For me this is reminiscent of the notion of "mavens" in Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point: individuals who produce home mix tapes or make (selected) tracks available on P2P networks can fill the role of experts on what's good to buy but less easily found than heavily-marketed goods.

There's probably also an effect from free sample distribution, which enhances the ability of every individual to survey more artists and more recordings with the same limited economic resources in the form of money -- don't have to buy whole collections to evaluate an artist, spending can be focused on collections and artists likely to be interesting. But the real bottom-line of economics is the finite amount of time we have in our lives, and as we find Mavens with whom we frequently agree through the P2P or home-tape network, we take advantage of the time they've already spent on the discovery and selection process.

P2P networks can be particularly good for this because they can reduce or eliminate the need for human Connectors to hook them up with Mavens -- I found artists and music through the home-tape network because I knew people who connected me to Mavens. With P2P I have an opportunity to search for Mavens based on music we already agree about, then look for work the Maven knows about but which I haven't yet found.

Unless I find Mavens who like the material being pushed by the record labels, this process could lead to me spending the same amount of money and time on commercial music (e.g. no net effect on CD sales, since I spend as much as I can comfortably afford in any case), just buying less of the material the record labels have spent the most promoting.

Advertising and marketing are a kind of frictional force in the free market, a distortion of the relative availability of information about products which allows vendors to manipulate the underlying realities which give rise to the laws of supply and demand. Any mechanism that removes the burden of frictional forces from the free market is harmful to those whose livelihood is fed by that friction.

Activities like paying radio stations to distort their selection process in favour of the record labels' preferences interfered with a mechanism through which Mavens could make their knowledge available, and restored some of the friction that label executives use to warm their cold and stony treasure hoards.

TNKO: In the last 30 minutes or so (at least) no posts with numbers below 29 were deleted -- I know this because I have been writing a response to #29 (while multiplexing other tasks into the same wall clock interval) and the same comment is still at that number.

So what constitutes "just" in the sense of "just got deleted" in your terms?

TimKuo #29:

This comment seems to be a kind of spoor of the hobby horse you and some others ride, comparing actions taken toward written comments on a weblog toward... well, I'm not sure what you are claiming that AT&T and YouTube are taking actions toward, or what the nature of those actions might be, since this generally goes unstated. The moderator's stated intention is to keep comment threads from becoming uncivil and unpleasant, and I'm pretty sure that's not a nuance that either AT&T or YouTube allocate resources for.

If you read the thread you will find a number of comments which disagree with the BoingBoing policy on handling of comments which disagree with the BoingBoing policy on handling of adverse comments.

If you read the first two the disemvowelled comments (either by reemvowelling them in your head or using external resources like software or pencil and paper) you will find that:

* One is a screed on the topic of "why Cory Doctorow is not a very good writer"

* Another tells Flying Squid that it's wrong to agree with Cory's response and apologize for the initial (and unfortunately missing) Flying Squid comment that was first in this thread. It further tells Cory that his response was awfully long and wordy, and that he (Cory) should not write so much about his own published work.

To me, those comments are uncivll and unpleasant and increasing the level of effort required to read them is a useful measure in the service of the moderator's stated ends. The secrets here are the nature of the misdeed you're trying to accuse Cory Doctorow of and your motivations for doing so.

Note to self: stay out of Logan Airport if wearing a chocolate-frosted donut on my shirt. Especially since, the way I eat, it will pretty clearly be a fragmentation donut.

JackCastile:

I think that the spelling you're looking for is "strait," but if you are correct then I'm glad I'm not straight. I'd have to waste a lot of time and energy worrying about something I couldn't control: the behaviour of my partner. Unless my partner were a strait male and limited to a narrow behavioural range.

POWEROID:

Um, I just mentioned an example of a police department circulating a still from a security camera of a suspect. To be absolutely clear, that video footage did not contain ANY material which showed a crime being committed, not at all.

Here's a link to a story from a Wisconsin paper about how a police department released security camera images of a suspect in order to request help in identifying the suspect. The news story indicates that the man was not recorded on video starting the fire for which he is the suspected arsonist.

So, you are factually wrong about that, I think. Do you have any evidence, citations, whatever, to back up your position?

