What do you want the future to hold?
aburt
announcement might be of interest, since those of us who read/write SF
think a lot about how the future could be. (More so than the average
mundane folk, anyway, who when I ask what they'd like to see in the
future give me a suspect look like they should call Homeland Security
or something... the future? Who thinks about the future?)
Anyway, FWIW, I've started a forum to collect answers to the question
"What do you want the future to hold?" over at http://NewNewForum.com/viewforum.php?f=26
called "Wishes for the Future". (In other words, what _would_ you
like to see in the future? World peace? Self-driving cars? A
microwave display that shows how your food is heated? :) )
Primarily meant to be fun, but, who knows. Some ideas might work
their way into SF stories (I'm announcing this to my Critters workshop
gang, the SFWA forums, and other places writerly folk hang out
precisely in the hopes some cross-fertilization might occur), and from
there maybe into the brains of people looking for things to create.
Hey, Roddenberry et al's ideas wormed their way into the public
consciousness and we got cell phones, etc. so why not dream big. :)
What with a new decade I'm feeling hopeful, and this idea seemed like
it could be fun.
Enjoy!
Dr. Andrew Burt
www.aburt.com
David DeLaney
>Hi all, been a while since I've posted here but I thought this
>announcement might be of interest, since those of us who read/write SF
>think a lot about how the future could be.
>Dr. Andrew Burt
>www.aburt.com
...why does that name sound familiar?
<sound of one internet clapping>
oh. OH. Okay got it.
Dave "never mind!" DeLaney
--
\/David DeLaney posting from d...@vic.com "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
http://www.vic.com/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ & Magic / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.
aburt
> On Sun, 17 Jan 2010 11:55:35 -0800 (PST), aburt <ababpub...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >Hi all, been a while since I've posted here but I thought this
> >announcement might be of interest, since those of us who read/write SF
> >think a lot about how the future could be.
> ...
> >Dr. Andrew Burt
> >www.aburt.com
>
> ...why does that name sound familiar?
I'm the Andrew Burt who founded the world's first free / public
Internet service provider as a bastion of free speech... the one who
runs Critters.org, one of the first SF writers' workshop on the web
and home to some 10,000 authors... the one who started the Black Holes
response time tracker for writers... the non-profit iFiction site to
help authors earn money for their work... helped sting PublishAmerica
with a couple chapters in Atlanta Nights and the first web site about
it... lobbies for inexpensive, DRM-free ebooks (and thinks digital
reading will replace paper)... the one who runs a sustainability non-
profit org (GreenAroundYou.org - check it out), and an assortment of
other free sites to help folks (see www.aburt.com for a list)... You
were thinking of something else???
Andrew
Quadibloc
> (see www.aburt.com for a list)
That URL does not appear to resolve.
John Savard
Quadibloc
> On Jan 17, 10:04 pm, aburt <ababpub...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> That URL does not appear to resolve.
A Google search turned up at least one person who doesn't seem to like
you:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2008/02/18/a-gut-check-moment-for-sfwa/
and turned up also a mention that you are the author of "Beyond the
Last Star".
So even if your web site is down, I know have a vague idea of who you
are.
John Savard
Mike Schilling
> On Jan 17, 10:16 pm, Quadibloc <jsav...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
>> On Jan 17, 10:04 pm, aburt <ababpub...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> (seewww.aburt.comfor a list)
>>
>> That URL does not appear to resolve.
>
> A Google search turned up at least one person who doesn't seem to
> like
> you:
>
> http://whatever.scalzi.com/2008/02/18/a-gut-check-moment-for-sfwa/
Lawrence, please correct me if I'm wrong, but I suspect that SFWA
politics is like academic politics: the amount of vitriol expended is
inversely proportional to the practical importance of the dispute.
Ken from Chicago
"aburt" <ababp...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:b7b5d4e1-c274-4a4a...@a6g2000yqm.googlegroups.com...
> Hi all, been a while since I've posted here but I thought this
> announcement might be of interest, since those of us who read/write SF
> think a lot about how the future could be. (More so than the average
> mundane folk, anyway, who when I ask what they'd like to see in the
> future give me a suspect look like they should call Homeland Security
> or something... the future? Who thinks about the future?)
Aside from me?
> Anyway, FWIW, I've started a forum to collect answers to the question
> "What do you want the future to hold?" over at
> http://NewNewForum.com/viewforum.php?f=26
> called "Wishes for the Future". (In other words, what _would_ you
> like to see in the future? World peace? Self-driving cars? A
> microwave display that shows how your food is heated? :) )
Ah, the more immediate future.
Robocars.
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.written/msg/7351ece82ae964d7
> Primarily meant to be fun, but, who knows. Some ideas might work
> their way into SF stories (I'm announcing this to my Critters workshop
> gang, the SFWA forums, and other places writerly folk hang out
> precisely in the hopes some cross-fertilization might occur), and from
> there maybe into the brains of people looking for things to create.
> Hey, Roddenberry et al's ideas wormed their way into the public
> consciousness and we got cell phones, etc. so why not dream big. :)
>
> What with a new decade I'm feeling hopeful, and this idea seemed like
> it could be fun.
>
> Enjoy!
>
> Dr. Andrew Burt
> www.aburt.com
-- Ken from Chicago
aburt
>
> That URL does not appear to resolve.
>
> John Savard
Not sure how google groups mangled it up, but try this:
aburt
> On Jan 17, 10:16 pm, Quadibloc <jsav...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
>
> > On Jan 17, 10:04 pm, aburt <ababpub...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> > That URL does not appear to resolve.
>
> A Google search turned up at least one person who doesn't seem to like
> you:
>
> http://whatever.scalzi.com/2008/02/18/a-gut-check-moment-for-sfwa/
>
> and turned up also a mention that you are the author of "Beyond the
> Last Star".
>
> So even if your web site is down, I know have a vague idea of who you
> are.
>
> John Savard
Oh, lordy, sure there are people who take issue with things I've
done. Eggs get broken when making omelets. Lots of people went after
me when I started the first ISP since it was free -- what do you mean,
you want to let the unwashed masses onto the Internet??? And once it
was running, people wanted to shut it down. I even had the
Scientologists threatening me and the University because we supported
free speech. (We won.)
As someone else noted, internal SFWA politics are ugly. It's even
harder when one of your detractors has a podium of a million+ readers
to put out mis- and dis-information about you, and you have no equal
podium to give your side. So, some people believe one side of a story
without even checking out the other side. I can't do anything about
that.
I just continue to do what I do, like set up fun little forums to talk
about the future, run workshops, set up nonprofits, etc. etc. etc.
If you believe what you've read about someone from one side of the
story, and that taints your opinion of, for example, a free site like
the "what do you wish for the future?" forum, oh well... Who's
potential loss is it, then? Not mine. :)
Andrew
Charlton Wilbur
ab> Anyway, FWIW, I've started a forum to collect answers to the
ab> question "What do you want the future to hold?" over at
ab> [REDACTED] called "Wishes for the Future". (In other words,
ab> what _would_ you like to see in the future? World peace?
ab> Self-driving cars? A microwave display that shows how your food
ab> is heated? :) )
You know what I'd *really* like to see? Posters who realize how moronic
they look when they post in a newsgroup to draw posters to a web forum.
Please, will the future have *any* of those?
Charlton
--
Charlton Wilbur
cwi...@chromatico.net
Bill Swears
So, what you're suggesting is that the guys who designed computers
looked moronic because they used slipsticks and mechanical drafting
tables? I'm afraid I can't follow your logic.
Bill
--
Living on the polemic may be temporarily satisfying, but it will raise
your blood-pressure, and gives you tunnel vision.
Ahasuerus
wrote:
> Quadibloc wrote:
> > On Jan 17, 10:16 pm, Quadibloc <jsav...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
> >> On Jan 17, 10:04 pm, aburt <ababpub...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> >> That URL does not appear to resolve.
>
> > A Google search turned up at least one person who doesn't seem to
> > like you:
>
> >http://whatever.scalzi.com/2008/02/18/a-gut-check-moment-for-sfwa/
>
> Lawrence, please correct me if I'm wrong, but I suspect that SFWA
> politics is like academic politics: the amount of vitriol expended is
> inversely proportional to the practical importance of the dispute.
Vitriol comes and goes, but that campaign produced a number of
memorable statements like "The world is changing -- dare I say we're
seeing the first portents of the singularity. We need to adapt and
jump ahead of that sucker so authors make money and the field remains
strong" (http://aburt.com/aburt.for.president.ht). Where is Harry
Warner, Jr. when you need him?
David Friedman
<1b6ad422-01e3-42c5...@l19g2000yqb.googlegroups.com>,
aburt <ababp...@gmail.com> wrote:
In this case, "some people" include John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow, and
they provide fairly detailed information supporting their view. Doctorow
includes a letter from the president of SFWA apologizing for the
mistake. Instead of objecting to people believing them without checking
out the other side, why don't you point us at the other side?
Specifically, is it true that you sent DMCA takedown notices on behalf
of SFWA for a large number of documents, many of which were not
infringing copyright, some of which had been put on scribd by their
authors, many by authors you had no authority to represent? That's the
substantive claim, and if true it is a reason to have a low opinion of
your judgement and competence.
...
--
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/ http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
Author of
_Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World_,
Cambridge University Press.
Bill Snyder
Sounds more like a job for Moskowitz.
--
Bill Snyder [This space unintentionally left blank]
Peter Knutsen
> In this case, "some people" include John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow, and
> they provide fairly detailed information supporting their view. Doctorow
> includes a letter from the president of SFWA apologizing for the
> mistake. Instead of objecting to people believing them without checking
> out the other side, why don't you point us at the other side?
>
> Specifically, is it true that you sent DMCA takedown notices on behalf
> of SFWA for a large number of documents, many of which were not
> infringing copyright, some of which had been put on scribd by their
> authors, many by authors you had no authority to represent? That's the
> substantive claim, and if true it is a reason to have a low opinion of
> your judgement and competence.
I haven't got time to read this right now
< http://www.ansible.co.uk/sfx/sfx165.html >
but I found it based on a quick Google search for this: pixel stained
burt (no quotation marks used). Not sure how reliable David Langford is,
but my guess would be "fairly reliable".
--
Peter Knutsen
sagatafl.org
aburt
wrote:
> In article
> <1b6ad422-01e3-42c5-b4cb-51efe781f...@l19g2000yqb.googlegroups.com>,
Complex question, since the background leading up to it is
substantively relevant, as are the agendas of those who cried foul, so
the short answer is "No."
See http://www.aburt.com/scribd.ht for lots of details before forming
an opinion.
My history with Doctorow goes way back. See http://www.aburt.com/doctorow.ht
for a history. Doctorow has a Communistic, anti-copyright agenda (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow#Opinions_on_intellectual_property
), and chose to use his large forum, and the aid of his many
sympathizers (including Scalzi and Stross), to present a very biased
spin on the story. I can only guess at their motives, though the
accidental and very brief downtime of a file he hadn't even put on the
scribd site himself, didn't even know was there until then, wasn't
labeled with his name as author, and was promptly restored at my
request, is such a small thing, and his response so incredibly
nuclear, that I can only conclude Doctorow et al.'s motives were
either spiteful or to advance an agenda. That's entirely their
right. However, the upshot is I run across people who've only heard
their side of the story, not having heard the other side of it. That
happens -- kudos to them, they were able to shout loudly to millions
while I was not -- but it doesn't mean their side is true, it doesn't
mean they didn't have an agenda and tried to magnify the incident to
advance it, nor, especially, that it has any bearing on the quality of
everything else I've ever done or will do in the future.
Judge for yourself.
Andrew
aburt
> I haven't got time to read this right now
> <http://www.ansible.co.uk/sfx/sfx165.html>
> but
The problem with "I haven't got time to read this right now but" is
that if you can't be bothered to read it, why should anyone else?
Sometimes one should actually read the things... (It and its cousin,
"tl;dr", spell the demise of humanity as an intelligent species.)
I also suggest http://www.aburt.com/scribd.ht for a first-hand account
and for critical details not widely known.
Ilya2
> Hi all, been a while since I've posted here but I thought this
> announcement might be of interest, since those of us who read/write SF
> think a lot about how the future could be. (More so than the average
> mundane folk, anyway, who when I ask what they'd like to see in the
> future give me a suspect look like they should call Homeland Security
> or something... the future? Who thinks about the future?)
I think you get this look because the question is very broad, and can
be interpreted in several different ways. You may get a friendlier and
more informative response if you narrow it down a bit. Like "What
technology is not available now, but you would like to see in the
future, and have reasonable hope it will happen in your lifetime?"
aburt
I usually do follow up with that. (It's hard to ask a long detailed
multi-syllabic question of people sometimes, they forget the first
part of the question by the time you get to the question mark -- the
verbal form of "tl;dr". I fear this may be the first signs of the
future portrayed in Idiocracy. :) )
Nonetheless, even when they clearly understand the question, there's
still a sort of apprehension people display, as if thinking about the
future being a better place is unthinkable.
For some of us it's fun, however, so if you're one of those, stop on
by the forum ( http://newnewforum.com/viewforum.php?f=26 ) and post
your thoughts on things you'd like to see in the future.
Mike Ash
<2d147715-db7f-462d...@30g2000yqu.googlegroups.com>,
aburt <ababp...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jan 18, 12:48�pm, David Friedman <d...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com>
> wrote:
> > Specifically, is it true that you sent DMCA takedown notices on behalf
> > of SFWA for a large number of documents, many of which were not
> > infringing copyright, some of which had been put on scribd by their
> > authors, many by authors you had no authority to represent? That's the
> > substantive claim, and if true it is a reason to have a low opinion of
> > your judgement and competence.
>
> Complex question, since the background leading up to it is
> substantively relevant, as are the agendas of those who cried foul, so
> the short answer is "No."
>
> See http://www.aburt.com/scribd.ht for lots of details before forming
> an opinion.
Forgive me if I've missed something, but after reading this page, these
seem to be the truly relevant facts:
1) You dove into the large task of identifying infringed works with
inadequate preparation, skills, and resources.
2) Because of (1), you ended up with a list that was very difficult to
work with.
3) Rather than search for authors you knew would welcome your actions,
you searched for authors you thought would not, thus guaranteeing that
any false negatives (far more likely than false positives for this)
would result in sending takedown notices on behalf of authors who didn't
want you to do this.
I can't say I feel very sympathetic for your plight here, especially
since you try to obfuscate the facts with a lot of frankly irrelevant
stuff about how it was all a big mistake so people shouldn't be mad, and
how Doctorow is a bad person and so forth.
I bet if I accidentally knocked some of your work offline, you would be
none to happy with me.
Given what I've read, I don't understand how you can say that the answer
to David Friedman's question is "no". Looks like a "yes" to me. The only
possible "no" that I can see is that you never say that any of these
mistakes were posted by their authors (but you never say they weren't,
either), so that particular piece could be wrong, but overall the answer
looks to be "yes" as far as I can tell.
--
Mike Ash
Radio Free Earth
Broadcasting from our climate-controlled studios deep inside the Moon
Kurt Busiek
> Given what I've read, I don't understand how you can say that the answer
> to David Friedman's question is "no". Looks like a "yes" to me. The only
> possible "no" that I can see is that you never say that any of these
> mistakes were posted by their authors (but you never say they weren't,
> either), so that particular piece could be wrong, but overall the answer
> looks to be "yes" as far as I can tell.
It looks, based on that account, like the most honest answer would be
"yes, more or less, but it was a mistake and apologies and remedies
resulted," but the answer given was, "Well, I have excuses and you
asked the question in enough detail so I can say it doesn't precisely
fit the parameters, making it a technical no."
Except excuses and "those other guys had agendas" doesn't change the
facts, and standing on technicality rather than copping to the basics
seems like an attempt to elude.
And when someone starts ducking and weaving, I tend to look for what
they're trying to avoid saying.
But so it goes.
kdb
--
Visit http://www.busiek.com -- for all your Busiek needs!
Mike Ash
wrote:
Sounds right to be. I visited the page with an open mind (no, really!)
but once I saw http://www.aburt.com/doctorow.ht my opinion started
swinging pretty rapidly.
It is interesting just how many people don't realize that adding
"besides, the other guy is a jerk" will hurt, not help, your argument.
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
So the short answer is, "yes", you did in fact do this. You made a
desultory effort to sort out things, gave up because (surprise
surprise!) it wasn't nearly so simple as you thought at first, and sent
a shotgun notice which was not sufficiently vetted nor formatted, hoping
that Scribd would act. As you did send something close enough to the
legal requirements to show that you did intend in some way, shape, or
form to pursue this, Scribd said "oh, hell with it" and removed
everything on the list.
As for "anti-copyright agenda", I don't think that fits Stross (he can
feel free to correct me if he likes); dunno about the others.
I myself feel current copyright is terribly flawed and self-damaging as
it stands, partly due to The Mouse and related corporations who should
NEVER have had the ability to act as "persons" in that particular
aspect. I think in most cases authors panicking about "pirates STEALIN'
MAH STUFF!" are doing themselves no good, because the real enemy of the
author isn't the pirate. It's obscurity. Baen's pretty much proven this
with the Free Library.
--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Live Journal: http://seawasp.livejournal.com
Jacey Bedford
<pe...@sagatafl.invalid> writes
> Not sure how reliable David Langford is, but my guess would be "fairly
>reliable".
I'd rate him as extremely reliable.
