Way To Go, SFWA

I went to be last night just before Cory Doctorow posted this rather entertaining and damning shot at SFWA and SFWA VP Andrew Burt. So I didn’t get to jump on it right away. But I have to say: I think I saw this coming. Something like it, anyway.

Back in the spring when the SFWA officer campaigns and election heated up the intertubes so remarkably, I remember thinking what a tool Andrew Burt was coming across as. As Cory said, allegations came to light that Burt had engaged in a conflict of interest in requesting that SFWA float a loan to pay for the patenting of “Shades of Grey,” a horribly misinformed and juvenile approach to ebook piracy. That’s putting it a bit strongly, but people like Cory and Charlie Stross and John Scalzi have approached the question from a more rational perspective: that is, noticing that freely available ebooks have a tendency to push paper book sales, not hinder them. To repeat the old saw, for most writers, their biggest problem is obscurity.

And in the debates surrounding the elections and Burt’s apparently rabid and narrow-minded anti-piracy stance, he often protested that he only sought to represent the will of the membership and not turn SFWA into an RIAA-like anti-piracy taskforce. He was an agnostic in the whole debate, so he claimed.

But now we have him ordering a blanket takedown of works including Cory’s Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom. Seriously, how colossally stupid do you have to be to see Cory Doctorow’s name in a list of freely available ebooks and assume he doesn’t want it there? I mean, just the cluelessness that Cory describes in that the list was a result of a basic search result for “Asimov” and “Silverberg” is bad enough, but not to have read through it? Not to have known that Cory’s works are licensed under Creative Commons?

SFWA leadership generally, and Burt specifically, are tipping over into a yawning chasm of uselessness. Not to sound like I’m heralding a prophet or anything, but Scalzi was right: SFWA needs leadership with an understanding of the modern state of publishing and a realistic appreciation of electronic media, and the Veep, at least, does not possess that. Whether Burt acted on his own initiative, or at the behest of the board, I do not think this bodes well for SFWA.

Which is too bad, because it’s an organization that could be so very much more.

SFWA Blunder Round-UP

I got a surge in search engine hits this morning. Andrew Burt, “Shades of Grey,” and SFWA were all mentioned prominently. It might only last the weekend, but apparently this thing is burning up the net, just a bit.

Nick Mamatas points out that Burt may not have conformed to actual DMCA takedown letter verbiage in communicating with Scribd, making his efforts not actually correct under the law, though that may end up saving him from charges of perjury. However, he did claim that it was official notice, so who knows how that shakes out. I’m guessing he didn’t consult any lawyers here. In that link, Nick provides some documentation links.

One of those is this bit of idiocy which Burt supplied as a list of infringing works. Aside from the aforementioned Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom, and issues of Ray Gun Revival, Burt also includes these: Learning XML, several instances of “Gay Erotica” (okay, so some of them seem to feature an Asimov character, but still..), The Best Advice I Ever Got (apparently by Warren Buffet and others), “Quotable Quotes,” “Hooked on Useless Fact,” and “Are We Living In End Times?” Okay, so maybe that last one is fantasy (ha!), but … not only does Burt not represent the copyright holders in these instances, they’re not even SFWA members.

According to a subsequent communication, Burt used a search method that focused on idiosyncratic phrases… which is sliiiightly more sophisticated than I thought at first, but not by much, and really just as useless when not coupled with a rigorous read-through of the results. Hell, I know in the past the Lois Bujold mailing list has conducted discussions on favorite idiosyncratic phrases, so any such broad, public search would hit that mailing list archive. The rest of that letter is alternately mystifying and enraging. Burt only points to a handful of authors who are mad (and, in the case of Asimov and Heinlein, presumably their estates), then speaks expansively about Scribd’s worth to SFWA members.

Again, that kind of thing is what Burt claimed he wasn’t all about during the election cycle, but it seems he is. He has come down, hard, and squarely on the side of those opposed to modern electronic distribution–he’s propagating the views of his much-maligned predecessor, Howard Hendrix, and presenting them as the views of SFWA as a whole.

Amazingly enough, it seems that Jeremy Tolbert and I agree again.

Also, here’s a nice bit of discussion in the SFWA LJ community. As a special note, it seems Will Shetterly has let his membership lapse, in spite of the touching story he often tells about SFWA’s Emergency Medical fund being there for he and his wife in time of need.