Pot, Kettle

Well. Cory Doctorow stepped in it. After getting all morally outraged over the SFWA sending takedown notices to a website, Scribd.com, that had huge amounts of pirated scifi novels and accidently including one of Doctorow's novels that had been uploaded legally by someone else, he infringed on Ursula K Le Guin's rights. He did this by quoting in a post, in it's entirety, a one paragraph short story. The quote did not include the copyright notice, but the page had a creative commons copyright notice.

From Jerry Pournelle's site [Link]

- URL: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/07/04/ursula-leguin-rips-i.html Assuming this may shortly be removed or changed, an original would also be visible at ARCHIVE LINK (search in that page for "Ursula", about 1/3 of the way down). Googling on "boingboing ursula le guin chabon" shows a number of other copies made by boingboing readers (assumedly believing the CC license granted them permission).

- Her piece was published, with permission, in several places including Ansible, http://news.ansible.co.uk/a240.html#leguin, which Doctorow identifies as his source. Ansible gave no permission for anyone to copy her story, and indeed it carries Ms. Le Guin's copyright notice; a notice that was omitted in the boingboing copy.

- The boingboing copy is of the entire text of the short story, which would not be covered under Fair Use. Doctorow has spoken widely on copyright matters and the limits of Fair Use, so he should be aware that copying an entire work is not permitted.

- Doctorow and boingboing, of which he is billed as a principal, operate for personal gain via advertising revenue, merchandise sales, publicity for his books, etc. Under copyright law, copyright infringement for commercial advantage may be considered a criminal offense. (Removal of a copyright notice and knowingly placing a Creative Commons license on a work without authorization may also be illegal.)

Doctorow's apology [Link]

The situation with Ms Le Guin was made more complicated by an accident of circumstances. Andrew Burt, the person whom Ms Le Guin chose to communicate the matter to me, is someone with whom I had put in a killfile following an altercation. I delete all emails from him unread, and if he sent me a message, I did not see it. So I didn't find out that Ms Le Guin objected to the quote until someone sent me a link to a page that Jerry Pournelle had put up about it, in which he quotes a letter from Andrew Burt. Burt is the Science Fiction Writers of America VP who had previously sent a fraudulent takedown notice that resulted in my novel being removed from an Internet document server.

Interesting that Andrew Burt's actions in the SFWA takedown notices to Scribd.com are fraudulent, but that Doctorow's actions were a misunderstanding.