This was a week where I discovered two little tidbits that really set my blood boiling over the state of IP law in this country. In both cases we have companies using the excuse of copyright to act like Uncle Vinnie the Mob Enforcer, but without the pinky ring or sense of style.First up, the Associated Press, in what seems to be a belated panic about news distribution over the internet, has decided to get all RIAA over the web (and, of course, the recording industry can tell you all how well that's going) and try to sue anyone who dares quote from their stories without paying license fees protection money. Apparently the threshold for AP calling out the lawyers is 79 words. Fair use anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?Is this the new way to monetize the news business? Print stories and then obsessively Google phrases hoping for a Cassie Edwards with deep pockets? So what if I embed a Google news feed into my blog, am I liable for the AP stories that come up in it? Have these asswits thought any of this through? Do they know how stupid they look? Have they ever seen a web browser? I'm waiting for some blogger to sue the AP for quoting 75 words of their content without permission. Wonder how far that will go?Second group of thuggish IP imperialists going over the line, really went over the line. As in criminal. As in, if they did this to a fortune 500 company they might be up on terrorist charges. Quick synopsis somewhat de-geeked: You have BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file-sharing system that, like all file sharing methods, can be used for good or ill. It is best to distribute large files such as Linux distributions, or HD movies. Enter MediaDefender, a company that uses an arsenal of techniques suited to Russian virus authors and Viagra spam merchants, whose mission statement is to prevent piracy of their clients' media. One favored technique is to flood the internet with bogus copies of pirate files. The way they do this is posing links to said fakes on torrent indexing sites. Now enter Revision3, a small internet TV station that produces video for users to download— via BitTorrent. (dun-dun-dunnn.)Now, of course, Revision3 would offer a indexing site for their torrents, right? Sure. Now, these indexing sites can be open or closed, and for a time because of technical issues, Revision3's index was open. That meant anyone could post the location of a torrent there. It should have been closed down so the index only responded to requests for Revision3's own shows. The response of MediaDefender was not to call up the Revision3 IT staff and say, "Hey, you got an open torrent index here, you sure you want that?" No, their reaction was exactly the same as a pirate's reaction, "Hey, this index is open. I can post my own (bogus) torrents, Yea!"Now, so far it's morally questionable, but not criminal. However, when Revision3 discovers the configuration error on their server (with no help from MediaDefender, which, as you remember, is supposed to stop this sort of thing themselves) their response is to close the index.One would think that MediaDefender would be happy that the conduit for pirated content was shut down. Apparently they weren't happy. In fact, their servers were pissed. After being shut out of Revision3's torrent index, they promptly launched a denial of service attack on Revision3 that took the site down for Memorial Day weekend.Let that sink in.They launched a cyber-attack on a legitimate business because the legitimate business stopped linking to pirated torrents. This requires a Doctorate in Stupidity.I think the AP should hire MediaDefender to protect their copyrighted content. The combined weight of arrogance, cluelessness and stupidity might just shatter the whole structure of IP law as we know it— which I am beginning to think is not a bad thing.
As the whole Cassie Edwards story pointed out, it is hard to be a plagiarist these days. Anyone with just a little suspicion can use the internet to correctly attribute just about anything, so it is a stupid, stupid, thing to do. The kind of thing you really only expect from people who never had the proper academic grounding, or a good English teacher flunking them for appropriating someone's words. . .Then again, if your English teacher was James Twitchell, I expect that flunking his students for plagiarism was not all that high on his priority list. Seems he's owned up to plagiarizing sections of his book for Simon & Schuster, Shopping for God. (via GalleyCat)In his own words (we hope):
It's my responsibility to make sure that the words and ideas are my own and, if not, that they are properly credited. In many cases, I have not done this. [...] I have used the words of others and not properly attributed them. I am always in a hurry to get past descriptions to make my points, a hurry that has now rightly resulted in much shame and embarrassment. I have cheated by using pieces of descriptions written by others.
