Cory Doctorow has written an impassioned piece on BoingBoing regarding the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Inc‘s (SFWA) use of the DMCA to take down work from Scribd. It appears that they were removed after an email was sent to them claiming that these infringed on the rights of Asimov and Silverberg but the manner in which the search was conducted is more like a dragnet or a broad search rather than a vertical or controlled search.
As he says, Doctorow is in the vanguard of creators using the Internet to spread awareness of their work and to sell copies of that work.
I really hope that this comes back to bite the SFWA hard and that they talk about how to rectify this situation quickly. Trying to gag people who are talking about work and writers must surely be counter to everything that they are supposed to stand for.
When sending a DMCA take-down notice, one does so “under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.”
If you send fraudulent DMCA-notices, you open yourself to liability (one example: Diebold, $125’000). If I were an SFWA member, I’d ask for a very good explanation of why their leaders are exposing the organization to liability like that.
I certainly hope questions are asked and given that people like Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi are members, I suspect very tough questions will be asked.