I just don’t think the situation is much different than it ever was. Long before the internet there was plagiarism and reproduction of books without authorisation. A famous example: Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was first pub’d in the US of A without the author’s permission.

While the internet has made it easier to pliagarise and steal intellectual property it’s also made it way easier to catch people at it.

My (main) problem with SFWA and the like is their hysteria over what are essentially not new problems. Electronic piracy is no different from the regular kind.

I absolutely agree that the individual writer should have control over their copyright. If they want it freely available online, cool. And if they don’t, also cool. Posting someone’s work without getting permission is very not cool.

I just think SFWA’s clueless mistake comes out of a bizarre institutional mindset. It’s not like this latest bruhaha was a one-off. They’ve been retarded about copyright for years and years.

E-piracy is having a minimal effect on writers’ incomes. Falling out of print and into obscurity, markets shrinking, those are the real dangers. That’s what frightens me.

My understanding of this particular notice from the SFWA is that it didn’t even actually qualify as a legal DMCA notice, but just the threat of invoking it was enough to cause the site to remove all the referenced material. As the notice itself was obviously poorly researched in terms of what material actually infringed on copyright, and infringed on the rights of some authors who had specifically requested that the SFWA not represent them in any copyright issues, clearly the SFWA has pulled a major boner here, and is a clear indication that certain parties in that organization don’t know what the hell they’re doing.

I think it’s past time that the DMCA was scrapped and the whole copyright issue looked at again, with a strong eye placed on achieving a proper balance between the needs of the creators and consumers of intellectual property. And the SFWA needs new leadership.