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Way To Go, SFWA
By Dave Klecha | August 31, 2007
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.
Topics: internets, science fiction | 4 Comments »
August 31st, 2007 at 8:33 am
“‘Shades of Grey,’ a horribly misinformed and juvenile approach to ebook piracy.”
I don’t think that’s putting it strongly at all. Now, if you had said it was formed by brain-dead conference-room savants who have no concept of modern marketing or plain consequence and risk strategic thinking. That would be harsher, but closer to the point.
Seriously, Shades of Grey is about the most idiotic way to fight piracy that could have been developed, and that includes the thought of flooding the pirate space with good copies of the books in question so as to have the pirates lose their motivation and their skills in pirating. I no longer pirate (back in the cracker days, sure) and even I have figured out a way to use SoG to get a good copy (using binary subtration to create an interference screen). IMHO, it (Shades of Grey) is worse than doing absolutely nothing. It actively poisons the market for the people it’s intending to help.
While there is a lot that’s great (and could be great) about SFWA, SoG has made me soften on my goal of membership. If they keep the “must swear to perserve and protect intellectual property laws…” in joining, I might by-pass it all together.
August 31st, 2007 at 9:56 am
Dammit. This has me re-re-thinking about joining SFWA. I had come to the point of, “Okay, I’ll join and effect change from within (once I have that third sale).” But now I find I’m going to have to write a letter that says something like, “You gotta stop this (and this and this and this) if you ever want my membership fee.”
August 31st, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Steve: Okay, so maybe I was putting it mildly. Regardless, it was a colossal cock-up, and now that the spotlight has come back ’round to it, I’m curious to see if he followed through on his promise to repay. As it is, it looks like the search that netted the results was even more incompetently performed than I first thought and quite obviously not proofread. I’m going to post a link to it in a minute.
Mer: Yeah, me too. Paul Melko, who is the regional director for our area, reads my LJ (and just commented on this there), so I’m hoping to engage him in a bit of discussion on the topic. I’ll be interested to see Capobianco’s statement when it hits.
August 31st, 2007 at 8:31 pm
Harrumph. This makes me grumpy.