SFWA Detailed Account

From Jerry Pournelle. [Link]

5. In exasperation Committee Chairman Burt said "Ok this is a takedown order". Of course it was not. It wasn't a legal order at all. It wasn't in any legal format and scribd had no more obligation to pay attention to that than they had to all previous requests to be reasonable. If I send you a list and say take these down, you have no obligation to do it. I have to send them in proper format, and certify that I am either the copyright owner or have authorization to act for the copyright owner before you have to pay attention to me. This wasn't in that form, and could have been ignored. They knew that. They had been telling us that in the past. There were no legal ramifications. You may think of Burt's exclamation as an aggressive bargaining statement if you like. Ignoring it would have had no legal consequences, and scribd knew that.

(The official response of scribd to Burt's letter was from their lawyers who made it very clear that this did not meet the requirements of a DMCA takedown order, and put them under no obligations.)

6 Nevertheless they did pull them and notified Doctorow and others they had done so, expecting I suspect that there would be a storm. About 90% of the documents on the list were blatant cases of piracy. Some were trivial. Some number, from a dozen to about fifty, were legitimately posted, some under the Creative Commons license, and should not have been removed. The removals were done by scribd. When complaints came to SFWA both the Committee Chairman and the President sent notices to both scribd and the document authors removing those from the list and apologizing to the authors.

7. scribd had EFF send a bullying letter to SFWA (A scribd official says defensively that letter was generated at the request of Cory Doctorow. I have no reason to doubt this, but the letter to the SFWA President says that it is on behalf of EFF's client, scribd.com.)

8. The resulting storm wasn't to scribd liking. Several VC's decided not to talk to them. (A scribd official says these persons are mythical. I can only say that I may have sources scribd does not have.) EFF got more hostile mail than it had expected. While there was a lot of obloquy poured onto SFWA, scribd came in for their share -- after all, they did have about 10,000 pirated documents up on their site, and anyone could go see that. Many people did, and were appalled.

9 For whatever reason, scribd got nervous and pulled thousands of documents including hundreds by Doctorow and others posted under Creative Commons, this time purely on their own initiative. They discovered that sorting the illegal from the legal documents took time and resources they did not have (and they have far more resources than SFWA or any individual author) so they went to mass action by pulling all the documents put up by particular individuals, whether legally there or not.

I think this has tarnished EFF more than SFWA.

With music, you can wink and nudge and say musicians make money on tours and t-shirts and hey, the music companies screw the musicians out of money anyways, so lets screw the music companies. Its harder to do that with writers or their families.