Andrew Keen is a public figure and in the grand tradition of the law in this country, he's fair game for comments and in particular mockery. Andrew Keen, on the flip side, has called the group of which Cory Doctorow is a prominent member "worse than the Nazis" in some respects.

"e-Leftists" don't claim the right to do whatever they want with information online, assuming that I've correctly understood how you mean the term you coined. The claim the right to use information that is either licensed for reuse or in the public domain.

So, anyway, if you have other examples, by all means let us all in on them. In the meantime, please understand that I think that you are unwilling or incapable of using rational thought in the exposition of your opinions. If you are banned, chased off, or ignored, it is probably because you are angry and incoherent.

I think that your statement "...ignorance wants nothing more than to remain ignorant..." applies most specifically and appropriately to you yourself. Good luck with that.

Hey, Nick. The numbers changed when posts from CantStopTheSignal were expunged.

My apologies if my remarks were intemperate or insulting to you. I think that mockery and direct and blunt statements like yours are reasonable in sufficiently robust conversations, which it turns out these comment threads generally have. If I'd had the ability to change them or pull them back I might have done so, when the following morning proved wiser than the evening when I posted them. Other comments with your byline should have shown me the error of my ways before I hit "Post."

JackCastile: there was a woman in the Boston area who advertised in personal ads for guys willing to go to a particular beach with her and engage in sexual acts in a car while the local voyeurs looked on. As I recall, she implied that she might want to roll down the windows sometimes, for particular voyeurs she liked.

One interpretation of a voyeur touching the woman in a couple engaging in sexual activities is that the woman knows about it and wants it, whether or not the guy she arrived with knows about it. Kinky, but maybe safer than just turning up in the park and getting intimate with a stranger. Or maybe a way to be with a guy she loves whose kink is voyeurism.

POWEROID(16)

Thank you for the example. Saying what the hell you're talking about is usually part of having a discussion. That's not a really good example, though: my local police recently published a still from a security video camera along with a police sketch of a man who was in the right general area at the right time to be a suspect for a crime. The person involved was presumably also thought by a crime victim to resemble the man who assaulted her.

In fact, it's quite common for police to publish pictures of criminal suspects from all kinds of non-public sources. The entry in this weblog identified the picture as that of a "presumed" thief.

The picture reproduced on this web site was published on a public web page first, so it's hardly a violation of privacy. A story with enough information to find the picture on Flickr was published in a politically very Right newspaper in Canada this morning.

So that pretty much wraps up a refutation of your one example of how this weblog is an example of the "e-Left" who don't respect rights to privacy and liberty. Got any more? I'd like to find out if it's true, as I suspect, that however many of your examples are defeated, your ignorance will be invincible.

Meanwhile, the FBI have been abusing their privilege of getting private information on US citizens without due process, the (politically Right) government of the US has been grabbing people off the street and imprisoning them without due process, and the TSA can interfere with your freedom of movement and pursuit of happiness without any accountability. Getting a picture uploaded to a Flickr account with at least a stolen password, if not a stolen computer, circulated further and labelled with "presumed thief" and "idiot" seems like a poor reason for inventing a whole new category for people you dislike. Some other kind of grudge behind that?

PINGUIS:

Yup, read the article in its entirety, and took into consideration that Saudi Arabia, like all nations, is a work in progress.

The nation's been around for less than 75 to maybe 100 or so years, depending on how you count it and what you use for milestones of development. It was a Wahhabist-dominated sharia-driven society in 1932, that is, in living memory.

Powerful clerical factions are still part of Saudi Arabia's societal structure, and as a result there are laws and provisions and police forces which are steered by narrowly construed religious tenets rather than laws which match the preferences of the majority of the population. Evidence for this in that article is found in the fact that the struggle to rescue the young women was a fight between two separate government agencies, one more secular and one more religious:

> The religious police reportedly tried to block the entry of
> Civil Defense officers into the building. "We told them that
> the situation was dangerous and it was not the time to discussj
> religious issues, but they refused and started shouting at us,"
> Arab News quoted Civil Defense officers as saying.

And in fact the seriousness of the consequences of the fire is, from elsewhere in the article, also related to the fact that (unlike the US these days) the Saudi government finances faith-based initiatives in education to the exclusion of secular provision of services:

> All aspects of state-financed education for girls in Saudi Arabia,
> including the renting of buildings for schools, is under the
> authority of the GPGE, an autonomous government agency
> long controlled by conservative clerics.