Jacey
--
Jacey Bedford
aburt
> In article
> <2d147715-db7f-462d-9ba0-2a3146427...@30g2000yqu.googlegroups.com>,
>
>
>
> aburt <ababpub...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Jan 18, 12:48 pm, David Friedman <d...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com>
> > wrote:
> > > Specifically, is it true that you sent DMCA takedown notices on behalf
> > > of SFWA for a large number of documents, many of which were not
> > > infringing copyright, some of which had been put on scribd by their
> > > authors, many by authors you had no authority to represent? That's the
> > > substantive claim, and if true it is a reason to have a low opinion of
> > > your judgement and competence.
>
> > Complex question, since the background leading up to it is
> > substantively relevant, as are the agendas of those who cried foul, so
> > the short answer is "No."
>
> > an opinion.
>
> Forgive me if I've missed something, but after reading this page, these
> seem to be the truly relevant facts:
>
> 1) You dove into the large task of identifying infringed works with
> inadequate preparation, skills, and resources.
I had more preparation, skill, and resources than the average author,
which is the standard they were setting in our discussions. They were
expecting that Average Author could use their system to identify
infringing works to request their removal. I told them that was
flawed. They said show us. I did.
>
> 2) Because of (1), you ended up with a list that was very difficult to
> work with.
No, because of _their system_ I ended up with a list that was
difficult to work with. I repeatedly asked them for their
assistance. They declined. They said to use their search feature for
keywords. I did. I told them that approach was inadequate.
They wanted an example of how difficult their search was to use for
this purpose, and I gave them that. That they later chose to use that
list to remove works is their own fault. Please carefully read the
timeline.
> 3) Rather than search for authors you knew would welcome your actions,
> you searched for authors you thought would not, thus guaranteeing that
> any false negatives (far more likely than false positives for this)
> would result in sending takedown notices on behalf of authors who didn't
> want you to do this.
Incorrect -- I was only acting on behalf of Bob Silverberg and the
estate of Isaac Asimov. That is all I searched for. I searched as
directed by Scribd.
> I can't say I feel very sympathetic for your plight here, especially
> since you try to obfuscate the facts with a lot of frankly irrelevant
> stuff about how it was all a big mistake so people shouldn't be mad, and
> how Doctorow is a bad person and so forth.
I'm not obfuscating the facts -- I'm stating them. If you choose to
call irrelevant details that are critically relevant, oh well, we
can't really have a dialog.
>
> I bet if I accidentally knocked some of your work offline, you would be
> none to happy with me.
I'd first ask you politely what happened, and to put it back. I
wouldn't assume malice or intent. I wouldn't post a blog entry on a
holiday weekend to millions of people citing the person for
intentional abuse of the law. (Which is entirely false, but once
said, to millions, impossible to unsay.)
Unless I had a communistic anti-copyright agenda, then I'd pounce on
the opportunity to cry to the millions.
> Given what I've read, I don't understand how you can say that the answer
> to David Friedman's question is "no". Looks like a "yes" to me. The only
> possible "no" that I can see is that you never say that any of these
> mistakes were posted by their authors (but you never say they weren't,
> either), so that particular piece could be wrong, but overall the answer
> looks to be "yes" as far as I can tell.
>
> --
> Mike Ash
> Radio Free Earth
> Broadcasting from our climate-controlled studios deep inside the Moon
You're missing the key element: That the point being made at the time
to Scribd was how difficult their site was to search for infringing
works in the midst of them stonewalling like your garden variety
pirate site. That they chose to interpret a non-DMCA notice as a DMCA
notice and take down the works was their choice. That they chose to
remove non-infringing works was their choice.
Saying I performed an inadequate search is incorrect: I told them
their site was difficult to search, and they asked for an example of
how hard it was. I gave them that. I even removed obvious works.
I realize subtlety is sometimes difficult to grasp, particularly when
it takes a lot of words to read and time to comprehend in a "tl;dr"
world, and especially when readers by and large to want works for free
and authors to write for love of art and not for money, but so it
goes.
If you don't support an author's right to determine who makes copies
of their work, then we're not on the same page, and undoubtedly the
actions either of us would take would seem unacceptable to the other.
My question to you is, indeed, do you support an author's right to
determine who makes copies of their work, for, let's say, 50 years
after publication?
aburt
<seaw...@sgeinc.invalid.com> wrote:
> aburt wrote:
> > On Jan 18, 1:47 pm, Peter Knutsen <pe...@sagatafl.invalid> wrote:
>
> >> I haven't got time to read this right now
> >> <http://www.ansible.co.uk/sfx/sfx165.html>
> >> but
>
> > The problem with "I haven't got time to read this right now but" is
> > that if you can't be bothered to read it, why should anyone else?
> > Sometimes one should actually read the things... (It and its cousin,
> > "tl;dr", spell the demise of humanity as an intelligent species.)
>
> > and for critical details not widely known.
>
> So the short answer is, "yes", you did in fact do this. You made a
> desultory effort to sort out things, gave up because (surprise
> surprise!) it wasn't nearly so simple as you thought at first, and sent
> a shotgun notice which was not sufficiently vetted nor formatted, hoping
> that Scribd would act. As you did send something close enough to the
> legal requirements to show that you did intend in some way, shape, or
> form to pursue this, Scribd said "oh, hell with it" and removed
> everything on the list.
>
> As for "anti-copyright agenda", I don't think that fits Stross (he can
> feel free to correct me if he likes); dunno about the others.
>
> I myself feel current copyright is terribly flawed and self-damaging as
> it stands, partly due to The Mouse and related corporations who should
> NEVER have had the ability to act as "persons" in that particular
> aspect. I think in most cases authors panicking about "pirates STEALIN'
> MAH STUFF!" are doing themselves no good, because the real enemy of the
> author isn't the pirate. It's obscurity. Baen's pretty much proven this
> with the Free Library.
>
> --
> Sea Wasp
> /^\
> ;;;
> Live Journal:http://seawasp.livejournal.com
Not so fast...
The point is whether the author has a right to decide who makes copies
of their work (for a reasonable time; I think 50 years from
publication is sufficient).
What's "good for you" isn't the question. You might need a heart
transplant to save your life, but it isn't my right to break into your
house in the middle of the night carrying a donor organ and perform
open heart surgery on you. "Because it's good for you."
I entirely agree with you that -- at the author's choice -- giving
away free ebooks/etc. can be highly valuable. (At least until ebooks
are a significant percent of sales, at which point it gets counter-
productive.) But **author's choice** is the key.
Obscurity may indeed be an author's nemesis -- but it is entirely up
to the author to decide what to do about that.
And all of this is waaaay afield of why I posted here in the first
place, to see if folks might enjoy a forum chatting about stuff they'd
like to see in the future. (If you'd like to post in the forum that
you'd like to see copyright changed to be X, Y, and Z, be my guest! I
would welcome it.)
Brian M. Scott
<pe...@sagatafl.invalid> wrote in
<news:4b54c8d5$0$273$1472...@news.sunsite.dk> in
rec.arts.sf.written,rec.arts.sf.composition:
[...]
> Not sure how reliable David Langford is, but my guess
> would be "fairly reliable".
Make that 'very reliable'.
Brian
alie...@gmail.com
> Hi all, been a while since I've posted here but I thought this
> announcement might be of interest, since those of us who read/write SF
> think a lot about how the future could be. (More so than the average
> mundane folk, anyway, who when I ask what they'd like to see in the
> future give me a suspect look like they should call Homeland Security
> or something... the future? Who thinks about the future?)
>
> "What do you want the future to hold?" over athttp://NewNewForum.com/viewforum.php?f=26
> called "Wishes for the Future". (In other words, what _would_ you
> like to see in the future? World peace? Self-driving cars? A
> microwave display that shows how your food is heated? :) )
>
> Primarily meant to be fun, but, who knows. Some ideas might work
> their way into SF stories (I'm announcing this to my Critters workshop
> gang, the SFWA forums, and other places writerly folk hang out
> precisely in the hopes some cross-fertilization might occur), and from
> there maybe into the brains of people looking for things to create.
> Hey, Roddenberry et al's ideas wormed their way into the public
> consciousness and we got cell phones, etc. so why not dream big. :)
>
> What with a new decade I'm feeling hopeful, and this idea seemed like
> it could be fun.
>
> Enjoy!
>
> Dr. Andrew Burtwww.aburt.com
Disregarding all the details, I'd answer the post title thusly:
"Me".
Mark L. Fergerson
Brian M. Scott
<il...@rcn.com> wrote in
<news:c3ea7504-553d-4c28...@l19g2000yqb.googlegroups.com>
in rec.arts.sf.written,rec.arts.sf.composition:
Mr Burt has worked very hard in recent years to ensure that
he's unlikely to get a very friendly reception here.
Brian
Brian M. Scott
<wsw...@gci.net> wrote in
<news:xY6dnVQE9PfGKsnW...@posted.mtasolutions>
in rec.arts.sf.written,rec.arts.sf.composition:
> Charlton Wilbur wrote:
[...]
>> You know what I'd *really* like to see? Posters who
>> realize how moronic they look when they post in a
>> newsgroup to draw posters to a web forum. Please, will
>> the future have *any* of those?
> So, what you're suggesting is that the guys who designed
> computers looked moronic because they used slipsticks
> and mechanical drafting tables? I'm afraid I can't
> follow your logic.
Nor I yours: a web forum is in no sense a better newsgroup.
Brian
Bill Swears
My reading was that he felt that asking people to suggest what they want
on either newsgroups or web-fora was stupid, because neither technology
would be there in future. Looking back, I see that you could be
correct, but I'd be willing to suggest that neither this type of
newsgroup, nor the web-forums we currently see will be any more
available in twenty years than the BBSs I used in the early nineties are
available today. That doesn't mean that it's moronic to use today's
technology to talk about tomorrow's.
We just recently sort of halted a massive exodus from this newsgroup,
caused by exactly the sort of incendiary personal attacks Aburt is
defending against. I don't think his initial post was worth more than
"Sorry, it's against our FAQ to advertise here."
Mike Ash
<324a1715-3600-4779...@l19g2000yqb.googlegroups.com>,
aburt <ababp...@gmail.com> wrote:
This is all interesting, but ultimately irrelevant. You didn't have
enough preparation, skill, and resources for the job at hand. That your
adversary thought otherwise doesn't matter. I don't care at all what
Scribd thought, and I'm surprised that you do.
> > 2) Because of (1), you ended up with a list that was very difficult to
> > work with.
>
> No, because of _their system_ I ended up with a list that was
> difficult to work with. I repeatedly asked them for their
> assistance. They declined. They said to use their search feature for
> keywords. I did. I told them that approach was inadequate.
>
> They wanted an example of how difficult their search was to use for
> this purpose, and I gave them that. That they later chose to use that
> list to remove works is their own fault. Please carefully read the
> timeline.
You seem intent on blaming Scribd for your mistake, because they made
things too hard for you, even though you could have taken extra time to
get things right, or given up on your effort. Because you did neither,
you seem to think that taking down infringing items was more important
than respecting the rights of others.
> > 3) Rather than search for authors you knew would welcome your actions,
> > you searched for authors you thought would not, thus guaranteeing that
> > any false negatives (far more likely than false positives for this)
> > would result in sending takedown notices on behalf of authors who didn't
> > want you to do this.
>
> Incorrect -- I was only acting on behalf of Bob Silverberg and the
> estate of Isaac Asimov. That is all I searched for. I searched as
> directed by Scribd.
You knew that your search would produce false positives. You say so
yourself right on that page, where you describe how you went through and
deleted items coming from Doctorow, Scalzi, and Stross. You did this,
rather than go through and look for items coming from authors you *were*
authorized to speak for.
You name _Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom_ as one wrongly-removed
item. You say that you didn't see it, and wouldn't have recognized it.
In other words, you didn't even examine all of the titles you sent
notices about, much less try to ensure that each title belonged to an
author you were authorized to speak for. And then you expect us to be
sympathetic about it? You're sending *legal takedown notices*, and can't
be bothered to double-check every item before you send the notices?
> > I can't say I feel very sympathetic for your plight here, especially
> > since you try to obfuscate the facts with a lot of frankly irrelevant
> > stuff about how it was all a big mistake so people shouldn't be mad, and
> > how Doctorow is a bad person and so forth.
>
> I'm not obfuscating the facts -- I'm stating them. If you choose to
> call irrelevant details that are critically relevant, oh well, we
> can't really have a dialog.
How is it relevant to this question that Cory Doctorow is a vocal
activist against US copyright law? How is it relevant that an entirely
different copyright dispute occurred between Doctorow and Ursula K. Le
Guin?
> > I bet if I accidentally knocked some of your work offline, you would be
> > none to happy with me.
>
> I'd first ask you politely what happened, and to put it back. I
> wouldn't assume malice or intent. I wouldn't post a blog entry on a
> holiday weekend to millions of people citing the person for
> intentional abuse of the law. (Which is entirely false, but once
> said, to millions, impossible to unsay.)
>
> Unless I had a communistic anti-copyright agenda, then I'd pounce on
> the opportunity to cry to the millions.
It is interesting that you state that you wouldn't assume malice or
intent, and yet this seems to be precisely what you're doing with
Doctorow. From my outside point of view, Doctorow believed with pretty
good reason that he was wronged by your actions, and reacted
accordingly. You, however, treat his reaction and overall position as
illegitimate right from the start.
> > Given what I've read, I don't understand how you can say that the answer
> > to David Friedman's question is "no". Looks like a "yes" to me. The only
> > possible "no" that I can see is that you never say that any of these
> > mistakes were posted by their authors (but you never say they weren't,
> > either), so that particular piece could be wrong, but overall the answer
> > looks to be "yes" as far as I can tell.
>
> You're missing the key element: That the point being made at the time
> to Scribd was how difficult their site was to search for infringing
> works in the midst of them stonewalling like your garden variety
> pirate site. That they chose to interpret a non-DMCA notice as a DMCA
> notice and take down the works was their choice. That they chose to
> remove non-infringing works was their choice.
I'm not missing it, I just don't see it as relevant. That an infringer
makes it difficult to search for infringing works does *not* justify a
shotgun blast of takedown notices against legitimate items. Yes, this
made your job harder, and yes, it seems that they were deliberately
obstructing you. Well, sometimes life isn't fair.
> Saying I performed an inadequate search is incorrect: I told them
> their site was difficult to search, and they asked for an example of
> how hard it was. I gave them that. I even removed obvious works.
>
> I realize subtlety is sometimes difficult to grasp, particularly when
> it takes a lot of words to read and time to comprehend in a "tl;dr"
> world, and especially when readers by and large to want works for free
> and authors to write for love of art and not for money, but so it
> goes.
>
> If you don't support an author's right to determine who makes copies
> of their work, then we're not on the same page, and undoubtedly the
> actions either of us would take would seem unacceptable to the other.
> My question to you is, indeed, do you support an author's right to
> determine who makes copies of their work, for, let's say, 50 years
> after publication?
Why do you think that this question is relevant to the rest? I'm not
even going to answer it. The question of whether copyright is a
reasonable concept to have in general is *completely* unrelated to the
question of whether you sent DMCA takedown notices on behalf of SFWA for
items which were not infringing copyright.
Since I assume you'll take my refusal to answer this question badly, let
me state right now that as a software developer, I've suffered from
piracy *far* more than a typical SF author, for which piracy is only
just beginning to show up on the radar. Piracy of the written word is
still mostly impractical, because the pirated product is almost always
far worse than the original, because most readers still prefer physical
books. The rise of dedicated ebook readers is starting to change this,
but the adoption rate is still small.
Meanwhile, anyone who pirates one of my programs gets a full, working
copy that looks, feels, and acts exactly like the original. This is
something that people in my industry have been dealing with for
literally decades. It's not a slowly growing fringe threat, like it is
for book authors, but rather a huge ongoing problem.
And yet, despite all of this, I disagree most strongly with your actions
on this particular matter and your justifications for same.
Speaking of subtlety, maybe you should recognize the subtlety involved
in being a constant victim of copyright infringement and yet not
believing that all measures taken to combat it are justified, and the
subtlety of holding the good guys to higher standards than the bad guys.
David Friedman
> > Specifically, is it true that you sent DMCA takedown notices on behalf
> > of SFWA for a large number of documents, many of which were not
> > infringing copyright, some of which had been put on scribd by their
> > authors, many by authors you had no authority to represent? That's the
> > substantive claim, and if true it is a reason to have a low opinion of
> > your judgement and competence.
>
> Complex question, since the background leading up to it is
> substantively relevant, as are the agendas of those who cried foul, so
> the short answer is "No."
>
> See http://www.aburt.com/scribd.ht for lots of details before forming
> an opinion.
Thank you.
David Friedman
> That they chose to interpret a non-DMCA notice as a DMCA
> notice and take down the works was their choice. That they chose to
> remove non-infringing works was their choice.
Have you webbed somewhere your half of the correspondence, so that
others could decide whether they think that what you sent scribd looked
like an incompetent attempt at a DMCA takedown notice or like an attempt
to show them that their tools for identifying infringing works were
inadequate?
Brian M. Scott
<wsw...@gci.net> wrote in
<news:O5Kdnd38Up6u2MjW...@posted.mtasolutions>
in rec.arts.sf.written,rec.arts.sf.composition:
> Brian M. Scott wrote:
>>> Charlton Wilbur wrote:
>> [...]
I certainly may be wrong, but I don't think that this has
anything to do with Charlton's post.
> We just recently sort of halted a massive exodus from this
> newsgroup, caused by exactly the sort of incendiary
> personal attacks Aburt is defending against.
Even with the qualification 'sort of', I disagree on both
counts.
> I don't think his initial post was worth more than
> "Sorry, it's against our FAQ to advertise here."
