Comments on: A Teachable Moment about Copyright from the SFWA

By: Thoughts by Ted » Blog Archive » Whack the Gopher

Thoughts by Ted » Blog Archive » Whack the Gopher — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 03:16:37 +0000

[...] Unfortunately, this takedown notice erroneously included a junior high school teacher’s list of 300+ recommended books (which naturally contained the strings “Issac Asimov” and “Robert [...]

By: Deanna Hoak

Deanna Hoak — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 23:19:05 +0000

Francis, if it were the case that Scribd was requiring a perfectly formed DMCA takedown for every URL, they would not have removed hundreds of files–including the one by the owner of this blog!–on the basis of the e-mail Burt sent.

By: Francis

Francis — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 18:29:17 +0000

But it should be noted that up until Monday Sept 3 Scribd had literally thousands of copyright infringing works on its site and seemed to make it hard to get them taken down – as in you had to generate a perfectly formed DMCA takedown for each and every URL

I do sympathize with the innocents affected by the SFWA move but I also believe that a large chunk of the blame for their misfortune can be laid at the door of scribd for paying no attention what so ever to politer and more informal suggestions that maybe they should do at least a basic minimum of content checking.

By: Nick

Nick — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 13:33:10 +0000

Thanks for the link. An interesting take on copyright history and theory. I’ll have to spend more time with the metaphor to fully grasp it.

By: Greg London

Greg London — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 14:57:06 +0000

If you teach copyright law, then this might be a useful free resource:

http://www.greglondon.com/bountyhunters/

It’s licensed CC-BY, so you’re free to use it in your class.

By: Nick

Nick — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 12:40:00 +0000

Johne,

I agree. This is one of the most interesting situations I’ve been involved in since I started blogging. It’s become much bigger than I imagined it would be when I wrote about it initially.

There are so many things I could do with this in my classroom: discussing copyright, tracing how a news story develops, examining the impact of blogs, to name a few.

One silver lining in all of this is that I’ve been introduced to Ray Gun Review. Great Magazine! I’ll be mentioning it in a future post.

By: BoingBoing points out SFWA DMCA misuse at Tobias Buckell Online

BoingBoing points out SFWA DMCA misuse at Tobias Buckell Online — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 22:59:25 +0000

[...] whole episode will now be taught to a group of students about copyrights and how they work by the teacher who had his stuff taken down and was one of the [...]

By: Johne Cook

Johne Cook — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 16:22:03 +0000

Hey, Nick!

I get a sense of history-in-the-making from all this. Setting aside the whole ‘wrongful-DMCA-takedown’ stuff, it was actually very interesting to see this episode begin, simmer behind the scenes, and blow up into a fully-fledged geek internet storm.

I have the sense that Things Will Change. We will only know from the distance of history, and won’t that be a cool point of history to share with new classes of eager minds?

I’ve written an editorial about all this in the September 1st, 2007 Ray Gun Revival Issue 29. Ironically, that editorial will remain available for viewing at Scribd because of the stand taken by Scribd, yourself, Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi, and the all the rest. Kudos to all!

By: Why is the SFWA screw-up embarrassing? at Deanna Hoak

Why is the SFWA screw-up embarrassing? at Deanna Hoak — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 15:46:10 +0000

[...] Because it resulted in mistakes like this. [...]