto a nasty planet on a rescue mission with an extremely unusual mount. Assume someone OCRs it and posts the file on a site. Then let's further assume that I, the author, in a fit of high dudgeon (and low madness) issue a DMCA demand that the story be removed. The site complies.

End of story? Not hardly.

A poster simply changes the title to "Through The Great Gruesome Swamp By Mechanical Frog", reformats it to fool the filters, says it's by "Fudrucker Q. Hudsucker" and posts it. Since these things are at best quickly scanned before they're posted, it's going to take a long time for someone who isn't in on the gag to find out. Meanwhile there are people out there on the internet spreading the word that Fudrucker Q. Hudsucker's latest opus is really that Rick Cook story about the giant mechanical frog.

Better filters, you say? What happens if I convert the story to a series of image files, one image per page, and give it a pretty, but non-distracting background? The result is much larger, but coming up with a filter to catch it is going to be damn near impossible.

And note the person doing the posting doesn't have to be a computer expert. The pattern for tools against copyright is that the experts write the software and distribute it. Ordinary, if dishonest, schmoes download it and use the easy GUI interface to process the stuff they want to post.

This is not, please note, theoretical. This kind of re-posting goes on every day on YouTube and a lot of other less-well-known sites. We saw an extreme example of this was model Daniela Cicarelli's attempt to block a YouTube video showing her and her boyfriend having sex on a beach in Cadiz Spain. A court ruled the couple's privacy had been violated and ordered YouTube to remove the video. YouTube responded that it had removed the video - repeatedly. People kept reposting it and the result was another round of whack the gopher. The Brazilian court then ordered the video blocked from appearing in Brazil and YouTube and communications companies responded by cutting off YouTube to most of Brazil because there was no other way to keep the video out. Finally some sanity prevailed and another judge overturned the ruling.

Now further note Ms. Cicarelli's net worth undoubtedly exceeds the net worth of SFWA. I don't know how much she and her banker boyfriend spent fighting this thing, but it was probably much more than SFWA could afford to spend on a similar exercise.

And the net result was nothing. The video is still out there and would have been out there even if there was some way to keep it off YouTube.

I don't feel too sorry for Ms. Cicarelli. Granted, her privacy was violated, but anybody having sex in public has to expect that someone will notice. But again, there's simply no way to prevent stuff like this.

The real answer to online posting of copyrighted works is to use common sense. Common sense in the first instance about what can possibly be prevented. And then common sense on what can be economically prevented.

Only after something has passed through those filters can we usefully discuss the moral and legal aspects of the situation.

Does that mean copyright is useless? No. It means you can't stop people from posting for free. Which leads to the next, and I hope, final installment of this thing.

COPYRIGHTS, WHACK-THE-GOPHER, AND SFWA -- WHY I QUIT

Just because you write about the future doesn’t mean you understand it. The case in point is the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s recent foray into Piss-Off-Your-Customers-Like The-RIAA Sweepstakes.

Recently SFWA, under the leadership of its vice-president Andrew Burt, mounted a DCMA blitz against the document-sharing site Scribd. The organization demanded the site remove a pile of files that it alleged infringed on the copyrights of SF writers Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg under pain of prosecution for copyright infringement.

Problem was, a lot of the documents in the SFWA demand weren’t works by Asimov or Silverberg. The demand, which swore that the works named were copyrights owned by those two authors, included such things as a bibliography of science fiction aimed at junior high school students, a paper (not by Asimov or Silverberg) titled “A History of Intellectual Discussion of 'Accelerating Change', and a lot of gay fiction that the authors obviously never had anything to do with.

What the mental giants at SFWA apparently did was to go through Scribd and grab every URL that contained the words “Asimov” or “Silverberg”, bundle them into a shotgun complaint, swear every one of those works was by Silverberg or Asimov, and shoot the whole pile of poop off to Scribd as a DCMA demand. Apparently no one even bothered to read through the list of items they were swearing – mendaciously and probably illegally – were owned by those two authors.

If this strikes you as damn peculiar, you’re not alone. Science fiction author Cory Doctorow is livid .One of the works on the SFWA hit list was Doctorow’s “Down and out in the Magic Kingdom”, which he released under the Creative Commons license which specifically allows free distribution. Now Doctorow is receiving angry mail from fans accusing him of hypocrisy.

So why did Scribd take down the stuff that wasn’t by Asimov or Silverberg? Because the DMCA is pretty peculiar in itself. As Doctorow notes: “In the real world, you couldn't get a book taken out of a bookstore or an article removed from the newspaper without going to court and presenting evidence of infringement to a judge, but the DMCA only requires that you promise that the work you're complaining about infringes, and ISPs have to remove the material or face liability for hosting it.”

The DMCA is in fact part of the movie and record industry’s last gasp effort to protect an unprotectable position in the internet age. It was passed after heavy lobbying by those groups in a futile effort to curb the use of digital media to distribute copyrighted material. As a quick survey of the web will demonstrate it hasn’t worked.