The problem isn't the post, but the poster: in the minds of
more than a few people, Mr Burt has stepped on his ... sword
... more than once. And most of the responses have been
from rasfw, not rasfc.
Brian
David Friedman
Mike Ash <mi...@mikeash.com> wrote:
> The question of whether copyright is a
> reasonable concept to have in general is *completely* unrelated to the
> question of whether you sent DMCA takedown notices on behalf of SFWA for
> items which were not infringing copyright.
As best I can tell from reading the web page he pointed us at, he
doesn't think he sent DMCA takedown notices. He thinks he sent something
more like a letter pointing out possible problems, to which scribd
reacted as if it were a takedown notice. Since I haven't seen the
letter, I don't know which version is correct.
David Friedman
Bill Swears <wsw...@gci.net> wrote:
> >>> You know what I'd *really* like to see? Posters who
> >>> realize how moronic they look when they post in a
> >>> newsgroup to draw posters to a web forum. Please, will
> >>> the future have *any* of those?
> >
> >> So, what you're suggesting is that the guys who designed
> >> computers looked moronic because they used slipsticks
> >> and mechanical drafting tables? I'm afraid I can't
> >> follow your logic.
> >
> > Nor I yours: a web forum is in no sense a better newsgroup.
>
> My reading was that he felt that asking people to suggest what they want
> on either newsgroups or web-fora was stupid, because neither technology
> would be there in future. Looking back, I see that you could be
> correct, but I'd be willing to suggest that neither this type of
> newsgroup, nor the web-forums we currently see will be any more
> available in twenty years than the BBSs I used in the early nineties are
> available today. That doesn't mean that it's moronic to use today's
> technology to talk about tomorrow's.
I interpreted the original comment as "will the future have any posters
who realize how moronic they look when ... ." But I could be wrong.
Peter Knutsen
> Mike Ash<mi...@mikeash.com> wrote:
>> The question of whether copyright is a
>> reasonable concept to have in general is *completely* unrelated to the
>> question of whether you sent DMCA takedown notices on behalf of SFWA for
>> items which were not infringing copyright.
>
> As best I can tell from reading the web page he pointed us at, he
> doesn't think he sent DMCA takedown notices. He thinks he sent something
> more like a letter pointing out possible problems, to which scribd
> reacted as if it were a takedown notice. Since I haven't seen the
> letter, I don't know which version is correct.
A site that can so easily be used for copyright infringement ought to
take steps to make it easy for authors and publishers to search for
pirated works of theirs, so that, for instnace, people who make a living
writing don't have to spend many hours on searches (on each of many
different such sites). I get the impression Burt thinks the site in
question didn't make it easy enough to do those searches in a reasonable
amount of time, and wanted to make it clear to them.
--
Peter Knutsen
sagatafl.org
Peter Knutsen
A web forum can in theory do some things that NNTP cannot, such as
letting users throw votes of various flavours at particular posts. I
have not ever seen this implemented, though, and I'm not even sure it is
a good thing in the end, although it does solve the problem of a
particular post hanging there apparently in a vacuum with no replies to
it, and the poster wondering if anybody ever read it.
Likewise, a web forum can be made to be as fast as Usenet or even
faster, by pre-loading threads and posts so that they appear instantly
when requested, but I have not seen anyone even attempt this. It is as
if the people who program web forum interfaces have a complete and utter
disregard for speed; perhaps they read very slowly, and so don't know to
cater for us who can read quickly.
Also, of course, there's the benefit of having all discussion about all
subjects gathered in one place and without censorship of any kind. Web
forum discussions are spread all over the web, and I've yet to come
across a web forum that wasn't censored at all in the same way Usenet isn't.
--
Peter Knutsen
sagatafl.org
Peter Knutsen
> We just recently sort of halted a massive exodus from this newsgroup,
> caused by exactly the sort of incendiary personal attacks Aburt is
> defending against. I don't think his initial post was worth more than
> "Sorry, it's against our FAQ to advertise here."
Since Aburt ran for president of the SFWA a year or two ago, and since
the Scribd issue happened while he was vice president, that part of the
thread is *extremely* relevant.
--
Peter Knutsen
sagatafl.org
David DeLaney
>Likewise, a web forum can be made to be as fast as Usenet or even
>faster, by pre-loading threads and posts so that they appear instantly
>when requested, but I have not seen anyone even attempt this. It is as
>if the people who program web forum interfaces have a complete and utter
>disregard for speed; perhaps they read very slowly, and so don't know to
>cater for us who can read quickly.
I think part of it is the affinity of webforums, these days, for having each
signed-in user have an 'avatar picture' that's attached to their posts. Loading
text, even with markup and stuff, is one thing, but loading all the pictures
from wherever they're stored, for each page of the thread, seems to slow stuff
down a lot. (Must be that "thousand words" equivalence.)
Dave
--
\/David DeLaney posting from d...@vic.com "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
http://www.vic.com/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ & Magic / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.
Lawrence Watt-Evans
<mscotts...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>Quadibloc wrote:
>> On Jan 17, 10:16 pm, Quadibloc <jsav...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
>>> On Jan 17, 10:04 pm, aburt <ababpub...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> (seewww.aburt.comfor a list)
>>>
>>> That URL does not appear to resolve.
>>
>> A Google search turned up at least one person who doesn't seem to
>> like
>> you:
>>
>> http://whatever.scalzi.com/2008/02/18/a-gut-check-moment-for-sfwa/
>
>Lawrence, please correct me if I'm wrong, but I suspect that SFWA
>politics is like academic politics: the amount of vitriol expended is
>inversely proportional to the practical importance of the dispute.
You're asking me? I quit SFWA years ago.
SFWA's most vicious arguments were usually about the Nebula awards and
the membership rules. Judge for yourself the practical importance of
those. There were lots of tremendeously stupid arguments during my
twenty-plus years as a member, almost all of them about awards,
membership rules, or matters of even less importance, but every once
in awhile something important got debated, as well.
As for Andrew Burt, I consider Scalzi's piece to be slanted but
accurate -- that is, his facts about Andrew are correct, but he has
chosen to only present negatives. Andrew's a well-meaning guy who
usually tries to be reasonable, and he's done a good job running
Critters. His work for SFWA included some genuine accomplishments as
well as the disasters and potential disasters Scalzi mentions. He's
not a raving loon or a troll, by any means.
--
My webpage is at http://www.watt-evans.com
I'm selling my comic collection -- see http://www.watt-evans.com/comics.html
I'm serializing a novel at http://www.watt-evans.com/realmsoflight0.html
Peter Knutsen
> On Jan 18, 1:47 pm, Peter Knutsen<pe...@sagatafl.invalid> wrote:
>> I haven't got time to read this right now
>> <http://www.ansible.co.uk/sfx/sfx165.html>
>> but
>
> The problem with "I haven't got time to read this right now but" is
> that if you can't be bothered to read it, why should anyone else?
> Sometimes one should actually read the things... (It and its cousin,
> "tl;dr", spell the demise of humanity as an intelligent species.)
Note the "right now" part.
It was late evening and I had to go to bed. I had every intention of
reading that page later on, and I have in fact read it now.
--
Peter Knutsen
sagatafl.org
Peter Knutsen
> Peter Knutsen<pe...@sagatafl.invalid> wrote:
>> Likewise, a web forum can be made to be as fast as Usenet or even
>> faster, by pre-loading threads and posts so that they appear instantly
>> when requested, but I have not seen anyone even attempt this. It is as
>> if the people who program web forum interfaces have a complete and utter
>> disregard for speed; perhaps they read very slowly, and so don't know to
>> cater for us who can read quickly.
>
> I think part of it is the affinity of webforums, these days, for having each
> signed-in user have an 'avatar picture' that's attached to their posts. Loading
> text, even with markup and stuff, is one thing, but loading all the pictures
> from wherever they're stored, for each page of the thread, seems to slow stuff
> down a lot. (Must be that "thousand words" equivalence.)
Well, web forums also don't keep track of which posts I've read and
which I haven't, and don' let me flag post, nor mark-as-read or
mark-as-unread as I wish. They also usually don't show proper branching
threads, but are just a long series of numbered posts, or those that do
use branching threads require me to load each post one at a time (and
doesn't use any kind of cache-based pre-loading).
Web forums don't *have* to suck. They do, all of the ones I've used and
almost certainly also all the ones I've chosen not to use or doesn't
even know exist, but they could be made a *lot* better than what they
currently are.
--
Peter Knutsen
sagatafl.org
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
> A site that can so easily be used for copyright infringement ought to
> take steps to make it easy for authors and publishers to search for
> pirated works of theirs, so that, for instnace, people who make a living
> writing don't have to spend many hours on searches (on each of many
> different such sites).
On many such sites, the point is to allow other people (not the site
maintainers) to share "stuff", and to maintain the privacy of the people
doing the sharing.
On the other hand, the point IS to allow the sharing of "stuff", there
is a way to FIND the "stuff". If it's actually all that difficult to
find, say, Silverberg's stuff for Mr. Burt, it's going to be that
difficult for the people who want to read it for free to find it.
I suspect it was actually quite easy to find most, if not all, of the
stuff for *any specific author*. Finding all the stuff for hundreds of
authors, well, that's going to be possibly hundreds of times more
difficult, because that's a search approach that most USERS of the
system aren't going to be after. But that's not THEIR job. You want to
look for stuff infringing on hundreds of people's rights? Search for the
hundreds. DON'T go shotgunning generally because you can't, to use a UK
term, be arsed to actually do the work necessary to make sure you're
targeting the right people.
T Guy
> > Seehttp://www.aburt.com/scribd.htfor lots of details before forming
> > an opinion.
(Mike Ash <m...@mikeash.com> ):
> Forgive me if I've missed something, but after reading this page, these
> seem to be the truly relevant facts:
>
> 1) You dove into the large task of identifying infringed works with
> inadequate preparation, skills, and resources.
>
> 2) Because of (1), you ended up with a list that was very difficult to
> work with.
>
> 3) Rather than search for authors you knew would welcome your actions,
> you searched for authors you thought would not, thus guaranteeing that
> any false negatives (far more likely than false positives for this)
> would result in sending takedown notices on behalf of authors who didn't
> want you to do this.
>
> I can't say I feel very sympathetic for your plight here, especially
> since you try to obfuscate the facts with a lot of frankly irrelevant
> stuff about how it was all a big mistake so people shouldn't be mad, and
> how Doctorow is a bad person and so forth.
>
> I bet if I accidentally knocked some of your work offline, you would be
> none to happy with me.
>
> Given what I've read, I don't understand how you can say that the answer
> to David Friedman's question is "no". Looks like a "yes" to me. The only
> possible "no" that I can see is that you never say that any of these
> mistakes were posted by their authors (but you never say they weren't,
> either), so that particular piece could be wrong, but overall the answer
> looks to be "yes" as far as I can tell.
(T Guy):
Whereas after reading the account at burt.com and th eone at
Sensible.com, the answer looks to be 'no' AFAICT.
If anyone fancies a laugh, by the way, I read
"I'm the Andrew Burt who founded the world's first free / public
Internet service provider as a bastion of free speech... lobbies for
inexpensive, DRM-free ebooks (and thinks digital
reading will replace paper)... " as meaning "I'm an Andrew Burt who
wants to do away with copyright so that I can starve authors to death
and then swig champagne atop their graves.'"
T Guy
aburt
You know, I entirely agree with you -- web forums are a poor shadow of
NNTP-based newsgroups. I note with considerable irony that SFWA's
current board has tried to forcibly migrate the internal discussion
forums to a phpbb-based web forum, which has provoked much
consternation among the members who prefer the existing NNTP-based
newsgroups we use. I'm among one of the protesters: NNTP-based
newsgroups are far superior.
However, I set up the newnewforum.com using phpbb for a couple
reasons, to experiment with the latest version of phpbb (primarily
since the newest version finally allowed the use of a decent reCAPTCHA
to control spam; I wouldn't touch it before that since the maintenance
time deleting spam was too high), and because I was hearing from the
crowd that newsgroups were becoming hated and the masses loved phpbb
style forums, so I figured I'd test out that hypothesis.
My personal preference is for an NNTP interface, since I much prefer
using 'nn' to read with than a web browser, for the ability to mark
threads and generally track read/unread posts better, follow the
structure of threads better, better archiving of messages one posts or
wishes to save out -- all as you say. But oh well. My ideal would be
for phpbb to have an NNTP access module.
Newsgroups (at least as they used to exist) were also a usefully
central place -- not a balkanized collection of a billion separate web
forums maximizing redundancy and inhibiting the flow of information.
(I even predicted this at the time -- the early days of the web -- and
urged web forum developers to interchange messages like Usenet sites
did... which was ignored. So, we get a billion small conversation
areas rather than a broader one.)
At this point it's unlikely web forums will be going away, so us
newsgroup lovers seemingly have to find ways to live with them.
Better yet, we should all get together and write an NNTP module for
phpbb.
At any rate, re my original post, believe me, if it were easier to set
up the "Wishes for the future" forum as a newsgroup structure, I would
have. However, since there doesn't appear to be any such existing
permanent forum already housing that discussion (or -- point me to
it), and to bring people to it entails pointing out that it exists in
many places (newsgroups, other web forums, one or the other of which
will inevitably hate the layout), and for spam control, I set it up as
you see.
aburt
>
>
>
> aburt <ababpub...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Jan 18, 6:06 pm, Mike Ash <m...@mikeash.com> wrote:
> > > In article
> > > <2d147715-db7f-462d-9ba0-2a3146427...@30g2000yqu.googlegroups.com>,
>
> > > aburt <ababpub...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > On Jan 18, 12:48 pm, David Friedman <d...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com>
> > > > wrote:
> > > > > Specifically, is it true that you sent DMCA takedown notices on behalf
> > > > > of SFWA for a large number of documents, many of which were not
> > > > > infringing copyright, some of which had been put on scribd by their
> > > > > authors, many by authors you had no authority to represent? That's the
> > > > > substantive claim, and if true it is a reason to have a low opinion of
> > > > > your judgement and competence.
>
> > > > Complex question, since the background leading up to it is
> > > > substantively relevant, as are the agendas of those who cried foul, so
> > > > the short answer is "No."
>
> > > > an opinion.
>
> > > Forgive me if I've missed something, but after reading this page, these
> > > seem to be the truly relevant facts:
>
> > > 1) You dove into the large task of identifying infringed works with
> > > inadequate preparation, skills, and resources.
>
> > I had more preparation, skill, and resources than the average author,
> > which is the standard they were setting in our discussions. They were
> > expecting that Average Author could use their system to identify
> > infringing works to request their removal. I told them that was
> > flawed. They said show us. I did.
>
> This is all interesting, but ultimately irrelevant. You didn't have
> enough preparation, skill, and resources for the job at hand. That your
> adversary thought otherwise doesn't matter. I don't care at all what
> Scribd thought, and I'm surprised that you do.
So your stance is that SFWA should have left Scribd alone to be a
pirate haven because Scribd had succeeded in making it too difficult
to identify the pirate works? Good news for pirates then. "Just make
your system difficult for the copyright holder to use and you LIVE!"
And what I said is not at all irrelevant. Scribd is the one who chose
to take down the works.
The argument boils down to a choice of kind of error. (There will
always be potential for errors, since humans are fallible, and time
and resources are not infinite. Perfection is not a reasonable
expectation. Let he who is perfect cast the first stone.) The choices
of error are:
1) False Negatives -- not removing all the copyright infringing
material in order to assure that no non-infringing material is removed
by accident.
2) False Positives -- removing all the copyright infringing material
with the possible error that some non-infringing material is also
removed by accident.
In Scribd's case, within the SFWA forums at the time, the discussion
amounted to saying that #2 was preferred. Remember, AT THAT TIME,
scribd had vast thousands of pirate works and was stonewalling doing
anything about it. They appeared, AT THAT TIME, to be your garden
variety pure pirate haven. We would find them all the time, and they
were not legitimate businesses, just plain pirate sitees. Nobody had
heard of scribd, and their purported business model looked to be
nothing more than "go pirate stuff and share it here." The demand was
"Shut down those pirates." That means a #2 kind of error.
The DMCA law provides a mechanism to handle type#2 errors (files
accidentally removed). And in the scribd case, those few files that
were wrongly disabled, for a very brief time, were -- at my immediate
request, as soon as I heard about them -- requested to be restored.
(Scribd took a longer time to actually restore them.)
Which kind of error you believe is the proper approach generally
determines which side of the copyright liberal/conservative spectrum
you are on. "Copyright liberals" will almost always say error type #1
is the correct approach. "Copyright conservatives" will almost always
say error type #2 is the correct approach.
That holds true today, in this very thread.
Those who feel there should never be a type#2 error, that there should
never be a valid file accidentally removed, at the potential cost of
leaving all infringing files available, are, well, almost certainly
"copyright liberals."
Society as a whole may in fact be swinging toward most people being
copyright liberals. That may or may not be a good thing. If authors
aren't allowed sufficient control over who makes copies of their work
-- and bear in mind Doctorow is one who believes anybody should be
able to copy your work for free, meaning the value of your work is $0
since "cheap drives out dear" -- then authors can't expect to earn any
money for writing.
The US Constitution provided explicity for copyright law realizing
that creators need some protection against unauthorized copies. They
didn't envision people giving away someone else's work for free,
undercutting the author's pay, but that's substantively the same as
some other publisher publishing it and keeping the money instead of
paying the author, which is what they were aware of.
So the law, as it stands, tilts toward allowing type #2 errors. I
entirely agree that The Mouse and others have abused that beyond
measure for their own greedy purposes, and that tarnishes every
creator, like SF authors. But that doesn't mean throw out the baby
with the bath water.