I am a writer, that means I make money off of my intellectual property.This does not mean I like digital rights management in any way, shape, or form. Here is an object lesson why. I don’t even blame Microsoft for giving the finger to all their former MSN Music customers, because tying rights to a user’s hardware is an inherently untenable model. With any DRM scheme, you are telling the end user “buy content, buy content, buy content” at the same time saying, “but we’ll have to shitcan all the content when the hardware changes, we sell the company, or go bankrupt.” Do we want a world where a publisher can go under and people have legitimately owned content that just expires? Of course, the bean counters like the idea of the user buying it all over again, but how many users will tolerate that? Who's willing to gamble their entire library on the chance that Kindle 2.0 won’t be backward compatible?The economic goal here is not to squeeze the end user, it’s to make sure the content creator gets paid enough to continue creating the content. Metallica and Haraln Ellison may bitch and moan about their audience “stealing” their work, but unless they’re at the point they're selling stuff out of their trunk, the end user ain’t who’s signing their checks, and books and CDs ain’t what they’re selling. They (and I, and most creative types) are selling the right to publish our creation to some other entity. As long as that entity makes money on the transaction, they will continue to buy Metallica’s songs and Mr. Ellison’s books. Royalties are just a mechanism of profit-sharing that’s essentially arbitrary— most writers get an advance against those royalties that’s negotiated as high as possible to get as much money as possible up front. So, ideally, you get paid a lump that hits a sweet spot that exceeds all the future royalties by just enough not to eat into the publisher’s profits so much they don’t want to buy the next book. DRM exists as an attempt to preserve the current economic model, not to serve the ultimate goal of that model. The goal is to make money on content, not to force people to pay for content, a subtle, but profound difference.Frankly, if a publisher of mine can figure out how to turn a larger profit on my books by giving them away, assuming I share in that profit somehow, I’m ok with that.
"Irreconcilable editorial differences."That's the word as Signet and Cassie Edwards part ways.Thanks to the Smart Bitches for the tip. (Or, if you're the AP, the Smart B------)
Paul McGuinness, manager of U2. Ok, we get it, music piracy = bad.But, do we think that either a) Making ISPs responsible for policing net traffic for copyrighted data or b) Taxing ISPs to compensate artists (read: compensate the monolith corporations that profit from said artists) are in fact good ideas?Quoth asshat:
If you were a magazine advertising stolen cars, handling the money for stolen cars and seeing to the delivery of stolen cars, the police would soon be at your door. That's no different to an ISP.
The whole Cassie Edwards flap continues to ripple outward, leaving blog posts and long comment threads in its wake. One of the things it has unearthed is a widespread misunderstanding of what plagiarism actually is, leading to some rather eloquent posts on the subtle difference between copyright infringement and plagiarism.But there is another widespread confusion that also needs to be addressed. It seems that for every person who believes "she did noting wrong", or "she was just lifting non-fictional facts", or "it's romance so it don't really matter. . ." there's someone else who's just as willing to dive overboard and say "hey that (description of a) book looks like (a description of) some other book," and point screaming "PLAGIARIST" like Donald Sutherland at the end of the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers.Such people don't get the fact that, in fiction at least, there's no ethical problem with taking ideas/plots from prior work and adapting them to your own.In fact, there'd be a bit of a problem if there was such a restraint as is pointed out rather amusingly on the Smart Bitches' blog:
There seems to be some confusion regarding the status of ideas in copyright law. You can’t copyright a plot or an idea. You can only copyright the specific expression of that plot or idea as recorded in some sort of tangible form. Think about the nightmare of attempting to nail down and legislate a plot or idea for a story. How specific would you have to be before you could declare something unique enough to copyright? “An angst-ridden story about a vampire falling in love with a human.” Dude, if you can copyright that and collect a small fee every time somebody published that story, you could have your own giant pool of gold coins to swim in, Scrooge McDuck-stylee. (Side note: doesn’t that sound like a painful idea to you? Because it always has to me.)
There seems to be some confusion regarding the status of ideas in copyright law. You can’t copyright a plot or an idea. You can only copyright the specific expression of that plot or idea as recorded in some sort of tangible form. Think about the nightmare of attempting to nail down and legislate a plot or idea for a story. How specific would you have to be before you could declare something unique enough to copyright?
“An angst-ridden story about a vampire falling in love with a human.” Dude, if you can copyright that and collect a small fee every time somebody published that story, you could have your own giant pool of gold coins to swim in, Scrooge McDuck-stylee. (Side note: doesn’t that sound like a painful idea to you? Because it always has to me.)