Elsewhere in the article you will see where the popular press is calling for changes that they believe can be made to start prying open the religious rule of education to let in some healthy and cleansing sunlight. But changes in attitude take time, and the fact that some part of a society or nation is oppressive does not mean that you can infer that the whole kit and kaboodle is oppressive.

In thinking about the possibility of strongly different attitudes within a society and the difficulty of reconciling them, consider that in 1965 in the USA the state police of Alabama were oppressing the citizenry with beatings, water cannon, and dogs and that this was nothing new. That limbs of the law were routinely implicated in murders and covering up murders. And that the thing that was new in 1965 was not these oppressive actions, but the federal government acting on the assumption that there would be more popular support for federalizing the Alabama National Guard and using them to protect US citizens, Alabama citizens, from agents of another element of their own government, their own nation, their own society.

Clearly the government of the state of Alabama was oppressive, a part of US society was oppressive, but it would be wrong to infer from this that the US as a whole was oppressive. For that matter, Governor George Wallace and President Lyndon Johnson were both Christians, along with the majority of US citizens. To this day you can find Christians who believe that being a good Christian requires one to support segregation and anti-semitism: see the "Christian Legal Reform Club," for example.

It appears that the monarchy wants to indicate that increasing the realization of general human rights and the rights of women and children are the state's direction:

> Saudi Arabia is a state party to the United Nations Convention
> on the Rights of the Child and the U.N. Convention on the
> Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women.

But change is difficult, even for an absolute monarch, in the face of an organized religion with its own impulse to power. I can imagine King Abdullah paraphrasing Henry II of England and asking, "Will no one rid me of these turbulent priests?"

Hey, POWEROID, could you maybe clarify that a little?

Both the political left and the political right can be espoused by people with tyrannical tendencies -- Communism and Fascism are the notable examples of the twentieth century. But I think I've seen a lot more censorship, authoritarianism, and general clamping down under Nixon/Reagan/Bush I/Bush II than under Clinton.

My examples would include FBI abuses and the Enemies List, larger fines from the FCC for "bad" language, and funding of art projects which might not meet with widespread popular enthusiasm. What have you got on your side of the discussion?

I wouldn't try to pronounce it, let alone read it! Looks like Polish -- probably why the case mod is so nice, it's a well-Polished design.

I kinda thought the "Yes" meant that writers won't make the same amount of money in a world that has Google in it as in a world that does not, without specifying which outcome was being affirmed. "Yes, one or the other. Dunno which."

I think that editors' incomes and the existence of Wikipedia are probably orthogonal, except for editors who stick their heads in the maw of the common-sense crusher that appears to be Wikipedia's current state of operation.

For what it's worth, a look over at Human Rights Watch turned up a link to information about the tragic deaths of at least 14 women in a fire at (sort of) a boarding school for girls on 11 March, 2002.

The very limited exposition from "CPT. TIM" might lead one to believe that a crowd of random Saudi Arabians passersby preferred to see the young women die in a fire rather than escape while immodestly dressed. As described in the Human Rights Watch article, the facts appear to be different.

The official Saudi Arabian firefighters attempting to rescue the young women were opposed by a separate organized group who did, apparently, believe in death before dishonour for the victims. There were (unusually) calls in the Saudi Arabian media for change as a result of the tragedy. Bystanders and parents tried to argue with the members of the "Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice" who were obstructing both escape and rescue attempts.

This doesn't seem to me to indicate that the culture of the people to whom Burqinis are marketed is so universally and uniformly oppressive as to justify CAPT. TIM's remarks. That person's willingness to view the events of 11 March, 2002, in a light which would justify his remarks makes me wonder what assumptions he had before hearing of the tragedy which led him to so implacably interpret it as evidence of widespread social oppression.

BEACZAR (126):

First, that last sentence of yours is amazing: if women didn't change their names when they married, why would the children have a last name of the father?