I myself and more of a "copyright moderate". I'm not a hardline
copyright conservative by any stretch of the imagination. Read my
stance on copyright: http://aburt.com/copyright.ht .
But when an error occurs, as it will, all of us being human, in this
case it was a type #2 error. The result of the error was very
minimal: A small number of non-infringing files were briefly
unavailable on one site. (A site Doctorow didn't know his book was
even on, hadn't put there, and wasn't labeled with his name.)
Restored very quickly, and the files were available elsewhere on the
web all during that time. Near zero loss.
If the choice was for that to happen, or to leave thousands upon
thousands of truly infringing files on scribd, when their rightful
owners wanted them removed, I would again choose the former.
I'm sure any copyright liberal will howl with indignation.
That's politics. Be my guest.
> How is it relevant to this question that Cory Doctorow is a vocal
> activist against US copyright law?
Because he had a choice in how to respond. He could have asked, hey,
what's up with this? Or he could have chosen to advance his political
position by loudly screaming to millions, "Abuse!!!" He chose the
latter. That clearly marks him as using the situation to advance his
anti-copyright agenda. Truly, if that isn't clear to someone, we have
no common ground for discourse.
>How is it relevant that an entirely
> different copyright dispute occurred between Doctorow and Ursula K. Le
> Guin?
I didn't bring that up.
But since you did, I'll note that it's another example of Doctorow's
extreme anti-copyright stance. He was himself basically an unabashed
pirate. It's no wonder he'd scream "Abuse!!!" to millions when a
simple and low-consequence error happened.
What's sad is to think that people are so anti-author they buy into
his absurd rhetoric. I understand the allure: Free stuff!! But when
you value everything at $0, you will eventually stifle creativity and
you'll get the value you seek.
A few authors might write SF for love -- Larry Niven, who has a nice
trust fund, admits he didn't need money from writing, and clearly
writes extremely well. But if you force the value of written SF to be
$0, then you undercut the ability of those with talent to create it.
Not everyone can, or wants to, write for love and $0.
(Saying there are alternate, non-writing ways to earn money as a
writer is self-contradictory. It's simple economics: Value writing
at $0, and that's the quality you'll get.)
Now, I entirely agree that TODAY piracy of novels isn't costing anyone
hardly nuttin. But it's an attitude: Once the attitude is in place
that piracy is okay, you can't put that toothpaste back in the tube.
Then, as seems inevitable, when people read digitally, the cost is now
$0 since it's all out there free for the grabbing. SF writers already
earn little enough, but take that little away, and you decimate the
quality of future written SF.
So I view tolerance of infringement, conceptually, as diminishing the
quality. There's a sea of free dreck SF out there now. Is that what
people want to read? Or do you want to read the quality of Asimov,
Heinlein, Silverberg, etc. If the latter, then let them control who
makes copies of their work, and don't tolerate people who give it away
for free.
That means accepting some #2 kinds of errors rather than being so
hardline that you say there can NONE, ZERO, NEVER. That path leads to
poorer quality SF.
Lastly, it's pretty absurd to paint everything I do, have done, or
ever will do with so broad a brush based on disabling access to
redundant copies of files for a short time, dontcha think? Disabling
a file that was available elsewhere renders moot things I've done like
founding the world's first free ISP? Running an SF writers workshop
for thousands? And all the other things I do?
Absurd much. Get over it.
Anyway -- the original thread was not about this. I'm just answering
attacks made when I came here to talk about wishes for cool stuff for
the future.
I hope folks drop over to http://newnewforum.com/viewforum.php?f=26
and have some fun musing about the future.
aburt
> I don't think his initial post was worth more than
> "Sorry, it's against our FAQ to advertise here."
We'd have to get into a question -- and I think an important one, for
the flow of useful knowledge on the net -- of how broadly do you
define "advertise."
Let me preface this by saying I've been on Usenet since 1981. There
was no spam then. The word didn't even exist with that meaning yet.
It was just the Monty Python sketch and meant the food product. :) (I
remember the first time I saw a genuine spam posting, and the first
time I received a real spam email -- one's response was to attack the
sender... back when one actually knew who it was!)
Today, the definition of "spam" has crept to an absurdly wide meaning
of "don't talk about one's own projects". That's not just silly, it's
actually harmful.
When the first version of Linux was announced (before it was even
named Linux), it was some guy named Linus posting about a project he
was working on, and asking people to take a look. The same kind of
"check it out" postings announced the births of the first web browser,
PERL, PHP, and so on. It's a very dangerous path to tar and feather
every "here's a new thing, check it out" post.
In my case, here, I posted about a free thing. Not a commercial
product. The "what do you want to see in the future?" forum is not a
commercial endeavor. $0. It's a fun thing, to play with and enjoy.
When you stifle the flow of information and announcements about
innovations, you stifle innovation itself. (Suppose nobody ever heard
of what-became-Linux because Linus wasn't allowed to mention it?
Suppose nobody ever learned about PERL and PHP? Good grief.)
Certainly nobody wants to be buried in a flood of ads for male
enhancement products in a forum talking about SF. But on target
topics, like a new novel? I'd say there's maybe even a line where on-
topic commercial announcements have a place. But certainly free on-
topic items shouldn't be barred from announcement.
So, do take care with overly restrictive definitions of "advertise."
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
You err in describing two types of errors and not choosing the "no
error" approach, in which you issue a takedown notice for a work that
you have VERIFIED is, in fact, infringing. This is the appropriate and
proper method for doing a legal notification. "We have determined that
this specific work infringes, and that we are, in fact, empowered and
directed to act in this case. Take it down."
This method avoids false positives AND false negatives. It does, of
course, require a bit more work on the side of the person doing the
notifications.
Bill Swears
with that, yet the thread was immediately derailed into the scribd
conversation, was an attack, and OT to this thread. does aburt now have
to stay off of the intertubes forever, because of an explosion at SFWA?
aburt
wrote:
> In article
> <324a1715-3600-4779-9682-fbd58f5e4...@l19g2000yqb.googlegroups.com>,
>
> aburt <ababpub...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > That they chose to interpret a non-DMCA notice as a DMCA
> > notice and take down the works was their choice. That they chose to
> > remove non-infringing works was their choice.
>
> Have you webbed somewhere your half of the correspondence, so that
> others could decide whether they think that what you sent scribd looked
> like an incompetent attempt at a DMCA takedown notice or like an attempt
> to show them that their tools for identifying infringing works were
> inadequate?
>
> --
> Author of
> _Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World_,
> Cambridge University Press.
No, and I doubt I'd have their permission to show the letters, since
they include interleaved quoted text as is common in email. There's
also the private SFWA forum postings that play into it, the cries for
blood and shutting down scribd as (then-believed) pure pirate site,
and it's forbidden to show those. It would be a lot of work to
collect it all even if possible.
I don't think it really matters, to tell the truth. The majority of
people seem to respond to the whole thing based on where they fall on
the copyright liberal/conservative spectrum. Those who think there
should never ever _ever_ _EVER_be cases that even briefly block from
view one backwater duplicate copy of a non-infringing file, they will
believe I'm evil incarnate and a variety of other pejoratives. Those
who think it's acceptable for some errors to occur, preferably if
they're correctable (as this was), seem generally to accept that all
the things I've done for the world are perhaps a net positive.
(There's also that oft-forgotten "innocent until proven guilty"
theory, which would place the burden of proof on my detractors to
prove that I sent a correct and "abusive" DMCA notice and that Scribd
was thus forced to remove those non-infringing files, rather than them
choosing to do so based of their own free will. The burden of proof
rests not with me, but with the accusers. I think some folks have
forgotten that, and/or chosen to view circumstancial evidence as
sufficient for lynching, because of their political leanings.)
And I didn't come here to rehash an event of 2-3 years ago. I didn't
bring it up. I came here to say, hey, what cool things would people
like to see in the future? Because there doesn't seem to be any forum
to discuss that in -- and some of us think that's fun to do -- so I
created one.
Scribd - old hat. Absurd to view anything else I might do in light of
it. Judge the new things I do on their own merits.
Bill Swears
>
> You err in describing two types of errors and not choosing the "no
> error" approach, in which you issue a takedown notice for a work that
> you have VERIFIED is, in fact, infringing. This is the appropriate and
> proper method for doing a legal notification. "We have determined that
> this specific work infringes, and that we are, in fact, empowered and
> directed to act in this case. Take it down."
>
> This method avoids false positives AND false negatives. It does, of
> course, require a bit more work on the side of the person doing the
> notifications.
>
people were putting them back up, and scribd was leaving them up until
somebody else requested that they come down again. This left authors
with the onus of returning to the same site that had violated their
rights repeatedly, and requesting yet another takedown.
Far as I know, it hasn't been an issue for me, but I would find that
sort of behavior annoying.
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
> Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor) wrote:
>>
>> You err in describing two types of errors and not choosing the "no
>> error" approach, in which you issue a takedown notice for a work that
>> you have VERIFIED is, in fact, infringing. This is the appropriate and
>> proper method for doing a legal notification. "We have determined that
>> this specific work infringes, and that we are, in fact, empowered and
>> directed to act in this case. Take it down."
>>
>> This method avoids false positives AND false negatives. It does,
>> of course, require a bit more work on the side of the person doing the
>> notifications.
>>
> IIRC, the scribd site was taking down works on request, but then other
> people were putting them back up, and scribd was leaving them up until
> somebody else requested that they come down again. This left authors
> with the onus of returning to the same site that had violated their
> rights repeatedly, and requesting yet another takedown.
>
> Far as I know, it hasn't been an issue for me, but I would find that
> sort of behavior annoying.
Well, I don't know how Scribd in specific worked, but I know a number
of the filesharing sites specifically DON'T KNOW what you share unless
they, themselves, do the same kind of search for it that YOU would. This
is quite deliberate, and necessary, to insulate them from the actions of
the users, and abusers, of their systems. So this would be a normal, and
pretty much unchangeable, part of that type of system. X puts up
Infringing Work, you tell Service to take down Infringing Work, they do
so, Y puts up Infringing Work.
Kurt Busiek
> I don't think it really matters, to tell the truth. The majority of
> people seem to respond to the whole thing based on where they fall on
> the copyright liberal/conservative spectrum.
Oog.
The ideological purity test raises its head. "If you think I did
anything wrong it's because you have an ideological axe to grind; it is
not possible for people of the proper ideological position to criticize
me."
Me, I'm fairly copyright-conservative, and I think his posts smell of
desperate self-justification and it-was-everyone-else's-fault-ism. He
seems unable to separate the question of what he did and whether he did
it appropriately from the question of whether the people he was
communicating were doing something wrong. But it's entirely possible
to take inappropriate action in the service of a worthwhile goal.
Still, the idea that everyone arguing with you is doing so because of
An Agenda rather than because of what they're actually saying must be
vastly comforting.
kdb
--
Visit http://www.busiek.com -- for all your Busiek needs!
Mike Ash
<1b885e58-877a-40fb...@f12g2000yqn.googlegroups.com>,
aburt <ababp...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >How is it relevant that an entirely
> > different copyright dispute occurred between Doctorow and Ursula K. Le
> > Guin?
>
> I didn't bring that up.
Uh, what? Yes you did. You pointed people to this page:
http://www.aburt.com/scribd.ht
Said page has a *huge* section discussing the Doctorow/Le Guin flap.
I don't want to start a long, drawn-out argument so I'm just going to
leave most of this be. However, I want to leave you with one more
thought:
Your big question in your last message was whether I support an author's
right to determine who makes copies of their work. I submit to you that
this right covers both negative *and* positive authorization. In other
words, copyright not only allows an author to prohibit another from
making a copy, but also allows an author to *permit* copying. By issuing
these mistaken takedown notices, you violated that right for the authors
in question. Perhaps not legally, but morally.
I'm sure I won't convince you. You appear to have decided that anyone
who disagrees with you is a "copyright liberal" whose opinion contains
no merit, but it's worth a shot.
Mike Ash
Peter Knutsen <pe...@sagatafl.invalid> wrote:
> On 19/01/2010 03:49, Brian M. Scott wrote:
> > On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 10:32:43 -0900, Bill Swears
> >> Charlton Wilbur wrote:
> >>> You know what I'd *really* like to see? Posters who
> >>> realize how moronic they look when they post in a
> >>> newsgroup to draw posters to a web forum. Please, will
> >>> the future have *any* of those?
> >
> >> So, what you're suggesting is that the guys who designed
> >> computers looked moronic because they used slipsticks
> >> and mechanical drafting tables? I'm afraid I can't
> >> follow your logic.
> >
> > Nor I yours: a web forum is in no sense a better newsgroup.
>
> A web forum can in theory do some things that NNTP cannot, such as
> letting users throw votes of various flavours at particular posts. I
> have not ever seen this implemented, though, and I'm not even sure it is
> a good thing in the end, although it does solve the problem of a
> particular post hanging there apparently in a vacuum with no replies to
> it, and the poster wondering if anybody ever read it.
I'm surprised you haven't seen this. Basic post voting is fairly common,
as seen on e.g. slashdot.org and reddit.com. It does solve a lot of
problems, like quickly getting rid of pointless, stupid, offensive
posts. On the other hand, it encourages groupthink to an enormous
degree, and places a lot of undeserved value on being early to reply to
something popular.
> Likewise, a web forum can be made to be as fast as Usenet or even
> faster, by pre-loading threads and posts so that they appear instantly
> when requested, but I have not seen anyone even attempt this. It is as
> if the people who program web forum interfaces have a complete and utter
> disregard for speed; perhaps they read very slowly, and so don't know to
> cater for us who can read quickly.
Even if you solve the computer-speed problem, you still have the
human-speed problem, in providing a good interface to the user. And even
if you solve that, you haven't solved the problem of your interface
being completely different from that of the other web forums that the
user visits. That, in my eyes, is the true value of NNTP: the user uses
one client program, of his choice, for everything. I don't have to learn
a whole new set of commands for every newsgroup I read.
> Also, of course, there's the benefit of having all discussion about all
> subjects gathered in one place and without censorship of any kind. Web
> forum discussions are spread all over the web, and I've yet to come
> across a web forum that wasn't censored at all in the same way Usenet isn't.
I think they exist, but are notorious for enormous quantities of bad
behavior. Usenet tends to avoid that simply by being obscure. I'm not
sure if you can avoid the bad behavior without censorship or obscurity.
Mike Ash
<ddfr-E202F1.2...@newsfarm.phx.highwinds-media.com>,
David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
> In article <mike-9C3F0A.0...@news.eternal-september.org>,
> Mike Ash <mi...@mikeash.com> wrote:
>
> > The question of whether copyright is a
> > reasonable concept to have in general is *completely* unrelated to the
> > question of whether you sent DMCA takedown notices on behalf of SFWA for
> > items which were not infringing copyright.
>
> As best I can tell from reading the web page he pointed us at, he
> doesn't think he sent DMCA takedown notices. He thinks he sent something
> more like a letter pointing out possible problems, to which scribd
> reacted as if it were a takedown notice. Since I haven't seen the
> letter, I don't know which version is correct.
"Since Scribd's owners were being even less helpful than before -- no
longer even giving lip service to wanting to help -- I told them that
their request for their specific DMCA wording was improper, and what I
had so far presented them was (as I had been told previously by lawyers)
sufficient notice for them."
By his own words, he believes that what he sent qualified as a DMCA
takedown notice.
It looks to me like he wants to have things both ways. What he sent was
either a DMCA takedown notice or not, depending on which position is
more useful for the argument at the time.
Chris
> On Jan 17, 10:04 pm, aburt <ababpub...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > (seewww.aburt.comfor a list)
>
> That URL does not appear to resolve.
>
When I clicked it, for some reason it tried to find
groups.google.com.www.aburt.com
The www.aburt.com site works fine.
Chris
David Friedman
<c58ee6fc-ccce-43f0...@b10g2000yqa.googlegroups.com>,
aburt <ababp...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't think it really matters, to tell the truth. The majority of
> people seem to respond to the whole thing based on where they fall on
> the copyright liberal/conservative spectrum.
I don't think anyone is likely to accuse me of being a socialist, and I
believe I'm currently a party to a suit against the Google Books
settlement, organized by my agent, and based on its violation of
copyright law. Nonetheless, as best I can filter out the information
I've seen, I think you were in the wrong.
--
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/ http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
David Friedman
Bill Swears <wsw...@gci.net> wrote:
> Peter Knutsen wrote:
> > On 19/01/2010 06:37, Bill Swears wrote:
> >> We just recently sort of halted a massive exodus from this newsgroup,
> >> caused by exactly the sort of incendiary personal attacks Aburt is
> >> defending against. I don't think his initial post was worth more than
> >> "Sorry, it's against our FAQ to advertise here."
> >
> > Since Aburt ran for president of the SFWA a year or two ago, and since
> > the Scribd issue happened while he was vice president, that part of the
> > thread is *extremely* relevant.
> >
> Yes, the issue was. The fact that his initial post had nothing to do
> with that, yet the thread was immediately derailed into the scribd
> conversation, was an attack, and OT to this thread. does aburt now have
> to stay off of the intertubes forever, because of an explosion at SFWA?
I think part of what derailed it in that direction was Burt's
self-advertisement--his post designed to show what a good person he was,
hence why we shouldn't have reservations about his attempt to recruit
people here for his forum.
David Friedman
> (Saying there are alternate, non-writing ways to earn money as a
> writer is self-contradictory. It's simple economics: Value writing
> at $0, and that's the quality you'll get.)