I am so sick of people thinking that retelling a story is plagiarism. If that were so then we would have, at most, ten novels. All books about vampires, zombies, middle-aged English professors are not the same (well, okay, some of them are). It’s not about the story you tell so much as HOW YOU TELL IT. Why is that so difficult to understand? Georgette Heyer did not plagiarise Jane Austen. David Eddings didn’t plagiarise J. R. R. Tolkien. Walter Mosley didn’t plagiarise Raymond Chandler. I did not plagiarise C. S. Lewis. The next person who says to me, “Oh my God! Did you see that Certain Writer’s next book is set in a future world where you have to have your skin removed and replaced with carbon when you turn sixteen? That is just like Scott’s Uglies books! He should sue!” That person will get smacked. HARD.
I am so sick of people thinking that retelling a story is plagiarism. If that were so then we would have, at most, ten novels. All books about vampires, zombies, middle-aged English professors are not the same (well, okay, some of them are). It’s not about the story you tell so much as HOW YOU TELL IT. Why is that so difficult to understand?
Georgette Heyer did not plagiarise Jane Austen. David Eddings didn’t plagiarise J. R. R. Tolkien. Walter Mosley didn’t plagiarise Raymond Chandler. I did not plagiarise C. S. Lewis.
The next person who says to me, “Oh my God! Did you see that Certain Writer’s next book is set in a future world where you have to have your skin removed and replaced with carbon when you turn sixteen? That is just like Scott’s Uglies books! He should sue!” That person will get smacked. HARD.
I thought I had posted all I was going to on this. But, then, my wife was waiting at Walgreens to get a prescription filled and was walking past the book isle, and came across this. I draw your attention to the lower right corner.
Cassie Edwards' plagiarism that is?Well I tried an experiment. I decided to spend part of my evening hunting down some CE sample text, look through it, and see if I can Google a lifted passage. I decided this at roughly 7:30.It is now 7:47. The seventeen intervening minutes was spent as follows: Fifteen minutes launching Amazon in my browser, searching for Edwards' work, finding a random book of hers that allowed the "search inside" feature, and scanning the pages for likely candidates. Two minutes punching a few phrases into Google.I got a hit.From Savage Intrigue by Cassie Edwards, Leisure Books 2007 p4-5
Wakan Tanka breathed life and motion into all things, both visible and invisible. He was over all, through all, and in all. Great as was the sun, and good as was the earth, the greatness and goodness of the Big Holy were not surpassed by either.The Dakota could look at nothing without seeing Wakan Tanka; they could never evade his presence, for it pervaded all things and filled all spaces.
Wakan Tanka breathed life and motion into all things, both visible and invisible. He was over all, through all, and in all, and great as was the sun, and good as was the earth, the greatness and goodness of the Big Holy were not surpassed. The Lakota could look at nothing without at the same time looking at Wakan Tanka, and he could not, if he wished, evade His presence, for it pervaded all things and filled all space.
What follows may be as close to a complete statement from Cassie Edwards as we’ve had since the whole plagiarism issue raised its ugly head. It is allegedly an e-mail response to a fan expressing support, and is documentary evidence of why lawyers generally tell you to shut the f**k up when the feces hits the fan. The text via the Smart Bitches blog: (My comments in green)[UPDATE: Dear Author contacted a representative of Cassie Edwards to confirm the authenticity of this e-mail. The response was "no comment." An evil, hateful person would assume that this means Cassie finally talked to her lawyer.]