Moving right along, though, isn't judgment of whether or not a group is oppressed the really the right of members of that group? I'm not saying that others don't have a right to hold an opinion, rather that they are wisest to also hold their opinions to themselves. Many people find it offensive to be told what is wrong with their nation or culture or their statuses therein by outside parties, even when those parties are careful in expressing themselves. And I don't think that your words here show much care and thought or insight.

As a commenter said somewhere upthread, I think that we should work on the beams in our own eyes before tending to the specks in others; there are plenty of cultural obstacles to freedom of choice and behaviour in our own English-speaking, Christian-centered societies to take up all the potential for change that we can find for quite some time.

I remember seeing that performance live and having my tiny little mind blown wide open. Pop music that was actually interesting and fun!

Plus I could never believe that Mick Jagger couldn't get no satisfaction any time he wanted it. Mark Mothersbaugh, on the other hand, looked like he might have some trouble with it.

Gilbert Wham (15): You're almost 40 years too late -- the Apollo 8 astronauts did this whole King James Bible Christmas thing from lunar orbit.

That is, engaged in Christian religious ritual while orbiting the Moon in a fucking spaceship.

I think that I would delete all the comments from a banned individual if she decided to bypass the ban, particularly if she flaunted her defiance of the ban, if I were charged with that responsibility.

The way to get unbanned is definitely not to sneak back in, any more than it's the way to get invited back to a party or unbanned from a bar or restaurant. The more effort you spend on sneaking in, the less likely you are to get the ban lifted.

That said, I'd like to see Nick's posting at 38 treated with spot remover, and LamontYouDummy's tediously standard-issue bozosity never would be missed. If I were responsible for moderating these comments I'd probably take care of these latter first: they seem more harmful to civil discourse than Can't Stop the Yawning's droning unpleasantness.

Teresa (167):

There are some fairly nasty substances with strong 'splodey tendencies which can be synthesized in a few minutes in an airplane bathroom, some can even be made from the proverbial ingredients which can be found in the corner drugstore. I don't know why we don't see more about these on YouTube.

For example, acetone peroxide synthesis requires hydrogen peroxide, acetone, and sulfuric acid; also ice if you want to avoid blowing yourself up, not necessarily a problem if making it in the airplane lav. HMTD is another nasty little item that can be synthesized in a hurry, but one of the ingredients, Hexamine, is likely to be detectable by explosives detectors. Synthesis instructions for substances like these generally include a step of drying out a filtered or precipitated solid, but if you made enough of it you could probably get a decent wet bang before a transatlantic flight landed.

I found a fair range of recipes at the "Ka-Fucking-Boom" section of the www.totse.com pages while refreshing my memory. I got interested when a past announcement of the defeat of terrorists at the hands of the TSA mentioned that the substances involved could be made with drug store items, and with more time and inclination for a search I found a few other "Anarchist Cookbook" sites. The synthesis processes look plausible and more likely to result in pyrotechnic incontinence than explosive impotence.

For what it's worth, I don't think that the risk of terrorist attacks grew significantly worse on 11 September, 2001, and most of the purported countermeasures seem like security theatre to me. I don't think that the liquids restriction is all that helpful -- I think that Schneier has noted that there are devices for smuggling liquids like beer into stadiums that could equally be put to use smuggling explosive components onto airplanes. But there really are common liquids which can be combined to synthesize explosives during an airplane flight, and it would be better not to have arguments against bogus "protective" measures derailed by asserting that there are not.

It might be hard to stage an effective use of in-flight-synthesized acetone peroxide, but getting to that point of opinion because of losing the point of fact would be unfortunate for one's argument.

Braxton (246): I agree with you, proving damages would be very difficult for Cory Doctorow, but I think the same might be true for Pournelle and others.

I don't by any means want to claim that I know the effect that unauthorized publication would have an author's sales and resultant residuals. I do want to note that several contributors to various threads on this and related topics have mentioned discovering authors through free downloads, authors they might otherwise have passed by. In terms of income it is perhaps an effect like having your books in a library's current circulating collection.

The harm that I think Doctorow on one side and Pournelle on the other could probably agree was done to each of them at some point in this affair was the harm of having control of the results of their creative efforts appropriated.

Pournelle is absolutely within his rights to decide for himself how his work is distributed, so is Doctorow, and both have a right to feel they have been harmed, regardless of their ability to assign and verify a monetary value to the harm, I think.

