Flametoad

Let me do you a huge favor and sum up the tempest in a teapot over the SWFA vs. Scribd.

Scribd is a site that allows users to upload text documents and share them in a way similar to Flickr. Unfortunately, users post text documents that they have no right to share–such as science fiction books and short stories. Some authors noted this, and at least one attempted to “informally” contact Scribd and ask them to remove his copyrighted material. He says Scribd never responded. He figured this was something his trade organization–SWFA–claimed to help stop, so he elevated the problem to them. The committee verified that there were many copyrighted works on the site, but in fact there were so many that they could not realistically find and list them all. Instead they relied on some sort of webcrawler to catalog all the works with their members’ names. They then issued a DMCA letter to remove all the works found using the webcrawler, and Scribd complies.

The problem is that the list created by the webcrawler was imperfect. It came up with thousands (I’ve seen the the number 10,000 used) of titles, and some number of those were legit. Among the authors wrongly affected was Cory Doctorow, who has the benefit of a huge bully pulpit. He publicly lambasted SWFA for overstepping its bounds. Moral outrage ensues. The SWFA president tries damage control and apologizes to the four authors affected. Moral outrage continues. Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) steps in on the side of Scribd. SWFA caves to public pressure and disbands the committee in charge of policing online piracy and calls for a new committee to figure out what the members want from their organization. [From an organizational standpoint, this is probably the best thing they could have done under the circumstances. Now they need to populate it with the loudest, most public naysayers during this mess.]

Although the damage has been done, I think at least some people are starting to wake up to a nasty truth. SWFA came up with a list of roughly 10,000 allegedly copyrighted files. There are three contested works in question, although another person has identified another 80 that may not belong on the list. Let’s go with the higher number, then triple it just to be safe. For the sake of argument, lets say there’s 240 titles that do not belong on the list. That’s 2.4% of the total list of copyrighted works.

Days of heated debate, EFF intervention, and the dismantling of a copyright protection committee…over a mistake ranging somewhere between fewer than 1% and possibly as many as 2.4%.

Isn’t moral outrage fun?