I just got on My Space and I found your wonderful encouraging letter. Thank you for believing in me, for I have done nothing wrong.[SWANN: exsqueeze me? Even when this was restricted to non-fiction you were saying to the AP that you just “didn’t know” you were supposed to cite references. Hint- if the behavior isn’t wrong, you don’t have to make excuses for it.]My publisher is standing behind me 100%, for they know my work better than anyone,[SWANN: Quoth Signet: “… we will be examining all of Ms. Edwards’ books that we publish, and based on the outcome of that review we will take action to handle the matter accordingly. We want to make it known that Signet takes any and all allegations of plagiarism very seriously.” Apparently, they don’t know your work that well.]and they know that all romance authors who use research for historicals have to use reference books to do this.[SWANN: Cassie, here is a hint. Use <> Copy. I’ve written historical novels, read a whole lot of reference materials, and the only passage I ever felt the need to copy verbatim was from a news article in the Cleveland Press about the Torso Murders, and that was because a character was reading that edition of the paper. I don’t think your 19th century characters have the same excuse lifting passages from a 2005 nature article about ferrets.]My readers love this accurate material about the Indians.[SWANN: And, apparently, ferrets.]And if I couldn’t use this material my books would not be worth anything to my readers who depend on me.[SWANN: Depend on her? Ok, I feel a little responsibility to my readers (sort of the reason I don’t lift passages wholesale in my books) but she makes herself out to be like a paramedic, a cop, or at the least the Roto-Rooter guy who came and kept my basement from flooding. It’s a novel, get over yourself.]The sad thing is that I am writing these books now in a way to honor our Native Americans, past, present and in the future.[SWANN: Why do I get the feeling that her primary demographic is not down on the Res?]And I am honoring my great grandmother who was a full blood Cheyenne. She would be so proud of me if she could read what I am writing about the Indians who have been so maligned for so long.[SWANN: The white man steals our land. We shall steal the white man’s words.]And do you know? I feel picked on now as our Native American Indians have always been picked on throughout history.[SWANN: How juvenile can you get? Chicky, you were outed on a blog for near-verbatim copying of your sources. You were not stripped of your property and made to march barefoot a few hundred miles to a reservation, forced to abandon your language and religion, and given a pox-infected blanket for your trouble.]I am trying to spread the word about them and what do I get? Spiteful women who have found a way to bring attention to themselves, by getting in the media in this horrible way.[SWANN: You note, at this point, there is not a single denial of what she’s been accused of doing? All she can do is malign the women who brought attention to the fact she’s been stealing passages wholesale.]Right now I am getting hit from all sides....CNN, The New York Times, AP, everyone who those women could think of to contact.[SWANN: Um… they posted it on a blog. That’s telling everyone. Also, I think the press caught wind of this themselves. It’s sort of like, their job.]And what is also sad is that a fellow author, has spoken up and condemned me.[SWANN: Hi there, I’m a fellow author. Pleased to meet you. Guess what? I’m condemning you too. And, frankly, I haven’t seen an author write about this who is not pretty pissed at your antics.]Thanks again for your support. When I am feeling stronger I plan to write a bulletin on My Space, but right now I am totally drained of energy from what has been done to me.[SWANN: You know, Cassie, if someone posted a picture of you shoplifting, I do not think an adequate defense is to decry how horrible it was someone posted the picture.]I hope that you will tell your friends, who are so much also mine, the wrong that has been done to me, and tell them that I will get through this. I will be found innocent and vindicated [sic] of any wrong.[SWANN: This is classic, and still not a denial. She never says “I did not do those horrible things I’m accused of.” Probably because it’s all in print and can’t really be denied. The best she can do is, “The horrible things I’m being accused of aren’t wrong. No, really, it’s ok. My publishers would have said something, wouldn’t they? Please, it’s not like I’m killing puppies. They’re all jealous anyway. They never liked me. Please feel sorry for me.”]For now, it’s all too raw and horrible, but I will be alright.
Well, Cassie Edwards' research methodology has caused quite an internet dust-up. Inevitable, I guess, when a set of controversial bloggers uncover this kind of skeleton in the literary closet of a popular NY-Times bestselling author. What I find interesting is that there are a few bloggers out there that have what I find to be a rather odd take on the whole thing. Here are a few examples:From the The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.
Now, I haven't read every last bit of the supposedly plagiarized pieces, but they all seem to be factual descriptions of actual Indian rituals, behaviors, beliefs, and so on. And changing the wording substantially, when describing actual real-world things, would tend to make one's description diverge from that thing. The technical term for this is "getting it wrong."
This one strikes me as a bit different because, while the issue is still plagiarism, it is plagiarism of non-fiction. Of information.