Braxton (244)

It's great to see constructive discussion and movement toward a meeting of the minds!

If I may point out one place where you write as if you had no choice, but in fact are not conscious of an alternative:

> Since I assumed [Cory Doctorow] did [describe an act I didn't think was fraudulent as being so], his choice of calling this fraud must have stemmed from a desire to inflame the issue.

Granting for the sake of argument that Cory Doctorow would upon calm reflection agree with you that the e-mail from Andrew Burt did not constitute fraud as such, you are unfortunately ruling out the possibility that he was sufficiently angry to use a word which conveyed his emotional reaction rather than choosing a term with better quasilegal accuracy. I mean, he could have just been mad and shooting his mouth off, like other people in the argument. His intent does not have to have been to inflame the issue.

One other point is that Cory Doctorow did in fact state how he felt this action was harmful to him, that it undid his work to encourage taking the Creative Commons license seriously as an alternative to copyright, work he felt he'd put significant effort into and a goal he believes in strongly and sincerely.

PHASOR3000 (11):

Could you provide a link to a place where someone who opposed the practices you describe referred to them as "torture" as such? I don't think I've read or heard that from a source that wasn't opposing restrictions on applying the practices you describe to captives, and as such I am inclined to believe that the claim that anyone seriously regards such things as torture is a misrepresentation.

What I have read and heard is that application of those practices of humiliation and degradation to captives is contrary to broadly accepted standards of human rights. It's easy for us to claim that the named practices wouldn't matter to us since they don't cause physical harm. Other practices, such as having one's captors urinate on one, being required to defecate on a crucifix or watching one's captors do so, or being fed only meals topped with human semen, might be degradations some of us would find equally distressing, albeit they do not directly cause physical pain.

The proof of this pudding is definitely in the eating: people who aren't subject to treatment intended to humiliate and degrade them can easily imagine themselves indifferent to such practices. Some correspondents in this comment thread will be motivated to believe that they are indifferent for political or ideological reasons.

I do believe, though, that if you sincerely make the effort to imagine yourself a captive and subjected to treatment you find deeply distasteful, you will come to understand how deeply harmful it could be to endure such a situation.

TSOL (18): No particular reason it couldn't be one of those alternatives, I suppose, if they make sense in their home cultures. In English the existing idiom (and this is an idiomatic reference) is "Bible." For example, the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics is known idiomatically as the "Rubber Bible" and not, say, the "Rubber Bhagavad Gita."

In the culture that dominates most English-speaking nations, "the Bible" is the ultimate authoritative book, while those alternatives are not. The book was written in English in an English-speaking nation. Because of that, your alternatives would seem contrived and to be making a point other than the one that this book was considered the authoritative reference for the field it referred to.

If you are really looking to change up a clichéed idiom, might I recommend an oxymoron such as the "Torture Dharma?"

Braxton Cook (233) And if I can just follow up briefly again, one immediate problem with filtering all possibly copyright-infringing material on upload is the sheer volume of material, none of it indexed against a reliable directory of copyright statuses.

Consider, for example, the amazon.com catalogue, which includes items for which all rights are reserved, items for which some rights have been released, and some items for which copyright has lapsed completely (e.g. Dover books). There's no indication in the catalog as to which is which, and given that some rights might lapse on author's death plus some waiting period, the list would have to change over time in ways that are hard to track.

In the case of college papers the number of items to search through is relatively limited -- compare papers with other papers submitted at this time, other papers submitted in recent years, papers which have been found through plagiarism distribution channels. And the result of finding a suspicious paper is to bring it to the attention of the academic authorities who have to investigate maybe a few hundred students per semester.

A site like scribd.com would have to investigate a huge number of document uploads and there's really no standard to automatically compare the uploads with. The alternative for such a site is to use the mechanisms of the existing law, which allow everything to be posted without legal exposure to the web site owner and require putative owners to find and protest the infringing publication. That seems kind of reasonable, in a way: if it's hard to find the document there's a good chance that it's not being downloaded much and the damage to the rights holder might well be fairly small.

Braxton Cook (233): This is just my semi-informed opinion, having seen more than one or two RIAA, MPAA, and individual studio evidence preservation and take-down notices, but my short answer to your question is that SFWA could provide practical support for rights-holders who want to send DMCA take-down notices.

