SFWA Issues Misguided Takedowns at Scribd
Filed Under (Ray Gun Revival, Writing Stuff) by Phy on 28-08-2007
I’m going to assume that you’re familiar of Flickr, the online photo management and sharing service. Their two missions are to help people ‘make their photos available to the people who matter to them’, and ‘enable new ways of organizing photos’.
Think of Scribd as the same sort of service for sharing online documents. It’s the sort of obviously cool idea that makes you wonder why you didn’t think of it first.
We editors of Ray Gun Revival magazine have our own goals, to expose the genre of space opera and golden age sci-fi to a new generation of readers, and to do it as part of the new wave of digital publishing. We aren’t a dead tree publisher, we share our magazines and the artistic contributions contained therein online to garner as much exposure as possible for our contributors’ works.
Scribd is a perfect venue to achieve these goals. When Scribd first started up, we quickly saw the value of such a service to expand the horizons for our readers, and to focus as much attention as possible for our artists and authors. Scribd helps us to increase visibility and readership all around.
We uploaded our first season of magazine issues in .pdf format, and it’s been a smashing success. We’ve been getting hits for our little space opera magazines at Scribd from all over the planet! Ray Gun Revival was featured as scifi.com’s Site of the Week in June, 2007. I don’t know how they found us, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it didn’t come about because of the sort of exposure we enjoy at Scribd.
But then something weird happened. We received a notification that one of our issues had been taken down because ‘because the copyright owner contacted us and asked us to.’ That statement was of great interest to us, because we hold the copyrights for these issues at the magazine. Puzzled, we queried Jason Bentley, Director of Community Development at Scribd. What unfolded next was a flat-out surprise.
The entity that filed the DMCA takedown request was SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. They, of course, have nothing to do with RGR. Jared Friedman, President of Scribd, responded personally. He agreed it looked like there was some confusion, and attached a DCMA counter-notification form. He wrote that Scribd would forward the counter-notification to the organization which complained about the document ‘and most likely reinstate the material.’ He even followed up a couple of hours later as I was checking and double-checking our contract language and discussing the situation with our leadership circle.
I understand that the next step is to wait for ten days while the DMCA wheels churn. If we are successful, our issue in question will be reinstated at Scribd. However, in the interim, I notice now that another issue has been taken down as a result of a SFWA request. This behavior is irritating at least and draconian at best, and we wonder if the SFWA doesn’t have better things to do.
Whether this is a misunderstanding or not isn’t the issue. What is apparent is that the SFWA are policing Scribd, filing takedown notices on behalf of organizations they have nothing to do with. In our case, they’re not only not protecting our magazine, they are harming our ability to gain the most exposure for our contributors through cool services such as Scribd.
I note that we aren’t the only ones who feel aggrieved by SFWA copyright polices. SF author John Scalzi mounted a write-in candidate for President of SFWA with a platform to address issues just as this. It is a pity that he was not successful. It seems that reform at SFWA is long overdue.
Update: …and now the rest of the story can be told, and sci-fi author Cory Doctorow has told it admirably:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/08/30/science-fiction-writ-1.html