"In their own way, they are a peaceful enough animal," Shadow Bear said... "They are so named because of their dark legs." "They are so small, surely weighing only about two pounds and measuring two feet from tip to tail," Shiona said. "While alone in my father's study one day, after seeing a family of ferrets from afar in the nearby woods, I took one of my father's books from his library and read up on them. They were an interesting study. I discovered they are related to minks and otters. It is said that their closest relations are European ferrets and Siberian polecats. Researchers theorize that polecats crossed the land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska, to establish the New World population."
Black-footed ferrets, so-named because of their dark legs, weigh about two pounds and measure two feet from tip to tail. Related to mink and otters, they are North America's only native ferret (and a different species than the ferrets kept as pets). Their closest relatives are European ferrets and Siberian polecats. Researchers theorize polecats crossed the land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska to establish the New World population.
"In their own way, they are a peaceful enough animal," Shadow Bear said... "Their name comes from the dark color of their legs." "They are so small, barely two feet long nose to tail, surely they can't weigh much more than a couple of pounds," Shiona said. "While alone in my father's study one day, after seeing a family of ferrets from afar in the nearby woods, I took one of my father's books from his library and read up on them. They were an interesting study. They're in the same family as minks and otters, and are closely related to European ferrets and Siberian polecats. I read the theory that those polecats crossed into the New World via the land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska."
If you follow this blog you might remember NE Ohio's resident plagercop Jack L. Herman who swiped plays wholesale from Canada, produced them under his own name, and I guess just assumed that the language barrier would prevent him from getting caught. I said in that post:
It goes to prove that direct word-for-word plagiarism is rare because it is an incredibly stupid practice to engage in. Especially for serial plagiarists like Det. Herman. The fact that your crime will remain on public display until someone figures out you stole it means that potential for eventual discovery is about as close to 100% as you can get.
Shadow Bear [by Cassie Edwards] introduced poor Kate to all-new levels of pain--she’d never encountered a book in which ellipses and exclamation marks were abused with quite that much abandon, or in which the characters spoke in Glossary with such distressing consistency. What especially caught her eye, however, were the didactic passages in the book. They were written in a distinctly different voice, and out of idle curiosity, she decided to Google certain phrases and sentences.The results were...interesting. Kate was able to find large chunks of text from a few sources that seemed to have been inserted into Shadow Bear with little to no modification, mostly from Land of the Spotted Eagle by Luther Standing Bear and, I shit you not, an article about black-footed ferrets from the Defenders of Wildlife.Yes. Ferrets.
SFWA is becoming an on-line spectator sport. I'm not going to go into too much depth here, as the bandwidth expended on this is already reaching critical mass. I'll only comment by posing the following rhetorical question:If the chair of your e-piracy committee screws up so bad that it makes your whole organization look like of bunch of myopic Luddite fossils and causes you to throw said committee under the bus, and then you impanel a bunch of respected writer-type folks to draft recommendations on how to fix the problems, is it a wise move to then, to all appearance, just take said recommendations, file them, and re-constitute the same e-piracy committee with the same leadership with the same obsessions?I make no comments on the merits, but I'll just make the observation that in some situations, making yourself look as if you're stupid, clueless, arrogant and unprofessional is tantamount to actually being stupid, clueless, arrogant and unprofessional. Appearances count, and this looks really bad.
Well, I'm starting a little experiment here. I am going to start releasing some of my short stories under a creative commons license. I'm a little bit of a latecomer to this, and I'm not Cory Doctrow or Rudy Rucker, but let's see if throwing free stuff out there gets any buzz going for ye olde midlist writer. First up, my real short time travel tale, "The Long View" which appeared in Amazing Stories back in 1995. Links to the stories will appear to the right.
. . .and provides an example of a point I was making over ten years ago. You may or may not have visited my home page, which predates this blog by about a dozen years or so, if you have, buried in the writing portion are a couple of essays I did on plot and world-building when I taught some classes on those subjects way too many years ago. While such writing advice, when it isn't market-specific, isn't prone to become dated (one of my favorites in my collection of writing books is a little compilation of essays entitled Of Worlds Beyond which was originally published in 1947. And Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses are as offensive today as when Mark Twain wrote about them in 1895.) it is true that specific examples used in such advice may date badly, especially if you are talking about SF and technological change.Exhibit one from "Worldbuilding: Constructing a SF Universe" by your's truly:
Unintended consequences are especially rife when talking about technological change. Every piece of technology will eventually find niches other than what its developers intend. (Consider the identification of pagers with the drug culture.) [emphasis added]
Making your world different can be as simple as locating it in that vast unknown territory, "The Future." But for every element of difference you introduce in a story, there will be a multitude of consequences rippling out from the point of difference. Consider one example: Once computer animation becomes cheap and detailed enough that a lone hacker can produce a feature film, what will this do to the major movie studios, television, advertising, intellectual property laws, politics, culture, and the nature of celebrity?