It's not really hard to send DMCA take-down notices, once you have a template and some basic software in place. Putting together the required materials and a process could be a very valuable contribution for SFWA to make. Actually identifying who is legally entitled to file such a notice might (or might not) be more complicated: who has the right to complain about a fan translation posted on a web page, for example? One wants to get this right, since the DMCA take-down notice is meant to include a sworn statement of legal competence to make a complaint.

Assuming that the author actually is in a position to have a complaint filed (i.e. currently controls the rights in question), then actual production of DMCA notices can be automated to a great extent. The elements of the notice are mostly a listing of facts: who are you, what did you find, where did you find it, are you asserting that you have the right to control its publication. Such a list can be prepared for e-mail and digitally signed, then sent through normal e-mail channels.

For all the obloquy of which Dr A. Burt has been a recipient, he's probably in a good position to marshal the required resources. The digital signature part is more or less part of standard e-mail software packages. Setting up the signing service and a reliable method for verifying the signatures is a free software project -- this is the kind of work for which graduate students were invented.

I noticed in some of Jerry Pournelle's on-line material that he had identified a number of items whose publication on a web site probably wasn't authorized. He probably knows the authors of those items, or their survivors, in many cases. Other SFWA members probably know the remainder. In some cases, a SFWA DMCA committee could probably act on behalf of members.

In the more moneyed world of film, tv, and music publishing industries there are a number of businesses that earn money through tracking purported DMCA violations and filing the required notices to take down allegedly infringing material and prepare for lawsuits against the purported violators. SFWA could fulfill the former role on behalf of sf&f authors.

If scribd.com is monitoring its groups in this way, they seem to have set sail from the DMCA safe harbor and making for waters infested with the sharks of legal action. Or the icebergs of copyrights. Or maybe frozen sharks. Something bad, anyway.

MILTONTHALES (218) The library analogy would be more along the lines of the library giving you a photocopy of the book and not requiring its return.

Even if they only give it to you a page at a time, a complete copy is required for a complete reading, and the copying is implicit in the way the client reads it.

Anonymous (11):

That's an amazingly anti-free-market position you are taking under the guise of disparaging anti-DRM sentiments as akin to communism.

DRM is a means of imposing artificial price supports on music, movies, books, software, and so on. Like a system of agricultural production caps and import quotas, these controls act through the restriction of supply such that the operation of the law of supply and demand produces a price (and profit) desired by the controllers of production. Government-enforced DRM is in some ways an element of central planning of the entertainment sector of the national economy.

In the absence of government backing for this kind of capitalist racketeering, supply, demand, and price would be free to seek a more natural equilibrium. This would undoubtedly lead to adjustments in the market and cause some amount of economic pain and probably lead to the collapse of the music, film, and television industries as we know them. Many people would probably dislike the result, but singers would go on singing, writers would go on writing, painters would go on painting, and so forth.

The risks and rewards of investing in large-scale entertainment enterprises would certainly change, but I think there would still be wealthy individuals willing to put up money for a chance to be part of the creative process. Creativity is attractive in itself to many (if not most) people: it seems unlikely that letting entertainment rights seek their own balance of supply and demand would eliminate entertainment as a human endeavour.

Todd Knarr: Actually, based on the stories from friends in the publishing business of the degree of difficulty involved in tracking down the current owners of copyrights, having a strict set or rules for formal notices makes a kind of sense to me.

And yeah, I can see that getting a non-conformant notification from Pournelle saying that some chunk of fiction you have posted that nobody's heard of is actually copyright would completely reasonably trigger a response of, "Tell me that in the proper form and I'll look into it."

What I question is the notion that such a letter-of-the-law approach would succeed as a defense against a suit brought against you for continuing to host all 7 HP books even after you'd been notified through the channels by which you ordinarily do business. Do you know that this has been tested in an actual legal proceeding in which the copyright at issue was for an extremely well known work?

Todd Knarr:

The DMCA seems to provide that if the web site owner is aware of infringing material, that material must be removed from access whether or not a formal DMCA notice was received from a copyright owner.