The DMCA is draconian in its provisions simply because it is just about useless for its intended purpose – as the experience of both record companies and movie studios have shown since it was passed.

Anyone who attempts to seriously apply the DCMA to prevent free distribution of material ends up playing an endless game of whack-the-gopher. As fast as one ‘infringing’ site is taken down, two more pop up. In some cases the material reappears on the same site under a different name. YouTube is rife with examples of this.

The one thing a DCMA dragnet is good for is annoying the fans. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has managed to make itself one of the most hated organizations in the country by using the DCMA and similar tactics against people who share music files. Now SFWA is playing the same game.

The difference is, SFWA has a much smaller war chest and faces a much more tightly knit fan community. Science fiction fandom is a close group and active fans tend to be opinion leaders in SF and Fantasy much more than the fans of records and movies. Pissing off the fans it notorious for having an immediate, and detrimental, impact on sales.

So what in God’s name possessed SFWA to act like this? Like the original request and the DCMA, SFWA is pretty peculiar in its own right.

The first thing you’ve got to understand about the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America is that it isn’t. Like the Holy Roman Empire, which in Voltaire’s phrase was “neither holy, Roman nor an empire,” SFWA is not an organization of science fiction and fantasy writers. While some of the leading SF and Fantasy writers belong, the vast majority of the members are people who barely meet SFWA’s extremely lax publication requirements. They are not professional SF or Fantasy writers in any meaningful sense of the term and many of them haven’t published a word of either science fiction or fantasy in years.

One result is that the real concerns of writers who earn substantial amount of their income from writing the stuff are largely ignored while the membership spends its time in endless debate on tempests in teapots like the quality of the food in the SFWA hospitality suite at the last convention they attended or rewriting the rules for the annual Nebula awards.

The SFWA publications where this stuff is discussed have (to quote Doonesbury) “all the subtle dynamics of a nursery school recess”. The meetings can be even worse.

Another result is that because the membership mostly aren’t writers they are easily swayed on issues they ‘should’ care about. Since they’re writers, they ‘should’ care about copyright, obviously.

To be perfectly fair to SFWA, back in the bad old days there were a number of unethical publishers who took shameless advantage of SF writers by violating their rights wholesale. The oldest magazine in the field went through a period (after many changes of ownership) where they republished stories from their back issues without further payment to the authors – who had received a pittance for selling all rights to the stories in the first place. This left a certain confused sensitivity to issues of copyright in some of the older members.

The third result of SFWA’s absurd membership composition is that when someone comes along with a strongly held opinion on something other than the Nebula rules or the quality of the food in the SFWA suite, he or she can often sway the membership into doing things which are silly, pointless or downright stupid. After all, why not? It’s not going to affect the average member’s livelihood and it’s not like it really matters if you haven’t had a story published in the last ten years and have no reasonable hope of ever having another published in a paying market.

That’s another characteristic of SFWA. If a tiny group is fanatic on a subject they can just keep bringing it up and bringing up and bringing it up until eventually they get the result they want, if only by a fluke. Of course the pendulum is then likely to swing the other way, but in the meantime SFWA is committed to a wrong-headed course of action.

All these things come together in the case of copyright to produce a Perfect Storm of Silliness.

This has been building for some time. The flap over free postings on the internet started about ten years ago when one or two people began to beat the drums against these awful copyright violations. Never mind that no one was making a dime off these postings. Never mind that, much more to the point, it was effectively impossible to stop.

As someone who was covering the internet and new media even then, I knew the limits on enforcement in the new environment. It was obvious to anyone who looked at the situation that as long as the posters didn’t try to charge for the work, there was no hope of stopping the practice. No matter how many sites you shut down there were always more.

And as a writer with several novels and stories already under my belt, I knew perfectly well the effect that this kind of campaign was going to have on the fans. They weren’t going to like it, a lot of them wouldn’t see the point of it, and science fiction fans being science fiction fans, they were likely to react very negatively, to the detriment not just of the individual authors but of the field as a whole.

I wasn’t alone in these realizations, but I was very much a rara avis. While a fair number of SFWA members are technically trained and a few of them are extremely knowledgeable about the web and the new media, it was obvious most members were not merely not aware of what was happening, some of them were best described as aggressively ignorant of the impact of the impending technological changes. They didn’t know, they didn’t want to know and by God, things were going to continue in publishing just as they always had. Now about the food at the last Worldcon…

I thought about pointing all this out, but I quickly realized it was futile. The exchanges in the newsletter made it obvious that reason had already gone by the board and I didn’t see any point in jumping into that particular hog wallow.

It was the final straw. I had become increasingly disenchanted with the organization because of its ineffectiveness as a voice for actual writers, its constant bickering and the bull-headed resistance to anything that might be a substantive change.

The irony of an organization made of up people who wrote about the future about to be blindsided by that same future was delicious, but it wasn’t enough to keep me in the organization. I let my membership lapse and I’ve never looked back.