The fact that there are indirect ways of earning money as a writer isn't
self-contradictory, and it is of some importance if, as I think likely,
copyright law becomes increasingly unenforceable for technological
reasons. Quite a lot of literature was produced prior to the first
copyright law, and, more recently, authors--Twain, for example--got
quite a lot of their income in indirect ways.
aburt
<seaw...@sgeinc.invalid.com> wrote:
> Peter Knutsen wrote:
> > A site that can so easily be used for copyright infringement ought to
> > take steps to make it easy for authors and publishers to search for
> > pirated works of theirs, so that, for instnace, people who make a living
> > writing don't have to spend many hours on searches (on each of many
> > different such sites).
>
> On many such sites, the point is to allow other people (not the site
> maintainers) to share "stuff", and to maintain the privacy of the people
> doing the sharing.
>
> On the other hand, the point IS to allow the sharing of "stuff", there
> is a way to FIND the "stuff". If it's actually all that difficult to
> find, say, Silverberg's stuff for Mr. Burt, it's going to be that
> difficult for the people who want to read it for free to find it.
>
Doesn't logically follow. The difficulty with their search is not
that it failed to find Asimov's or Silverberg's works. The difficulty
is it found _too much_.
In general, sites with unauthorized works fell into three categories:
1) Pure pirate site, main purpose being to share infringing files.
2) A personal site where the owner didn't know it wasn't okay to post
a few stories to share.
3) Large, non-pirate sites with small amounts of pirate material,
where some one user put up pirated files against site policies.
#2s & 3s were usually cooperative, and would remove material just for
having it pointed out. #3s would often boot the user (their choice,
for policy violations).
#1s usually responded indignantly, uncooperatively, or not at all.
They would usually be as unhelpful as possible. (Well, yeah, hosting
infringing material is what they _do_.) When I was tasked with
dealing with that, the usual approach, after they proved unhelpful,
was to go up the chain to their network provider -- who would usually
act like #3, and tell them to clean up or boot them.
Note that if a whole pirate site went away, or all files posted by
some user on a legit site, that would usually mean some non-infringing
files went away too. The horror! Yes, a pirate might post a public
domain work, like H.G.Wells', along with the corpus of Asimov's
works. They might even have a copy of a Doctorow story there, along
with all of Heinlein's works. When the responsible party (e.g. their
ISP etc.) decided their user wasn't taking appropriate action
themselves, and booted them, guess what, out went the non-infringing
files too.
Scribd, when it was first reported and approached, looked and acted
exactly like a #1. They entirely ignored my first messages to them.
Once I got them to respond, they stonewalled. Nobody had ever heard
of them, it was in no way apparent they were a legitimate business.
Did scribd act like a typical #3, and say, whoa, these users you've
pointed out to us, they're posting material against our policies,
we'll tell them to clean up or remove them? No, they acted like they
realized their business model _was_ largely driven by posting
infringing files, and the did their best to stick up for the pirates.
So we kinda assumed they were a pirate site. Walk like a pirate site,
talk like a pirate site... harrrr.
But they cried to the EFF and Doctorow to save them, who used their
massive podium to advance their anti-copyright agenda, which worked
very well for them. Scribd still hosts plenty of pirate material, and
still gives lip-service to stopping it. (They give lip-service in the
hopes they can attract VC money and do an IPO and get millions of
dollars, for which they have to look like they're not outright
pirates.) There was a post in the SFWA private newsgroups just the
other day by an author saying, hey, look how much pirate material they
have for me, and so&so, and so&so. A quick search shows they still
have infringing material from Asimov, Heinlein, etc.
But as I said upstream, there will be false positives and false
negatives, and which is more important to someone is generally
proportional to where they fall on the copyright liberal/conservative
spectrum. Of course, saying there should never _never_ NEVER be an
error that removes a non-infringing work, not even a unknown redundant
copy on a backwater site that gets restored promptly... that marks
someone as really _really_ REALLY far to the copyright liberal side
(as in, pirate-friendly).
That's a political stance. Fair enough. Free world. If having that
political stance means everything else I've ever done or ever will do
is tainted to that person, I think that's amazingly silly and closed-
minded, but well, c'est la vie.
aburt
You're kidding, right?
You err in not reading the preface, that there is ALWAYS the
*possibility* for errors. To err is human. You err in not
understanding the point I was making, that you have to decide which
kind of error you would prefer -- "no error" is not an option, unless
you're a deity, I guess. (By your logic I would have to be god-like
to be incapable of making any error... I suppose I should thank you
for the compliment... :) but it isn't accurate.)
You probably also illustrate my point, that the more strident someone
is about the unacceptability of removing a non-infringing work, the
more anti-copyright they are.
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
>
> But as I said upstream, there will be false positives and false
> negatives, and which is more important to someone is generally
> proportional to where they fall on the copyright liberal/conservative
> spectrum.
No. You're making the same mistake people make in regular political
discussions. You're constructing a simple two-dimensional graph from
what is a vastly more complex issue, and saying "You take this postion,
you're on THAT side".
I do not fit on your puny graph.
> Of course, saying there should never _never_ NEVER be an
> error that removes a non-infringing work,
I'm saying there should never, EVER be a LEGAL DOCUMENT/NOTIFICATION
filed by an individual (e.g., a Mr. Burt) in which that individual has
not, in fact, ascertained for certain that the target against which he
is filing is a legitimate one. Not "Well, SOME of what I'm targeting I'm
sure is what I want", but "THAT one. There. THAT is illegal. And THAT
one. Take THOSE off."
This is not a difficult demand. It is a simple, direct requirement for
anyone who's stepping into a legal arena. You don't walk into a
courtroom and accuse people of other crimes in a sort of generalized
shotgun way. If you DO attempt such a thing, you'll end up paying all
sorts of nasty penalties.
not even a unknown redundant
> copy on a backwater site that gets restored promptly... that marks
> someone as really _really_ REALLY far to the copyright liberal side
> (as in, pirate-friendly).
>
> That's a political stance.
I am taking no "stance" here on your copyright issues; that's a
separate discussion. If you care, my own position is that copyright (A)
needs to be removed from corporate hands entirely (i.e., organizations
cannot own copyrights, only individuals) and have a clear,
non-changeable term of expiration (Life+25 years or 50 years, whichever
is shorter, for instance -- the latter condition to deal with the
potential of life-extension making people live a significant amount of
time longer than they currently do). Oh, and also remove "trademark"
from consideration in this context; none of this "yes, my copyright
expired 40 years ago, but Iconic Character(TM) is protected by my
continuous exercise, and rabid defense of, the trademark."
James A. Donald
wrote:
> IIRC, the scribd site was taking down works on request, but then other
> people were putting them back up, and scribd was leaving them up until
> somebody else requested that they come down again. This left authors
> with the onus of returning to the same site that had violated their
> rights repeatedly, and requesting yet another takedown.
You are arguing that all is fair in war, but one has an obligation to
use the most targeted means reasonably available.
Someone could create a spider to detect works on a list, and owners of
works that have this problem could request the spider operator to add
their works to the list, and authorize the operator to automatically
issue takedown notices whenever the work is re-pirated.
Then there would be no false positives, nor false negatives.
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
> On Jan 19, 9:48 am, "Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)"
> <seaw...@sgeinc.invalid.com> wrote:
>> You err in describing two types of errors and not choosing the "no
>> error" approach, in which you issue a takedown notice for a work that
>> you have VERIFIED is, in fact, infringing. This is the appropriate and
>> proper method for doing a legal notification. "We have determined that
>> this specific work infringes, and that we are, in fact, empowered and
>> directed to act in this case. Take it down."
>>
>> This method avoids false positives AND false negatives. It does, of
>> course, require a bit more work on the side of the person doing the
>> notifications.
>>
>> --
>> Sea Wasp
>> /^\
>> ;;;
>> Live Journal:http://seawasp.livejournal.com
>
> You're kidding, right?
>
> You err in not reading the preface, that there is ALWAYS the
> *possibility* for errors. To err is human.
To avoid errors is the responsibility of the person making charges,
however. Yes, there will be errors made, sometimes, through no fault of
someone else. But the GOAL should be "No errors", and under no
circumstances is it excusable to begin a legal proceeding in which no
significant effort has been made to AVOID such errors. It's one thing to
hand in a list of, say, 10,000 infringements and discover "whoops, I
missed deleting that one", versus "I removed these three guys that I
know are high profile AND not targeted, and maybe a few more, but
there's almost certainly others in there that either don't care or that
I don't have authority over, but what the hell, let's do it anyway."
>
> You probably also illustrate my point, that the more strident someone
> is about the unacceptability of removing a non-infringing work, the
> more anti-copyright they are.
And you are, of course, wrong. I favor copyright. In a clearly
delineated way discussed in another posting. I make money from writing,
after all. But current instantiations of copyright are not good.
aburt
>
> aburt <ababpub...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >How is it relevant that an entirely
> > > different copyright dispute occurred between Doctorow and Ursula K. Le
> > > Guin?
>
> > I didn't bring that up.
>
> Uh, what? Yes you did. You pointed people to this page:
>
> http://www.aburt.com/scribd.ht
>
> Said page has a *huge* section discussing the Doctorow/Le Guin flap.
By that token, I "brought up" everything else on the Internet because
it's all linked, and you know, you could have followed a link from
here to there to.... Really, I didn't bring up Le Guin, and had no
intent or desire to do so. Just because one thing is on a page with
something else... Really. (But who cares? If you want to talk about
it, I'm willing.)
>
> I don't want to start a long, drawn-out argument so I'm just going to
> leave most of this be. However, I want to leave you with one more
> thought:
>
> Your big question in your last message was whether I support an author's
> right to determine who makes copies of their work. I submit to you that
> this right covers both negative *and* positive authorization. In other
> words, copyright not only allows an author to prohibit another from
> making a copy, but also allows an author to *permit* copying. By issuing
> these mistaken takedown notices, you violated that right for the authors
> in question. Perhaps not legally, but morally.
The law does exactly that: It permits an author to decide how/when/
who should be able to make copies. It is both "negative and
positive", as you say, at the same time. By the author having 100%
control over that, they determine it. (Within lots of boundaries,
like Fair Use, public domain etc.)
Doctorow did exactly what you say, as I'm sure you know; he told
people it was okay to copy that book. (Now, as an interesting
digression, I notice he hasn't given that explicit copy-at-will
permission to ALL his works... hmmmmm.)
That's not the issue. I certainly had no *intent* to cause his work
to be blocked, however briefly. That his work was blocked was an
accident.
So the pertinent question devolves to what I posted upstream: There
will always be a potential for error, so which kind of error do you
want to steer toward?
And I notice you didn't answer my question. :) Do you believe an
author has the right to decide whether to release free copies of their
work, or is it okay for others to decide to make copies without the
author's consent?
>
> I'm sure I won't convince you. You appear to have decided that anyone
> who disagrees with you is a "copyright liberal" whose opinion contains
> no merit, but it's worth a shot.
I make it a habit to argue only when I'm thoroughly sure of the logic
behind my position. I'm always open to new logic, but it has to be
100% sound logic. I've not heard any logic yet that tells me it's
okay for Person A to write a book and Person B, without A's consent
and outside the permitted laws, decide to shotgun copies of it around
the Internet for free. Yes, I think that's wrong.
Not just morally, but because of the devaluing effect it has on the
quality of literature. The trend line started by setting the value of
novels to $0 is that eventually what gets written will be worth that.
If you want quality, you have to support it.
aburt
wrote:
> In article
> <1b885e58-877a-40fb-9be5-ad91747c7...@f12g2000yqn.googlegroups.com>,
>
> aburt <ababpub...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > (Saying there are alternate, non-writing ways to earn money as a
> > writer is self-contradictory. It's simple economics: Value writing
> > at $0, and that's the quality you'll get.)
>
> The fact that there are indirect ways of earning money as a writer isn't
> self-contradictory, and it is of some importance if, as I think likely,
> copyright law becomes increasingly unenforceable for technological
> reasons. Quite a lot of literature was produced prior to the first
> copyright law, and, more recently, authors--Twain, for example--got
> quite a lot of their income in indirect ways.
>
> --
> Author of
> _Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World_,
> Cambridge University Press.
The general problem with the non-indirect ways are (a) they aren't
suitable for everyone (not every writer is a good public speaker, for
example); (b) often an order of magnitude less money, meaning they
aren't really replacing the income from writing, they're just a straw
concept people can point to and feel good; and (c) they aren't about
WRITING.
It may well be that technology kills fiction writing as an income
source, or greatly reduces the number of writers who can make or hope
to make income from it. That would simply be sad. Could happen, I
don't deny it -- but sad.
aburt
wrote:
> In article <Ps6dnVkU6MUXeMjWnZ2dnUVZ_qudn...@posted.mtasolutions>,
> Bill Swears <wswe...@gci.net> wrote:
>
> > Peter Knutsen wrote:
> > > On 19/01/2010 06:37, Bill Swears wrote:
> > >> We just recently sort of halted a massive exodus from this newsgroup,
> > >> caused by exactly the sort of incendiary personal attacks Aburt is
> > >> defending against. I don't think his initial post was worth more than
> > >> "Sorry, it's against our FAQ to advertise here."
>
> > > Since Aburt ran for president of the SFWA a year or two ago, and since
> > > the Scribd issue happened while he was vice president, that part of the
> > > thread is *extremely* relevant.
>
> > Yes, the issue was. The fact that his initial post had nothing to do
> > with that, yet the thread was immediately derailed into the scribd
> > conversation, was an attack, and OT to this thread. does aburt now have
> > to stay off of the intertubes forever, because of an explosion at SFWA?
>
> I think part of what derailed it in that direction was Burt's
> self-advertisement--his post designed to show what a good person he was,
> hence why we shouldn't have reservations about his attempt to recruit
> people here for his forum.
>
> --
> Author of
> _Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World_,
> Cambridge University Press.
To be honest it's because I had a feeling I should say something to
try to get a fair hearing before someone said something irrelevant
like "Oh, the abusive nasty nogood Andrew Burt who attacked a poor
defenseless pirate site and blocked one of Doctorow's books, nothing
he can ever do is valid or useful, he's evil evil evil kill him kill
kill kill!" And, well, what do you know, I was right. :)
Totally absurd reaction, but predicable.
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
> To be honest it's because I had a feeling I should say something to
> try to get a fair hearing before someone said something irrelevant
> like "Oh, the abusive nasty nogood Andrew Burt who attacked a poor
> defenseless pirate site and blocked one of Doctorow's books, nothing
> he can ever do is valid or useful, he's evil evil evil kill him kill
> kill kill!" And, well, what do you know, I was right. :)
Haven't seen THAT reaction here. Perhaps you've been away from Abusenet
too long and can't recognize the difference between caution and dredging
up old crimes for a good ol' time, and ACTUAL hatred, abuse, and
revilement.
aburt
<seaw...@sgeinc.invalid.com> wrote:
> aburt wrote:
>
> > But as I said upstream, there will be false positives and false
> > negatives, and which is more important to someone is generally
> > proportional to where they fall on the copyright liberal/conservative
> > spectrum.
>
> No. You're making the same mistake people make in regular political
> discussions. You're constructing a simple two-dimensional graph from
> what is a vastly more complex issue, and saying "You take this postion,
> you're on THAT side".
I disagre... in this case it's generally true. Abstractions are never
perfect, but often accurate enough to capture they essence. This one
does. (And as for "regular political discussions", the fact that a
linear specture is nearly universally used should indicate it does
have utility.)
>
> I do not fit on your puny graph.
I offered a binary choice, which one would you pick? (In that choice
there was no middle ground, mathematically. When the universe is
divided into set S and not-S, there's no "middle". Remember your set
theory.) If an error were to happen, despite best efforts, which kind
of error should it be? Type #1 or #2?
>
> > Of course, saying there should never _never_ NEVER be an
> > error that removes a non-infringing work,
>
> I'm saying there should never, EVER be a LEGAL DOCUMENT/NOTIFICATION
It doesn't matter what adjectives you place on it. The question is
what happens **IF** there is an error. Saying "there shall not be an
error" isn't the point. Humans do make errors. Demanding 100% error-
free in all cases for all eternity simply doesn't exist.
> This is not a difficult demand.
Actually, it's QUITE difficult to determine exactly which items are
infringing, get them all (missing none of them), and including nothing
that shouldn't be there.
I've done it, and know how much work is involved.
So I challenge YOU to do so, so you can see how much work is
involved. I challenge you to visit scribd.org, today, and identify by
URL every document on their site that is an infriging work by, say,
Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. You have to identify them all --
no missing any -- and your list cannot include anything they didn't
write.
Post your results here so we can check your work. Remember, you set
the bar yourself for a 0% error rate!!
Proof's in the puttin' on statements like "this is not difficult"...
because it is, indeed, quite time consuming.
(And I have a funny feeling you'll beg off from doing that task. But
maybe you'll surprise me.)
> I am taking no "stance" here on your copyright issues; that's a
> separate discussion. If you care, my own position is that copyright (A)
> needs to be removed from corporate hands entirely (i.e., organizations
> cannot own copyrights, only individuals) and have a clear,
> non-changeable term of expiration (Life+25 years or 50 years, whichever
> is shorter, for instance -- the latter condition to deal with the
> potential of life-extension making people live a significant amount of
> time longer than they currently do). Oh, and also remove "trademark"
> from consideration in this context; none of this "yes, my copyright
> expired 40 years ago, but Iconic Character(TM) is protected by my
> continuous exercise, and rabid defense of, the trademark."
That's fine, and I could go along with some of that, but it doesn't
address the core issue here: The author's right to control who makes
copies, and to deny unauthorized copies, and how easy/hard it should
be to stop them.