My intended point was that if I were to submit a feedback form on scribd.com's site informing the operators of the site that a single file with the contents all seven volumes of the Harry Potter series was available for download from their site, there might be no safe harbor for them if they did not act to remove it. A defense like, "Never heard of it, didn't know its copyright status," or, "Nobody in these parts has read it, so we thought this was a fair-use satire," might not hold up.

Bob W. (201): "...reasonably disclaim knowledge of the infringement because of having taken the material posted as just fanfic."

If scribd.com doesn't get it together and start peremptorily and summarily removing uploads like the "Complete Harry Potter Series in One File" in advance of DMCA or other notices, SFWA might not have them to kick around for much longer. The status of the rights to publish copies of those works can't be considered to be in doubt, nor are the works so obscure that a reasonable site owner could reasonably disclaim knowing the material posted was just fanfic.

Not for nothing, the uploader notes that there might be problems with the transcription, "but hey, it's free!" I would suppose that from J.K. Rowling's point of view this might be a sterling example of adding insult to injury. Scholastic probably won't find that very amusing, either.

P.S. MILTONTHALES (199): It's impossible to allow "reading" without allowing "downloading."

Theodore Tso (196):

In fact, it's no easier to forge e-mail than to send fraudulent paper mail on unauthorized letterhead, so this isn't really a new problem. Furthermore, I can assure you that material is taken down and end users are restricted from Internet access every day based on e-mail for which no electronic signatures have been verified and no contact has been made with purported senders. These things are done with the knowledge and advice of legal counsel.

It may be the case that Americans will sue at the drop of a bit, it seems unimaginable to my legally uneducated mind that a web site owner could be sued for ceasing providing resources to distribute somebody's written material unless they had contracted to distribute it and breached that contract by no longer doing so. If that were truly an issue, this site would be vulnerable to suit for every comment it didn't publish, wouldn't it?

I think you know that I've felt this way for a long time, Teresa, but once again you have proven that you are made of teh awesome!

Carol Hennepin (188):

It may be that scribd.com can decide not to act on the basis of a written but not-framed-according-to-DMCA notice about an infringing item published through their website, they're unlikely to avoid trouble if push comes to legal shove. Even if some third party writes in and says, "Hey, you have a copy of `The Last Colony' posted, that just came out in hardcover and it says `all rights reserved' in the book," the site owners would do well to look into it. Since nobody ever gets around to doing all the work they need to do, there may be some wiggle room for the web site owners with regard to the weight they give the notice and how long it takes them to get around to it.

When one or more persons is notorious for posting materials they don't have the right to distribute and the number of postings reported as being misappropriations is quite large, the site owners are on much thinner ice. The prospect of widespread publicity of the misappropriated content on scribd.com seems to have focused its management's collective mind wonderfully, and as Scalzi notes this has led to their cleaning up much of the mess without formal DMCA notification.

Btw, a typical RIAA or MPAA takedown or evidence preservation notice includes both a recognized business address and a PGP-keyed signature in an attempt to avoid the "notice could come from anybody" problem. I don't know how often these are verified by recipients, but it would certainly be easier to do this for a few commercial DMCA stool pigeons than for each and every author who might wish to have fiction taken down from the many social websites which might make materials available in a way which infringes the IP rights of their right-owners.

Teresa (182): Oops, I meant 177, which starts with, "Wll, pprntly Scrbd nd th FF wn." I meant to check the numbers, but in preview mode the thread items lose their ordination.

Btw, 170 ("Internet authors is a great site About different kind of authors.") seems to be comment spam which leads to "publicize your writing on teh Intarwebs." Shortly after I clicked on the link my cheesy home firewall/NAT crashed.

Anonymous (or nnms)@178: Don't worry, first you'd have to wrt something wrth stlng before nybdy wld bthr cpyng t.

I mean, the point of the complaints raised by SFWA's agents was that work that had been found worth paying to read had been made available for free. It's not exactly relevant if you take your floppy bat and your off-round ball and go home: honestly, nobody minds if you perfect your writerly craft on your own or with the help of people who know in real life, the old-fashioned way.

Oh, and I think the phrase you want to put in SFWA's mouth is, "Nt n th fc! Nt n th fc!" It's probably about equally wrong, but more entertaining -- as with all fiction, the stuff you make up about this should be entertaining.