Well, predictably, there's a thread on Whateveresque (not to be confused with Whatever) that delves into the Doctrow/Le Guin mess in all its retarded glory, and does so in flametastic eloquence I couldn't even begin to match. . .
Haven't posted a clip here in a while. Here's one I found via the SFWA blog. (Irony again.) Here we have Walt Disney characters explaining the concept of fair use and copyright. Made by professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University. For added fun, count up how many of the characters are based on prior work.
Sometimes you come across news that so twisted in recursive levels of self-parody that you cannot even express an opinion on it, you just have to sit back and say, "gee that's f__ked up."Case in point, this series of events, the latest of which I found thanks to a post on the SF Site blog:The SFWA e-piracy committee overreaches in demanding a laundry-list of items taken off a website because of copyright violations. Some items turn out to be perfectly legit, including some work by Cory Doctrow released under a Creative Commons license. Can you say oops?Doctrow gets predictably medieval on SFWA's ass in an internet dust-up that essentially ends with SFWA throwing the current incarnation of the e-piracy committee under the bus.Then we find out that Doctrow reprints an essay by Ursula K Le Guin under the Creative Commons license. Problem? The essay wasn't printed under any such license, which means Doctrow was guilty of exactly the reverse of the mistake that SFWA had made.What this all means to me?A) IP law is broken. (But we knew that.)B) Everyone is capable of being stupid, and the current IP law facilitates such stupidity.
I posted earlier about how we needed new models for an Intellectual Property economy. On John Scalzi's Whatever Blog there's a thread that goes into the specifics of an existing rental model that seems to work.I also had some thoughts about the economy of Second-Life and MMORPG's in general, and now I find a N.Y. Times article that reads like early William Gibson. (via Freedom to Tinker.)
Ok, I'm playing catchup here, but I just found Mark Helprin's article about Copyright.John Scalzi has a decent response to all that and others have gone on at length.But there was a quote from Helprin I had to comment on:
Were you to have ushered through the many gates of taxation a flour mill, travel agency or newspaper, they would not suffer total confiscation.Once the state has dipped its enormous beak into the stream of your wealth and possessions they are allowed to flow from one generation to the next. Though they may be divided and diminished by inflation, imperfect investment, a proliferation of descendants and the government taking its share, they are not simply expropriated.That is, unless you own a copyright. Were I tomorrow to write the great American novel (again?), 70 years after my death the rights to it, though taxed at inheritance, would be stripped from my children and grandchildren.
[This is a copy of a letter I just sent to the SFWA Forum]
For the past three years I’ve been involved in a legal dispute with Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast over one of their d20 products. So far, I’ve remained mum about this in public, but fortunately the issue has just reached a mutually satisfactory conclusion. While I cannot go too deeply into the details of the matter, I can give some props where props are due. I cannot express my appreciation enough for the folks at SFWA. If it wasn’t for Griefcom and a couple of much needed loans from the SFWA Legal Fund, I would find it hard to believe that this matter would have ever reached a resolution. Having the support of a professional organization like SFWA is invaluable for leveling the playing field between individual authors like myself, and corporate behemoths like Hasbro.I offer my sincere thanks to everyone involved,Steven SwiniarskiAkaS Andrew Swann
Subscribe to RSS headline updates from: Powered by FeedBurner
![[Book Cover]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uQy0Lty60brWd2hN3ixMcVbchqQzx0eG9IBKJTkRWroQJaA44nd64aEN1ZqQBAlCoIOG3f_u-toAMto-f1-NOEKJ9fZVCRYL_w80CQBB1nzNR4K9eKfcicE2ErAj21M7Pk-qegavhh=s0-d)