I agree copyright terms are waaaay too long. I favor 50 years.
I agree trademarks shouldn't be a substitute for copyrights; if
they're used for copyrighted purposes, they should last exactly as
long as the copyright.
I'm haven't thought much about whether corporations should be allowed
to own copyrights (beyond the length of time, which I think is too
long), but I'll ponder that.
(For the record, I proposed a copyright concept that was 50 years long
of complete author control like today, followed by 50 years during
which anyone could republish a work if they paid a statutorily set
royalty for doing so; the royalty would start high, at year 51 [to
encourage negotiating with the author] and sliding down to $0 at year
100, when it enters the public domain. I could be convinced that 50 &
50 aren't the right number of years, perhaps should be shorter, but I
kind of like the idea that after N years the author can't deny
publication if they get paid a fair amount, "fair" sliding downward
toward zero as the work approached public domain status. Of course,
this would require all new international treaties, so the likelihood
is about 0.)
Kurt Busiek
> On Jan 19, 12:32 pm, David Friedman <d...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com>
> wrote:
>> I think part of what derailed it in that direction was Burt's
>> self-advertisement--his post designed to show what a good person he was,
>> hence why we shouldn't have reservations about his attempt to recruit
>> people here for his forum.
>
> To be honest it's because I had a feeling I should say something to
> try to get a fair hearing before someone said something irrelevant
> like "Oh, the abusive nasty nogood Andrew Burt who attacked a poor
> defenseless pirate site and blocked one of Doctorow's books, nothing
> he can ever do is valid or useful, he's evil evil evil kill him kill
> kill kill!" And, well, what do you know, I was right. :)
>
> Totally absurd reaction, but predicable.
"This pub, this very pub we're just sittin' in, I built it, with me own
hands! But do they call me the Pubmaker? Nah! See the wall over there,
protects our town? I built it, with me own hands! But do they call me
the Wallmaker? Hell if they do. And the bridge, you know, that crosses
our river, I built it, with me own hands! But do they call me the
Bridgemaker?
But I tell ye, man! Ye fuck one goat..."
I'm not sure making a preemptive defense proves one right that one
would be attacked anyway, as opposed to bringing it on oneself as a
response to the defense. Or that the "attack" was anywhere near as
cartoony as presented.
But then, I wouldn't agree that pointing people to a page with stuff on
it and providing a link, and then reacting indignantly when people
respond to the stuff on the page as if one had brought it up is quite
the same thing as complaining that one is being accused of pointing to
the entire internet because everything's linked.
It seems to me that "I'm not the guy who brought it up" fails as an
argument when the person claiming not to have brought something up both
made a preemptive defense and pointed people directly to the page on
which the "I didn't bring it up" material resides, urging people to go
read it.
It may just be that extolling one's vortues brings on the opposing
view, and pointing people to a web-page and urging them to read it
constitutes bringing up the stuff on it. Or maybe that's just me.
aburt
> On Tue, 19 Jan 2010 08:11:06 -0900, Bill Swears <wswe...@gci.net>
For the record, I was trying to get scribd to institute something like
this. They refused. I offered them a number of suggestions on things
they could do, none of which were difficult to code up. They refused.
(They have subsequently implemented something, under threat of lawsuit
from someone else as I understand it, but it doesn't appear to work
well.)
James A. Donald
> > You are arguing that all is fair in war, but one has
> > an obligation to use the most targeted means
> > reasonably available.
> >
> > Someone could create a spider to detect works on a
> > list, and owners of works that have this problem
> > could request the spider operator to add their works
> > to the list, and authorize the operator to
> > automatically issue takedown notices whenever the
> > work is re-pirated.
> >
> > Then there would be no false positives, nor false
> > negatives.
aburt
> For the record, I was trying to get scribd to
> institute something like this.
Surely it is not scribd's job to institute something
like this. It is your job, the job of those trying to
enforce copyright.
So it sounds like you are saying that because scribd
would not do your work for you, you were DOSing them
with a spam of fake DCMA notices.
Brian M. Scott
<ababp...@gmail.com> wrote in
<news:e15aa3f4-050f-434f...@36g2000yqu.googlegroups.com>
in rec.arts.sf.written,rec.arts.sf.composition:
> On Jan 19, 1:11�pm, "Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)"
> <seaw...@sgeinc.invalid.com> wrote:
>> aburt wrote:
>>> But as I said upstream, there will be false positives
>>> and false negatives, and which is more important to
>>> someone is generally proportional to where they fall on
>>> the copyright liberal/conservative spectrum.
>> � � � � No. You're making the same mistake people make in
>> regular political discussions. You're constructing a
>> simple two-dimensional graph from what is a vastly more
>> complex issue, and saying "You take this postion, you're
>> on THAT side".
> I disagre... in this case it's generally true.
That is by no means clear.
> Abstractions are never perfect, but often accurate enough
> to capture they essence. This one does.
Nor is this.
> (And as for "regular political discussions", the fact that
> a linear specture is nearly universally used should
> indicate it does have utility.)
No, it indicates that too many people are rather
simple-minded about such things. In fact it's well-known
that a linear spectrum doesn't even come close to capturing
the range of political positions; two linear dimensions,
while still inadequate, do a much better job.
[...]
aburt
> James A. Donald <jam...@echeque.com> wrote:
>
> > > You are arguing that all is fair in war, but one has
> > > an obligation to use the most targeted means
> > > reasonably available.
>
> > > Someone could create a spider to detect works on a
> > > list, and owners of works that have this problem
> > > could request the spider operator to add their works
> > > to the list, and authorize the operator to
> > > automatically issue takedown notices whenever the
> > > work is re-pirated.
>
> > > Then there would be no false positives, nor false
> > > negatives.
>
> aburt
>
> > For the record, I was trying to get scribd to
> > institute something like this.
>
> Surely it is not scribd's job to institute something
> like this. It is your job, the job of those trying to
> enforce copyright.
Lawyers on the committee disagreed with you about that.
> So it sounds like you are saying that because scribd
> would not do your work for you, you were DOSing them
> with a spam of fake DCMA notices.
Not at all. And there was DOSing of DMCA notices, yeesh. Read the
history on the link I posted.
Bill Swears
think that the responsibility lies in the hands of the sponsoring
agency, the host site.
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
Indeed. But I only require that if you TAKE ACTION that you be correct
in your action. If you choose not to because you're uncertain, that's
fine. You're the one saying you have to get each and every one.
I'm just saying that if you file, you need to be sure that you have
determined that what you're filing on IS what you want, and that you
haven't dropped any of the ones you DID intend to file on. You can of
course decide a cutoff point, since a cutoff isn't producing "false
negatives"; you've decided where you're going to stop -- twenty works,
or one each by these five authors, or whatever.
>
> I've done it, and know how much work is involved.
>
> So I challenge YOU to do so, so you can see how much work is
> involved. I challenge you to visit scribd.org, today, and identify by
> URL every document on their site that is an infriging work by, say,
> Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. You have to identify them all --
> no missing any -- and your list cannot include anything they didn't
> write.
No, because this is not what I was discussing at all.
I said that if you file it, you should be SURE that the infringing work
does, in fact, infringe, and that you, in fact, have the right to take
action over that infringement.
By my standard, therefore, if I find ONE infringing work, and I can
identify it for sure, I could send that C&D letter.
I did not say "you must find all, and never miss any".
You should not discard any that you didn't MEAN to discard (false
negative), but if you are only looking for ones you're sure of, that
shouldn't be a problem.
>
>> I am taking no "stance" here on your copyright issues; that's a
>> separate discussion. If you care, my own position is that copyright (A)
>> needs to be removed from corporate hands entirely (i.e., organizations
>> cannot own copyrights, only individuals) and have a clear,
>> non-changeable term of expiration (Life+25 years or 50 years, whichever
>> is shorter, for instance -- the latter condition to deal with the
>> potential of life-extension making people live a significant amount of
>> time longer than they currently do). Oh, and also remove "trademark"
>> from consideration in this context; none of this "yes, my copyright
>> expired 40 years ago, but Iconic Character(TM) is protected by my
>> continuous exercise, and rabid defense of, the trademark."
>
> That's fine, and I could go along with some of that, but it doesn't
> address the core issue here: The author's right to control who makes
> copies, and to deny unauthorized copies, and how easy/hard it should
> be to stop them.
There you conflate legal issues and practicality.
You *CANNOT* stop them. This is a simple fact. All you can do, to a
greater or lesser extent, is to discourage them.
This will become more and more true, unless you permit more and more
extreme controls on the flow of information in general. If you can
actually STOP any piracy of (given author) rather than merely be a pain
in the ass to SOME of those pirating it, you'll have to be approaching,
if not actually entering, Orwellian territory.
aburt
> On Tue, 19 Jan 2010 12:58:42 -0800 (PST), aburt
Oh, the irony! I'm pretty regularly lambasted by people who have over-
trivialized views of the scribd matter who only heard one side of the
story, or who let their own political leanings on the matter color
their views of a pretty cut&dried situation. Placing that on a simple
linear scale is quite leap upwards, complexity-wise!
Between us, I'd be glad to place it onto a multi-dimensional space,
but I think few would understand it.
I'm happy to go along if you start it. Describe your ideal N-
dimensional space for this.
Though, honestly, it gets pretty repetitive, so I'd have much more fun
thinking about cool things we could have in the future (see purpose of
first post in thread). :)
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
> On Jan 19, 1:11 pm, "Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)"
> <seaw...@sgeinc.invalid.com> wrote:
>> aburt wrote:
>>
>>> But as I said upstream, there will be false positives and false
>>> negatives, and which is more important to someone is generally
>>> proportional to where they fall on the copyright liberal/conservative
>>> spectrum.
>> No. You're making the same mistake people make in regular political
>> discussions. You're constructing a simple two-dimensional graph from
>> what is a vastly more complex issue, and saying "You take this postion,
>> you're on THAT side".
>
> I disagre... in this case it's generally true. Abstractions are never
> perfect, but often accurate enough to capture they essence. This one
> does. (And as for "regular political discussions", the fact that a
> linear specture is nearly universally used should indicate it does
> have utility.)
>
>> I do not fit on your puny graph.
>
> I offered a binary choice, which one would you pick?
On this aspect of your discussion, I choose neither. You don't get to
define my axes.
Dimensional Traveler
>
> I don't think it really matters, to tell the truth. The majority of
> the copyright liberal/conservative spectrum. Those who think there
Just FYI, every time you make accusations based on this "copyright
liberal/conservative spectrum" or say someone disagrees with you because
they are part of "The Anti-Copyright Conspiracy", the more you look like
a shrilly ranting nutjob and lose credibility.
--
"The Internet lied again!"
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
He WRITES much better than Starcade, though (who performs the same
stunt, but with strident repetition and much mouth-foamery, with respect
to anime/manga over in r.a.anime.misc). And Mr. Burt actually seems to
engage in dialogue rather than simply repeat the same thing LOUDER AND
LOUDER.
Kurt Busiek
<sea...@sgeinc.invalid.com> said:
Yeah, but if it's dialogue that dismisses any view that he might have
done something wrong by ascribing it to An Agenda, then it's dialogue
without purpose, since he's not listening.
He appears to be willing to engage in dialogue about how anyone else's
approach is unworkable to his mind, and will invite people to offer up
alternatives to be knocked down, but he's still dismissing the main
complaint out of had.
Usually with some form of "That's not the point, the point is what I
want to talk about, your point is irrelevant nonsense I have defined as
such by declaring it ideoological."
James A. Donald
> So we kinda assumed they were a pirate site. Walk
> like a pirate site, talk like a pirate site... harrrr.
>
> But they cried to the EFF and Doctorow to save them,
> who used their massive podium to advance their
> anti-copyright agenda, which worked very well for
> them. Scribd still hosts plenty of pirate material,
> and still gives lip-service to stopping it.
You are not fighting bittorrent and amule, because
bittorrent and amule are too tough.
So the people you are attacking are your allies, not
your enemies, because the real enemies of copyright are
too tough. That is why you spammed scribd with fake
DCMA takedown notices. If you had tried spamming
thepiratebay with fake DCMA notices, their spam filter
would have automatically dumped them in the spam folder,
and in the unlikely event a human saw them, that human
would have added you to their blacklist for being
insufficiently entertaining
The fact that you spammed scribd with fake DCMA notices
shows you knew they were an ally, not an enemy.
aburt
<seaw...@sgeinc.invalid.com> wrote:
> aburt wrote:
> > On Jan 19, 1:11 pm, "Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)"
> > <seaw...@sgeinc.invalid.com> wrote:
> >> aburt wrote:
>
> Indeed. But I only require that if you TAKE ACTION that you be correct
> in your action. If you choose not to because you're uncertain, that's
> fine. You're the one saying you have to get each and every one.
By this statement, you do at least answer my question: You favor
error type #1.
(My mandate, at the time, called for error type #2.)
(See upstream post for definitions.)
> I'm just saying that if you file, you need to be sure that you have
> determined that what you're filing on IS what you want, and that you
> haven't dropped any of the ones you DID intend to file on. You can of
> course decide a cutoff point, since a cutoff isn't producing "false
> negatives"; you've decided where you're going to stop -- twenty works,
> or one each by these five authors, or whatever.
Exactly what someone would say who favors error type #1 over #2.
> > I've done it, and know how much work is involved.
>
> > So I challenge YOU to do so, so you can see how much work is
> > involved. I challenge you to visit scribd.org, today, and identify by
> > URL every document on their site that is an infriging work by, say,
> > Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. You have to identify them all --
> > no missing any -- and your list cannot include anything they didn't
> > write.
>
> No, because this is not what I was discussing at all.
Yes, actually it is. I was tasked with a situation calling for this.
The task wasn't "get some of the pirated material off scribd" it was
"get the pirated material off scribd". And, historically, in general,
that kind of removal would usually have a site owner (e.g. ISP) remove
non-infringing material too. Error type #2.
>
> I said that if you file it, you should be SURE that the infringing work
Never filed a DMCA request, so from that standpoint, your point is
moot. Bear in mind this was in the midst of a long, contentious
negotiation. They chose to consider what I sent them a list of works
to take down. I never demanded they take down the works on that
list. Blame Scribd for taking the wrong works down. It was their
decision.
> I did not say "you must find all, and never miss any".
That's the constraint I was working under, so it's fair game for me to
suggest you try operating under it also, when you suggest I operate
under yours.
> You should not discard any that you didn't MEAN to discard (false
> negative), but if you are only looking for ones you're sure of, that
> shouldn't be a problem.
Seriously, take a stab at finding them: It's not as easy as it
sounds.
> You *CANNOT* stop them. This is a simple fact. All you can do, to a
> greater or lesser extent, is to discourage them.
Now that's probably a true statement. The purpose of the former SFWA
e-piracy was not to entirely eliminate piracy, but to try to minimize
it to as low a level as was practical.
Scribd looked like a pure pirate site, so I approached them as one.
They did nothing to convince me otherwise, I'll tell you that.
> This will become more and more true, unless you permit more and more
> extreme controls on the flow of information in general. If you can
> actually STOP any piracy of (given author) rather than merely be a pain
> in the ass to SOME of those pirating it, you'll have to be approaching,
> if not actually entering, Orwellian territory.
Today there's virtually no dollars lost to ebook piracy. The question
really is, at the point where ebooks are worth real money to authors,
and piracy is so easy, what do you do?
Give up? Say, heck with it, I just won't write a novel since the
pirates will float it around for free so I won't earn much from it?
Publishers want to stay in business earning money, so they'll try to
do ever more Draconian ways to stop piracy. Those ways will generally
be nasty to readers, like intrusive DRM (which I loathe), books locked
to specific devices, etc. Yechh.
I would much prefer it if authors and publishers felt satisfied that
the efforts to fight piracy by removing it after it appeared were
sufficient, and that there was thus no need for DRM and so on. Note:
It need not BE sufficient, just that authors/publishers FEEL it is
sufficient. If they FEEL they are not losing money and their rights
(rights are incredibly important to authors), then they won't need to
seek those Orwellian measures you talk of.
I'm as against those Orwellian and Draconian measures as you are. But
authors/publishers need to feel _enough_ is being done to stop piracy,
or they'll do more.
Especially once ebooks are worth real money -- a day I think is coming
rather soon. I think 5-15 years at the most. Hey, I already read
about 99% of fiction on my Blackberry, and have for, what, over five
years now.
I actually think Doctorow & Co. are a bit of the Luddites in this
mix. In discussions with Cory in the past, and with others who swing
that way, they've said No, they really _don't_ think ebooks will ever
be serious money. They think people will keep reading primarily on
tree-paper.
I think that's nuts. I think once we get an inexpensive device that
hits people just the right way, it'll be a mad rush to reading novels
digitally. The Kindle has already shown that it can be mainstream to
read books digitally. I'm convinced (and I'll eat some paper if I'm
wrong) that reading digitally is the way of the future.
At which point (circling back), the piracy equation changes. Then a
pirate copy _is_ the real item, not a poor digital substitute for a
physical paper product. (At that point, it would be foolish to give
it away free, because you'd be giving the _real thing_ away free, not
a lesser-used format of it.) So we've got a few years to figure out
how to stop the publishers and authors from getting in a real tizzy
about piracy, but social thought patterns of readers are already
setting up like concrete ("piracy is, sorta, y'know, okay, wink wink,
no harm no foul"). Time is running out to find a solution that's
acceptable to most on both sides of the debate.
Honestly -- I'm not a hardass anti-pirate guy. I'm looking ahead to a
probable future, and trying to steer it toward a decent outcome, where
the cure isn't worse than the problem. Would I have done things
differently with scribd knowing what I know now? Of course.
