SFWA vs. The Internet, Round Umpteen

[nemorathwald]

Scalzi's law: Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

And yet despite this being Scalzi's own law, Scalzi himself (being swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath) said in his blog post about the latest round of Science Fiction Writers of America vs. the internet:

SFWA erred in implementation, but not in intent.

Interpretation of the intent of strangers is one of the biggest problems in fights between groups. Scalzi might be right, but I am inclined to be less charitable.

Consider the backwards and panicky positions of SFWA's leadership (remember, despite the difference of opinion within the organization, this is the faction that is currently winning). Then consider an SFWA officer who perceives (mind you, I'm talking about perception, not reality) damages caused by encouragement of free works and internet marketing by internet users and forward-looking authors.

That SFWA officer's attitude could, in the mind of that officer, justify a deliberate DMCA abuse as an act of retaliation. I'm not saying that's what happened; I'm saying it's plausible. The reason it sounds plausible to we in the BoingBoing/Slashdot/EFF contingent is that we are going to perceive SFWA through the lens of our experiences of RIAA and MPAA goon squads.

When I commented this, Scalzi replied:

Not just plausible, it is what's happening. Which is (sadly) funny, because SFWA is neither anywhere as much as a threat, or anywhere as organized as those two entities.

Spoken with an understandable pragmatism. But we were talking about motive, intent, to whom the organization is friendly and to whom it is hostile, and other such intangibles. I would have preferred to hear him say "Come on Matt, you don't think they are an organization dedicated to hating and fearing readers? Put down the caffeine and back away slowly."

Instead it's: "They're just wannabe antagonists, and they suck at it so bad that the MPAA and RIAA won't let them into their secret hideout." Sounds like they erred in implementation and intent. The incompetence is sufficiently advanced such as to be indistinguishable from malice.

You know... what with one silly fiasco after another, you have to admit what it's starting to look like. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and waddles like a duck, maybe it's a duck. A duck of malice.

---

Something new struck me when reading Jerry Pournelle's version of the story. Listening to authors talk about this imbroglio is like seeing that drawing of a young girl who turns into an old woman depending on your perspective.

We (EFF/BoingBoing/Slashdot) tend to feel confused when SFWA supporters make this a story about Scribd.com instead of a story about SFWA. "Wait", we want to say. "Isn't Scribd.com just a medium?" It sounds like SFWA waging war against telephones. Pournelle talks about Scribd.com with words like "good guy or bad guy". Telephones are not good guys or bad guys.

And thus, just as there are out-of-touch authors, so there are out-of-touch geeks. Pournelle's language reminds geeks that Scribd is backed by humans who are moral actors capable of making decisions. Through our lens we normally see Scribd.com as part of the information ecology. Those silly Keystone Kops at the SFWA, declaring war on the carbon cycle! What a chuckle. It's delusional to send a legal nastygram to moray eels in the Great Lakes telling them to stop killing native species. To a geek, a more elegant solution to piracy is equivalent to filling the lake with eel-killing chemicals: invent a crippling virus that spreads only through Scribd.com documents.

So. Let's pay some attention to the humans who run Scribd.com as well. They should have made better decisions, like adding a part of the upload process that asks the uploader to assert that they have rights to the content, or improving their response for redress of rights-violation. Better yet, they should have very loudly and publicly given SFWA's takedown notice the finger and said "try again when you can get it right." The people behind Scribd.com were sloppy at every step.

Comments

[scalzi.livejournal.com]

That's not Scalzi's Law, that's Grey's Law, a corollary to Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

As for Scalzi's Law, there are two:

Scalzi's Law of Online Communication: "Anything bad you ever write about someone online will get back to them sooner or later."

And, related:

Scalzi's Law of Internet Invocation: "If you name them, they will come."

The latter, at least, is amply proven by this comment.

[tlatoani.livejournal.com]

ROTFL.

Scalzi: The New Kibo.

[zifferent.livejournal.com]

Why is it hard to believe that the SFWA's lawyer was given a list of authors and the scribd.com website address and told to sick'em. I could then see that list being pushed down the line towards the nearest para-legal or secretary to complete the gruntwork of piecing together the list of authors, titles and URLs. The list would have been inserted into a DMCA takedown notice, double-checked for simple mistakes and sent on its way via email.

While Mr. Pournell might have caught Cory Doctorow's writings, I'm almost certain any generic lawyer's secretary wouldn't and would have just seen that Mr. Doctorow was a SFWA member and continued on their merry way typing up the letter.

Also consider that most literary works aren't licensed in the same way that software is licensed, and finally like Cory Doctorow's books. It's likely it never occurred to secretary or lawyer, assuming that like most people are a bit further behind the curve of the publishing industry's trail-blazers than the science-fiction/computer geek community. An exception for a specific one of the SFWA's members wouldn't have entered their minds.

Finally, email is almost too easy to send and mistake emails happen all time, and only makes the mistake scenario even more plausible.

[jeffreyab.livejournal.com]

Points:

Cory's stuff on the net is stuff he wants on the net, even other authors who put stuff on the net for free do not put everything they have written on the net, just enough to help the other stuff sell.

Scribd would have been better to use the wikipedia model where users can take down stuff and say why rather than the Flickr model where you have to ask for people to take stuff down.

Scribd got hit because they are the biggest target like any of those music sites I never used.

[cathyr19355.livejournal.com]

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

I like it, no matter who said it. It explains the current Administration--and people's reactions to it--so well.