Anyway, I'm out of the equation now, except as an observer, answerer
of question about the past, and muse about the future.
But it's really absurd for people to keep up with the knee-jerk
reactions if I post something on some random topic and people say
"oooh, scribd guy, everything he says is useless." Really absurd.
aburt
I'm not making any accusations; everyone has a right to their
beliefs. I'm commenting that people view things through a lens based
on their "political" leaning. I would hope that people understand
that concept enough to realize that just because someone else is in a
different place on the spectrum than themselves that they can still
have valid opinions. (Especially about entirely off-topic matters.)
The level of discourse is sometimes akin to, "Ooooh, you're a
Republican and I'm a Democrat, so your statement that it might snow
tomorrow is pure b***s***." Really, how absurd and childish.
Really -- this thread began as a topic about things we wish for the
future, and what did others turn it into almost immediately?
aburt
I still find it interesting that people have little interest in
talking about things they'd like to see in the future.
(Someone mentioned that was well covered by other forums, but when I
asked where those were, for links, nobody came up with any. Are there
any? I looked a little and didn't find any obvious ones, which is why
I started one. If it's redundant, no biggie, it can wither, it
doesn't take up any resources.)
But what's the block that keeps people from tossing out ideas for
things they'd like to see in the future?
I've usually found SF folks in a group to LOVE to muse about things
they'd like to see in the future.
I figured when I posted maybe some folks would avoid the forum I
created and just post here (and I'd carry their ideas over), but we
had, what, one in that realm? One word, "robocars." Nothing else
people want?
Now I would prefer, since there are multiple input channels on this,
to keep the posts over on that aforementioned forum [
http://newnewforum.com/viewforum.php?f=26 ] but even posting here...
nobody has any dreams of what the future might hold?
I sometimes feel people have lost their imagination for the future,
from a combination of the "now" being so interesting and having much
of what was previously envisioned for the future ("now already is the
future"), and some element of future burnout, or dismay at the present
not being what they'd hoped for, or depression that the future might
be worse so better not think about it..... ??? Thoughts? Is there
no future left to dream about?
aburt
Begging pardon, but there was no spamming of DMCA notices, fake or
otherwise... Your comment is predicated on something that simply did
not happen.
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
> On Jan 19, 2:41 pm, "Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)"
>> This will become more and more true, unless you permit more and more
>> extreme controls on the flow of information in general. If you can
>> actually STOP any piracy of (given author) rather than merely be a pain
>> in the ass to SOME of those pirating it, you'll have to be approaching,
>> if not actually entering, Orwellian territory.
>
> Today there's virtually no dollars lost to ebook piracy. The question
> really is, at the point where ebooks are worth real money to authors,
> and piracy is so easy, what do you do?
Subscriptions, patrons, copyright that allows you to slam anyone who
does it (but that generally won't be applied except in egregious cases),
ignore it for the most part.
Obscurity is the enemy. As I've pointed out time and again to Starcade
on this general subject (his subject is anime piracy, but the same
issues apply), iTunes has *PROVEN* that people will pay money to get
something that they could also get easily for free. Most of the stuff on
iTunes -- and a lot of stuff not on it -- is available for free, and it
ain't hard to find. Some of the better-disguised Napster reincarnations
charge some piddly fee per month, but you could download a hundred times
the value of those in iTunes fees in a couple days.
Yet people USE iTunes. They use it for a LOT of things. Because people
WILL pay money out of their own pocket for stuff they like, as long as
the price is reasonable. CDs are dying because they are terribly
overpriced, and they're all-or-nothing deals. iTunes lets me actually
buy the exact songs I want, and not waste my money on stuff I DON'T want.
Sure, you NEED copyright so that someone who tries to make money from
your stuff -- especially someone high-profile enough to actually, you
know, MAKE money instead of basically pay off his online fees -- can be
hammered HARD, and made an example of, so that it keeps piracy to a dull
roar.
But you don't need to be particularly worried about it.
The Baen Free Library has ALSO proven this -- in the book market
directly. People can get all those titles for free. Yet they ALSO still
BUY them. Sometimes they're buying MORE of them after the book's
available in the Free Library than they were before, when the book was
newer and NOT freely available.
>
> Give up? Say, heck with it, I just won't write a novel since the
> pirates will float it around for free so I won't earn much from it?
No, I write because I write. Making money is a wonderful side bonus,
but I've been writing since I was 6. I suspect this is true of most
fiction writers.
> Publishers want to stay in business earning money, so they'll try to
> do ever more Draconian ways to stop piracy.
Or maybe figure out clever ways to make money regardless of it, because
it's not actually nearly as damaging as some people think it will be.
> Especially once ebooks are worth real money -- a day I think is coming
> rather soon. I think 5-15 years at the most. Hey, I already read
> about 99% of fiction on my Blackberry, and have for, what, over five
> years now.
15 years, maybe. I've been reading stuff on computers of one sort or
another since 1976, but there still isn't a reasonable substitute for a
real book. Kindle is a nice try, but it's about a light-year short.
They need to add in two major features before it works for me as a real
book replacement, and those two features require more technology
development than you'll see in a mere 5 years (I actually see some of
the associated R&D work).
>
> I actually think Doctorow & Co. are a bit of the Luddites in this
> mix. In discussions with Cory in the past, and with others who swing
> that way, they've said No, they really _don't_ think ebooks will ever
> be serious money. They think people will keep reading primarily on
> tree-paper.
>
> I think that's nuts.
There, we agree.
I also think that eventually much of the WoW/EverQuest/etc. stuff is
going to reach the point where it can merge with the movie field, and
entertainment is going to change drastically when it does. Again, a few
major technological hurdles have yet to be overcome, but when they are...
>
> At which point (circling back), the piracy equation changes. Then a
> pirate copy _is_ the real item, not a poor digital substitute for a
> physical paper product.
Which is the situation with respect to music and movies, and yet they
survive. The MPAA and RIAA have done their frothing-mouthed best to try
and stop it ALL, and failed MISERABLY, and yet -- strangely -- people
still make money (some of them MORE money) from music, create movies and
use Hollywood Accounting to hide the fact that THOSE make money, and so
on. The pirates post a brand-new film for download days after premiere
(sometimes BEFORE), and yet, a year later, a hundred million dollars
worth of DVDs are purchased. iTunes flourishes despite all the other
easily found pirate sites where their wares are free.
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
> Anyway, returning to the original topic of this thread...
>
> I still find it interesting that people have little interest in
> talking about things they'd like to see in the future.
>
> (Someone mentioned that was well covered by other forums, but when I
> asked where those were, for links, nobody came up with any. Are there
> any? I looked a little and didn't find any obvious ones, which is why
> I started one. If it's redundant, no biggie, it can wither, it
> doesn't take up any resources.)
>
> But what's the block that keeps people from tossing out ideas for
> things they'd like to see in the future?
My books as movies. That I could make myself, in my home, without
needing to spend tens of thousands (let alone millions) of dollars to
make. This including all of the actors, sound effects, sets, etc., done
by me, needing no more technical knowledge than I currently have.
We've come a long way down that road. But there's a very, very long way
to go (at least two major breakthroughs needed).
Full-immersion VR with customizable interface.
Cheap space travel (as in, "Why don't we take the kids to the Moon
Palace this week, dear?").
Fusion, or at least commonly-in-use fission, power.
Solar Powersats.
FTL.
Extraterrestrial intelligence.
Cybernetics that REALLY replace the lost limbs/organs.
Long-life treatments.
Daleks. (Well, okay, maybe not. But everything IS better with Daleks!)
James A. Donald
> > The fact that there are indirect ways of earning
aburt <ababp...@gmail.com>
> The general problem with the non-indirect ways are (a)
> they aren't suitable for everyone (not every writer is
> a good public speaker, for example); (b) often an
> order of magnitude less money, meaning they aren't
> really replacing the income from writing, they're just
> a straw concept people can point to and feel good; and
> (c) they aren't about WRITING.
Let us look at what has been happening with comics.
Compare dead tree comics, with web comics, web comics
being available for free, with the author earning money
by indirect means.
Dead tree comics merely endlessly repeat what sold forty
years ago. Web comics have an enormous amount of novel
material, they are dynamic, creative, and there are lots
of them.
The problem is that the gatekeepers for dead tree comics
only publish what they know will sell, and they only
know it will sell if the exact same thing was sold over
and over and over again for the past sixty years.
We are seeing the same thing in science fiction, though
not to the same extreme. Today's Analog magazine is a
second rate plagiarism of older Analog magazines.
Compare and contrast with the freshness and novelty of
science fiction web comics such as
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php
http://freefall.purrsia.com/default.htm
aburt
<seaw...@sgeinc.invalid.com> wrote:
> aburt wrote:
> > On Jan 19, 2:41 pm, "Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)"
> >> This will become more and more true, unless you permit more and more
> >> extreme controls on the flow of information in general. If you can
> >> actually STOP any piracy of (given author) rather than merely be a pain
> >> in the ass to SOME of those pirating it, you'll have to be approaching,
> >> if not actually entering, Orwellian territory.
>
> > Today there's virtually no dollars lost to ebook piracy. The question
> > really is, at the point where ebooks are worth real money to authors,
> > and piracy is so easy, what do you do?
>
> Subscriptions, patrons, copyright that allows you to slam anyone who
> does it (but that generally won't be applied except in egregious cases),
> ignore it for the most part.
It will be worth trying, but subscription services have long had
trouble getting started with music, for example. Patronage is a dicey
moral idea, in that what gets written would be what the patron asks
for, which could get generally based on some agenda the patron wants
to advance. Slam-if-egregious, well, Scribd was considered egregious
(just FYI), so there we go. Ignoring it appears to be too frightening
to publishers with real money on the line (e.g. RIAA, MPAA; book
publishers aren't there yet since there's not [yet] much money in
ebooks) -- so they want _something_ done. (My hope, as I said, was to
chart a course that would ultimately deter publishers and authors from
demanding Draconian measures. Silly me.)
> Obscurity is the enemy.
It's absolutely a real enemy, I 100% agree. (One of the things I
tried to do in SFWA was explain how pirate channels could be useful
marketing. It was a hard sell.)
However, and this is something that a lot of infringing site folks
have a really hard time grasping, many authors are amazingly
protective and sensitive about their rights.
Anecdote: Years back I was negotiating a settlement with
Bookshare.org, when SFWAns were livid about perceived piracy there.
Bookshare.org is a "ebooks for the blind" outfit. Before I got
involved they brought the founder in to address a SFWA business
meeting in San Jose, and they totally sandbagged him, yelling at him,
cursing, it was really ugly. Seriously, SFWA attacked and wanted to
sue a guy providing ebooks to the blind. The assumption was that this
was a major piracy site masquerading as a legit site. This was not
long after Harlan Ellison was going after AOL/etc. The SFWA climate
was severely anti-piracy. As CS prof. and CEO of a tech company I
knew something about what the Bookshare guy was trying to do, and the
techincal side of things, so I volunteered to try to investigate if he
was legit, and if so to broker a peace, before they sued his ass off.
They were really hot to go after him. The then-president agreed to
let me have a go at it. The CEO of Bookshare was understandably
skeptical of me (especially after his warm reception in person), but
we got to talking, and wonder of wonders, we worked out a deal.
The major stumbling block for him was grasping how important control
of rights was to authors. It couldn't be true that authors wanted
control more than anything; just control, the right to revoke a book
from his ebooks-for-the-blind program if they wanted to. (He claimed
the right to scan books without permission. [Sound familiar?].) He
also had some questionable entry requirements for users (we were able
to get a pet signed up) and some questionable security. At the end of
the day, I brokered a peace, I got him to make some changes to his
security, and, as I said, the biggest sticking point for him, I got
him to allow authors to remove a book if they chose. It was
critically important to them -- in *principle* -- to have that right,
whether they ever used it or not. Jim's a good guy, and he finally
gave ground on that point. (FYI, no author ever invoked that right.
They simply wanted the control, not to have their rights taken away.)
Anyway -- that's still an issue for many authors. To have the
control, not to let someone else decide "free ebooks are good for you,
so I'm spreading yours around".
So, yes, obscurity may be a very real enemy, but, for many authors,
control is more important to them. That is their right under the law,
too, so whether any one of us might think it's a good idea, or less
important than obscurity, it's their right.
(Witness what so much of the Google Books settlement is about.
Rights.)
Any solution to the present/future piracy problem will have to address
that, or there will be pushes for more Draconian measures, no matter
how unreasonable the reasons for them may seem to others.
>As I've pointed out time and again to Starcade
> on this general subject (his subject is anime piracy, but the same
> issues apply), iTunes has *PROVEN* that people will pay money to get
> something that they could also get easily for free. Most of the stuff on
> iTunes -- and a lot of stuff not on it -- is available for free, and it
> ain't hard to find. Some of the better-disguised Napster reincarnations
> charge some piddly fee per month, but you could download a hundred times
> the value of those in iTunes fees in a couple days.
Yet the music industry says they're not making as much as they used to
overall. I honestly don't know how much they're losing compared to if
piracy didn't exist. From my own surveys, my hunch is they're down
maybe 20-30% overall.
If that's accurate, it's one of those troublesome numbers: Not enough
to die for, but not so little as to ignore it, and worth fighting
for. (And that's how they've acted, too.)
> Yet people USE iTunes. They use it for a LOT of things. Because people
> WILL pay money out of their own pocket for stuff they like, as long as
> the price is reasonable. CDs are dying because they are terribly
> overpriced, and they're all-or-nothing deals. iTunes lets me actually
> buy the exact songs I want, and not waste my money on stuff I DON'T want.
I think it boils down to people are mostly honest, 70-80% of the
time. (I recall there was a sort of study, where a guy put a price on
hot dogs maybe it was, and a sign told people to put money in the jar,
but he didn't ask for the money or scream "thief!" if someone ran
without paying -- and he got a 70-80% pay rate. Wish I could find a
reference for that.)
The question is whether losing 20-30% of your revenue is acceptable,
and how far to go to avoid losing it.
>
> Sure, you NEED copyright so that someone who tries to make money from
> your stuff -- especially someone high-profile enough to actually, you
> know, MAKE money instead of basically pay off his online fees -- can be
> hammered HARD, and made an example of, so that it keeps piracy to a dull
> roar.
The other aspect is the slow devaluation, that something available for
$0 gets perceived as _worth_ $0, so eventually people don't want to
pay for it, or pay much. Resulting in less production, and lower
quality.
I remember seeing a news article about how there are fewer Mega Stars
in music these days, like Michael Jackson. Many more mini-stars, but
not the giants. That's the kind of result than could (I'm not saying
it _is_, but _could_) come from the slow erosion of perceived value
from ubiquitous free copies.
On the flip side, I don't think you can really _stop_ piracy, so the
real question is how to survive as best you can. And avoid really
nasty reactions, like ugly DRM.
> The Baen Free Library has ALSO proven this -- in the book market
> directly. People can get all those titles for free. Yet they ALSO still
> BUY them. Sometimes they're buying MORE of them after the book's
> available in the Free Library than they were before, when the book was
> newer and NOT freely available.
Love what Eric Flint got them to do at Baen.
It is, however, predicated on ebooks being only a small percent of
sales. If ebooks become sizable in sales, giving them away free to
spur sales of paper books kinda ceases to work.
> > Publishers want to stay in business earning money, so they'll try to
> > do ever more Draconian ways to stop piracy.
>
> Or maybe figure out clever ways to make money regardless of it, because
> it's not actually nearly as damaging as some people think it will be.
But you also have the perception problems among authors/publishers to
address. That's not trivial. Perception is often more powerful than
reality. <Laughs with irony, thinking of how this thread has gone>
> > Especially once ebooks are worth real money -- a day I think is coming
> > rather soon. I think 5-15 years at the most. Hey, I already read
> > about 99% of fiction on my Blackberry, and have for, what, over five
> > years now.
>
> 15 years, maybe. I've been reading stuff on computers of one sort or
> another since 1976, but there still isn't a reasonable substitute for a
> real book. Kindle is a nice try, but it's about a light-year short.
Yes, yes, and yes. Innovation comes fast sometimes, thus my "5 to"
lower bound. DVDs came out suddenly and overtook VHS in a mere three
years, so the change can come in the night.
Everyone who thinks ebooks will overtake print books, within say 5-15
years, raise their hand...?
(I'm always curious how widespread the thought has gotten.)
> > I actually think Doctorow & Co. are a bit of the Luddites in this
> > mix. In discussions with Cory in the past, and with others who swing
> > that way, they've said No, they really _don't_ think ebooks will ever
> > be serious money. They think people will keep reading primarily on
> > tree-paper.
>
> > I think that's nuts.
>
> There, we agree.
Good note to end this on.
aburt
On Jan 19, 5:02 pm, "Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)"
<seaw...@sgeinc.invalid.com> wrote:
> aburt wrote:
> > Anyway, returning to the original topic of this thread...
>
> > I still find it interesting that people have little interest in
> > talking about things they'd like to see in the future.
>
> > (Someone mentioned that was well covered by other forums, but when I
> > asked where those were, for links, nobody came up with any. Are there
> > any? I looked a little and didn't find any obvious ones, which is why
> > I started one. If it's redundant, no biggie, it can wither, it
> > doesn't take up any resources.)
>
> > But what's the block that keeps people from tossing out ideas for
> > things they'd like to see in the future?
>
> My books as movies. That I could make myself, in my home, without
> needing to spend tens of thousands (let alone millions) of dollars to
> make. This including all of the actors, sound effects, sets, etc., done
> by me, needing no more technical knowledge than I currently have.
(Ah, now we're talking! Mind if I copy these over to the other
forum?)
You're thinking software that could easily create digital actors/
etc.? (Not my area of expertise at all, but it sounds cool)
> Full-immersion VR with customizable interface.
Yup.
>
> Cheap space travel (as in, "Why don't we take the kids to the Moon
> Palace this week, dear?").
For sure. I've always put "Vacations on the moon" in the same
sentence with "Flying cars" (now willing to settle for self-driving
cars) and "Robot maids" (not settling there).
> Fusion, or at least commonly-in-use fission, power.
Yes, for me, a "Mr. Fusion" from Back to the Future.
> Solar Powersats.
Some of the tethered dirigible ideas are cool too.
> FTL.
Must have.
> Extraterrestrial intelligence.
Eh... can we stipulate "friendly"?
I got a rejection from a story I sent to Stan Schmidt, where I had the
humans leading the aliens back to earth to learn about them, and he
wisely pointed out that we may really _not_ want aliens to know where
we live. :)
> Cybernetics that REALLY replace the lost limbs/organs.
New bodies.
>
> Long-life treatments.
For me, yes, until Digital Immortality is available.
>
> Daleks. (Well, okay, maybe not. But everything IS better with Daleks!)
Um, right, um, what I said about ETs...... :)
Mike Ash
<c14e760d-f5e1-4f65...@j19g2000yqk.googlegroups.com>,
aburt <ababp...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jan 19, 10:28�am, Mike Ash <m...@mikeash.com> wrote:
> > In article
> > <1b885e58-877a-40fb-9be5-ad91747c7...@f12g2000yqn.googlegroups.com>,
> >
> > �aburt <ababpub...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > >How is it relevant that an entirely
> > > > different copyright dispute occurred between Doctorow and Ursula K. Le
> > > > Guin?
> >
> > > I didn't bring that up.
> >
> > Uh, what? Yes you did. You pointed people to this page:
> >
> > http://www.aburt.com/scribd.ht
> >
> > Said page has a *huge* section discussing the Doctorow/Le Guin flap.
>
> By that token, I "brought up" everything else on the Internet because
> it's all linked, and you know, you could have followed a link from
> here to there to.... Really, I didn't bring up Le Guin, and had no
> intent or desire to do so. Just because one thing is on a page with
> something else... Really. (But who cares? If you want to talk about
> it, I'm willing.)
Nope, you don't get to play that game. You *specifically pointed* at a
web page *on your own web site* and told people to read that to get the
fact. You brought up everything on that page. This is in no way
equivalent to "everything else on the Internet".
> > I don't want to start a long, drawn-out argument so I'm just going to
> > leave most of this be. However, I want to leave you with one more
> > thought:
> >
> > Your big question in your last message was whether I support an author's
> > right to determine who makes copies of their work. I submit to you that
> > this right covers both negative *and* positive authorization. In other
> > words, copyright not only allows an author to prohibit another from
> > making a copy, but also allows an author to *permit* copying. By issuing
> > these mistaken takedown notices, you violated that right for the authors
> > in question. Perhaps not legally, but morally.
>
> The law does exactly that: It permits an author to decide how/when/
> who should be able to make copies. It is both "negative and
> positive", as you say, at the same time. By the author having 100%
> control over that, they determine it. (Within lots of boundaries,
> like Fair Use, public domain etc.)
>
> Doctorow did exactly what you say, as I'm sure you know; he told
> people it was okay to copy that book. (Now, as an interesting
> digression, I notice he hasn't given that explicit copy-at-will
> permission to ALL his works... hmmmmm.)
>
> That's not the issue. I certainly had no *intent* to cause his work
> to be blocked, however briefly. That his work was blocked was an
> accident.
>
> So the pertinent question devolves to what I posted upstream: There
> will always be a potential for error, so which kind of error do you
> want to steer toward?
Easy: I want to steer toward the error wherein people trying to enforce
copyright don't claim to speak for people they have no authorization to
speak for. In short, I want to steer toward the error where *you* don't
also become involved in violating authors' rights.
> And I notice you didn't answer my question. :) Do you believe an
> author has the right to decide whether to release free copies of their
> work, or is it okay for others to decide to make copies without the
> author's consent?
You notice? I specifically stated that I was not going to answer that
question, because it's irrelevant, and I believe it to be baiting. If
you want more details, go back a couple of posts and find the bit where
I talked about how I, as a software developer, am far more affected by
internet piracy than any SF author is currently.
--
Mike Ash
Radio Free Earth
Broadcasting from our climate-controlled studios deep inside the Moon
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
> On Jan 19, 4:56 pm, "Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)"
> <seaw...@sgeinc.invalid.com> wrote:
>> aburt wrote:
>>> On Jan 19, 2:41 pm, "Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)"
>>>> This will become more and more true, unless you permit more and more
>>>> extreme controls on the flow of information in general. If you can
>>>> actually STOP any piracy of (given author) rather than merely be a pain
>>>> in the ass to SOME of those pirating it, you'll have to be approaching,
>>>> if not actually entering, Orwellian territory.
>>> Today there's virtually no dollars lost to ebook piracy. The question
>>> really is, at the point where ebooks are worth real money to authors,
>>> and piracy is so easy, what do you do?
>> Subscriptions, patrons, copyright that allows you to slam anyone who
>> does it (but that generally won't be applied except in egregious cases),
>> ignore it for the most part.
>
> It will be worth trying, but subscription services have long had
> trouble getting started with music, for example.
The key is to make it EASY to pay. Not sign-up for some special
services -- almost all of us have bank accounts with debit cards, etc.,
so I shouldn't need anything special -- not "minimum of $10". Make it
possible for me to pay ten cents to you electronically whenever I read a
chapter of your book, without jumping through hoops.
> Patronage is a dicey
> moral idea, in that what gets written would be what the patron asks
> for, which could get generally based on some agenda the patron wants
> to advance.
I fail to see the problem. You have trouble with Patron's agenda, don't
take his money. Alternatively, make sure Patron knows that what he's
getting is your writing, not your soul. "You're making sure more Ryk
Spoor books get written, and you get to see them first. You don't get to
do any more than any other publisher does to tell me WHAT to write or
how to write it; you may request. You may suggest. But ultimately I
write what I want to write."
> Slam-if-egregious, well, Scribd was considered egregious
> (just FYI), so there we go.
How much money was Scribd making from the infringing material?
"Egregious" would be "hey, he's making MONEY from this!" (as opposed to
"Whoa, dude, he's ALMOST covered his costs", which means I point and
laugh at him for stealing something that costs him money)
If they're giving it away for free, there's basically four
possibilities for each of their downloader "customers":
1) Wouldn't ever have paid for my stuff anyway.
2) Would have paid for it if he hadn't found it free.
3) Will pay for it now that he's found it free.
4) Already paid for it, just getting another free copy.
Of these, only (2) represents a lost sale. My guess is that (2)
represents a very small fraction of people who are actually my likely
target customers. Either they'll pay (given reasonable prices) for my
stuff, or they won't.
> Ignoring it appears to be too frightening
> to publishers with real money on the line (e.g. RIAA, MPAA;
Not my problem that they're complete and utter idiots. I wrote to three
of the major record labels warning them that this would happen back in
1992 - 1993. Not one of them responded, not even with a form letter. Had
they begun to transition themselves back then, Napster would never have
come to pass, and Apple wouldn't be positioned to be THE content
provider in the next century.
>
> However, and this is something that a lot of infringing site folks
> have a really hard time grasping, many authors are amazingly
> protective and sensitive about their rights.
A lot of those sites are run by young people whose reaction to being
accused is to fight back, even if in their gut they know what they're
doing is wrong. The combination of author flamage and defensive young
punk means a lot of yelling and no progress.
>
>> As I've pointed out time and again to Starcade
>> on this general subject (his subject is anime piracy, but the same
>> issues apply), iTunes has *PROVEN* that people will pay money to get
>> something that they could also get easily for free. Most of the stuff on
>> iTunes -- and a lot of stuff not on it -- is available for free, and it
>> ain't hard to find. Some of the better-disguised Napster reincarnations
>> charge some piddly fee per month, but you could download a hundred times
>> the value of those in iTunes fees in a couple days.
>
> Yet the music industry says they're not making as much as they used to
> overall. I honestly don't know how much they're losing compared to if
> piracy didn't exist. From my own surveys, my hunch is they're down
> maybe 20-30% overall.
I think, honestly speaking, the music industry is filled with lying
liars who lie on the one hand, and reactionary dinosaurs who have
deliberately dug in their heels and tried to ignore the oncoming
technology train.
>
>> Yet people USE iTunes. They use it for a LOT of things. Because people
>> WILL pay money out of their own pocket for stuff they like, as long as
>> the price is reasonable. CDs are dying because they are terribly
>> overpriced, and they're all-or-nothing deals. iTunes lets me actually
>> buy the exact songs I want, and not waste my money on stuff I DON'T want.
>
> I think it boils down to people are mostly honest, 70-80% of the
> time. (I recall there was a sort of study, where a guy put a price on
> hot dogs maybe it was, and a sign told people to put money in the jar,
> but he didn't ask for the money or scream "thief!" if someone ran
> without paying -- and he got a 70-80% pay rate. Wish I could find a
> reference for that.)
>
> The question is whether losing 20-30% of your revenue is acceptable,
> and how far to go to avoid losing it.
I think it's not nearly so simple; if you expand your visibility and
make payments easier, the number of payment possibilities increase, so
the loss of what you would have gotten on the old system may be made up
by the new.
>
>> Sure, you NEED copyright so that someone who tries to make money from
>> your stuff -- especially someone high-profile enough to actually, you
>> know, MAKE money instead of basically pay off his online fees -- can be
>> hammered HARD, and made an example of, so that it keeps piracy to a dull
>> roar.
>
> The other aspect is the slow devaluation, that something available for
> $0 gets perceived as _worth_ $0, so eventually people don't want to
> pay for it, or pay much. Resulting in less production, and lower
> quality.
And then resulting in increased valuation as people start looking for
the scarce quality stuff, if they actually care. If they don't, well,
you're wasting your time...
>
> I remember seeing a news article about how there are fewer Mega Stars
> in music these days, like Michael Jackson. Many more mini-stars, but
> not the giants. That's the kind of result than could (I'm not saying
> it _is_, but _could_) come from the slow erosion of perceived value
> from ubiquitous free copies.
Michael Jackson was one of a generation. There's going to be one like
him every 10, 20 years. Madonna is a good match, for instance. There are
fewer mega stars for a number of reasons -- I think mostly not because
the copies are free, but because the online ACCESS to vastly more
diverse choices has split up the market.
>
>> The Baen Free Library has ALSO proven this -- in the book market
>> directly. People can get all those titles for free. Yet they ALSO still
>> BUY them. Sometimes they're buying MORE of them after the book's
>> available in the Free Library than they were before, when the book was
>> newer and NOT freely available.
>
> Love what Eric Flint got them to do at Baen.
>
> It is, however, predicated on ebooks being only a small percent of
> sales. If ebooks become sizable in sales, giving them away free to
> spur sales of paper books kinda ceases to work.
Sales of PAPER books, yes; that's a truism. If you stop selling paper
books, you can't pump their sales. If you mean, giving away free copies
will not pump sales of the electronic, I don't believe that one little bit.
There are already a number of people who get the Baen Free Library
version... and then PAY for the electronic Webscriptions copy. About
10%, or a bit more, of my income is already from the electronic versions.
>
>>> Publishers want to stay in business earning money, so they'll try to
>>> do ever more Draconian ways to stop piracy.
>> Or maybe figure out clever ways to make money regardless of it, because
>> it's not actually nearly as damaging as some people think it will be.
>
> But you also have the perception problems among authors/publishers to
> address. That's not trivial. Perception is often more powerful than
> reality. <Laughs with irony, thinking of how this thread has gone>
I don't have that problem. THEY have that problem, but for MY own
opinions and approaches, I don't have to consider them.
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
> On Jan 19, 5:02 pm, "Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)"
> <seaw...@sgeinc.invalid.com> wrote:
>> aburt wrote:
>>> Anyway, returning to the original topic of this thread...
>>> I still find it interesting that people have little interest in
>>> talking about things they'd like to see in the future.
>>> (Someone mentioned that was well covered by other forums, but when I
>>> asked where those were, for links, nobody came up with any. Are there
>>> any? I looked a little and didn't find any obvious ones, which is why
>>> I started one. If it's redundant, no biggie, it can wither, it
>>> doesn't take up any resources.)
>>> But what's the block that keeps people from tossing out ideas for
>>> things they'd like to see in the future?
>> My books as movies. That I could make myself, in my home, without
>> needing to spend tens of thousands (let alone millions) of dollars to
>> make. This including all of the actors, sound effects, sets, etc., done
>> by me, needing no more technical knowledge than I currently have.
>
> (Ah, now we're talking! Mind if I copy these over to the other
> forum?)
Be my guest. (with appropriate attribution, of course! ;) )
>
> You're thinking software that could easily create digital actors/
> etc.? (Not my area of expertise at all, but it sounds cool)
>
And design the images from verbal descriptions. And either compose a
soundtrack, or automatically-behind-the-scenes obtain the license rights
for music appropriate to what I'm making.
"Okay, here I want the *Odin* to make its first appearance. Odin's sort
of like *Nike*, but it's about five times as massive, and has long
mass-driver extensions on it... no, narrower than that... Okay, now add
some bands around it to give some structural support... a few more...
good. Okay, now..."
>> Extraterrestrial intelligence.
>
> Eh... can we stipulate "friendly"?
Unfriendly's okay, as long as they're not super-advanced so we can kill
them and take their stuff.
>
> I got a rejection from a story I sent to Stan Schmidt, where I had the
> humans leading the aliens back to earth to learn about them, and he
> wisely pointed out that we may really _not_ want aliens to know where
> we live. :)
As discussed in Leinster's "First Contact".
Though if you get there by any of the means we can currently postulate,
they KNOW where you came from by then.
>
>> Cybernetics that REALLY replace the lost limbs/organs.
>
> New bodies.
But not run by Microsoft. I want them to work like Shadowrun cyber
(without the "essence cost" business): at least as good as the original
and often better.
>
>> Long-life treatments.
>
> For me, yes, until Digital Immortality is available.
Again, the Digital had best not be Microsoft.
>
>> Daleks. (Well, okay, maybe not. But everything IS better with Daleks!)
>
> Um, right, um, what I said about ETs...... :)
But they're so CUTE!
James A. Donald
> > If you had tried spamming thepiratebay with fake
> > DCMA notices, their spam filter would have
> > automatically dumped them in the spam folder, and in
> > the unlikely event a human saw them, that human
> > would have added you to their blacklist for being
> > insufficiently entertaining
> >
> > The fact that you spammed scribd with fake DCMA
> > notices shows you knew they were an ally, not an
> > enemy.
aburt
> Begging pardon, but there was no spamming of DMCA
> notices, fake or otherwise..
You certainly spammed something, and the Board of the
SFWA called what you sent out "DCMA notices".
What is needed to make DCMA notices work is a spider,
some automated means for spidering sites and detecting
infringing works - but such automated means has to work
off a list of specific copyright protected works,
check what it spiders against what is in those works,
and then, and only then, issue a DCMA notice.
aburt
> David Friedman <d...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com>
>
> > > The fact that there are indirect ways of earning
> > > money as a writer ....
>
I hear what you're saying. Paper-based book publishers have enormous
cost barriers to trying something new. (The need to create tens of
thousands of physical copies, and thus the printing costs,
warehousing, shipping costs, and the whole "returns" system, for
example.) The risks of failure are economically pretty sizable.
Rehashing what's known to sell is much safer. It's about risk
management.
If (when) we move from a physical object to a digital object, the risk
structure changes. There's still a need to put out the best products,
and not dilute one's own products (so it's unlikely one publisher
would put out a gazillion books at a time), but the costs will be
less, and it will be easier to experiment. Plus other publishers (and
individuals) will be able to compete on a more level playing field
(differences that remain being marketing power/money, value of
branding, existing audiences, etc.) -- but an "indie" book will be
more competitive than today.
The "long tail" will get longer, of course, meaning sales dilution for
the popular items and a sea of weaker items competing with it, making
it harder to find the quality goods.
That effect is already happening some in short fiction in SF.
Circulations for print markets aren't nearly as high as they used to
be, it's cheap to start a web zine. (Though _not_ so easy to pay pro
rates to authors, and not so easy to make a profit at it, as is a
common goal in starting a business, since there's less money to be
made online -- a delicate interplay there.) Nonetheless, it's
starting. It won't really get going until ebooks (and digital reading
in general) become a sizable share of the market. (Which is to say,
when there's a significantly greater demand for digital reading.)
When that happens there'll be a lot more experimentation. Authors
will be better able to become brands. Other entities could become the
trusted sources of "quality identification" (other than the hint that
since it's on a bookstore shelf and labeled "Tor" it's probably of
some decent quality, vs. a random ebook pulled from the Long Tail).
It'll be fascinating and exciting, that's for sure.
(In fact, see the "Wishes for the Future" forum's list of ideas
already on it -- one of the first I posted was for "digital paper",
and concomitantly widespread digital reading.)
James A. Donald
> > Surely it is not scribd's job to institute something
> > like this. It is your job, the job of those trying
> > to enforce copyright.
aburt
> Lawyers on the committee disagreed with you about
> that.
If the lawyers thought that what Scribd was doing was
wrong, the appropriate action was to sue Scribd, not
spam them with fake DCMA notices.
The board overruled you five to one. When the shit hit
the fan, you were all alone.