Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was “my bad” indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things. But honestly Monica, the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it!

Editor fail.  Copyright fail.  Ethics fail.  And, public relations fail.  (Just note the comments on their Facebook page.)  You see, when you decide to be an asshat to a blogger, especially in such an interestingly twisted and completely asinine fashion, they tend to blog about it.  And, when your statements have reached such an epic level of complete  cluelessness about the nature of the medium itself, it becomes entertaining for other people to blog about it.  So the relatively unknown person you’ve stolen from blogs about it and gets a linkback from the relatively known Nick Mamatas.  The latter, being relatively known, inspires even more relatively known bloggers to mock the stupid whose name is  Judith Griggs.  Scalzi takes a swing with the cluebat and makes a palpable hit in front of his 30K of daily eyeballs.  (What’s the circulation of that magazine again?  Just wondering.)  And the Smart Bitches of equally vast viewage take multiple swipes and offers a present of Google.  Then, at last, the meme goes nuclear when it crosses the radar of Instpundit.

So, Judith Griggs, you are now an internet meme.  I wonder if permanently associating yourself with this kind of asshattery in the minds of a few hundred thousand people was worth the few hundred bucks you saved by not actually buying the rights to your articles.

Via here.

Again with the asshats I say.  And we have some wonderful hats of assness this time in the person(s) of a company known as Righthaven.  What is Righthaven, you ask?  It is a posse of out-of-control lawyers who Google on behalf of their clients’ IP rights, and if they catch someone doing something nefarious— such as quoting a paragraph with proper credit and linking back to the full article— then they sue your ass. I don’t mean they send you a nasty note, or a cease and desist, I mean they file paperwork at the court demanding $75K and you don’t find out until you get a subpoena.

How to fight this? Well, if you get sued, take their ass to court and don’t settle. Sure, it’s a pain in the ass, and expensive, but if everyone does this their whole scheme will collapse. Second, never ever ever link back to the assholes that hire these people. they don’t deserve the traffic, and a trackback may get you sued.

The company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. … He specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, news aggregators, and blogs.

So, AP seriously wants everyone to pay for the privilege of linking back to their own articles. So what’s the logical outcome a) a brand new revenue stream b) a serious downturn in traffic back to their sites, and a corresponding decrease in ad revenue?

And then we have Steven Metalitz, lawyer for the RIAA and MPAA (Now that’s a satanic resume) who has no real problem with the planned obsolescence of DRM’d content.  Just cause you bought it don’t mean you get to keep it.  That attitude doesn’t promote piracy at all, does it?

Then we have the hysterical antics of the Canadian Access Copyright society, that would make anyone ashamed to be a copyright holder.  (But then, none of this is about protecting individual authors, is it?)

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

If you read the whole thing on the dead tree apocalypse, you might read through this paragraph without thinking. But look at it again. Bar linking to or paraphrasing. The judge has a frakking blog, you’d think that gives him some understanding of how the internet works  hell, you’d think he knows how fair use works. I mean, you want to save an obsolete business model by outlawing the core functionality of HTML? MMMMM’kay. If you do that, how does he expect anyone to end up on the on-line walled garden of the NY Times? Oh, right, this is about the perpetuation of dead trees, not allowing the N.Y. Times (or anyone else) to actually profit from the new media to pay for their journalists.

This idea is made of FAIL.

(via here and here)

Author Chris Anderson writes about the web, and web marketing. He is one who you expect to be savvy about things like social networking, open source, creative commons, and all that other Web 2.0 stuff that’s all the hot shite on teh interwebz. He knows the dynamics of the online mob like few other dead tree writers. . .

So you’d think he’d see this coming, wouldn’t you? You’d think if massive lifts of uncredited quotes from Wikipedia ended up in his book, he might realize that, well, there’d be a reaction. I mean, target audience anyone? Even if we’re as kind as his publisher and accept the explanation that it was all just a snafu: “All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources…”

And somehow I don’t quite buy the explanation, especially given that the plagiaristic passages aren’t just a reprise of fact in the author’s words, but word-for-word cribbing of Wikipedia including transcription errors. Even if you had footnotes in place, that would be ethically problematic unless it was all set off as a quote.

Here’s a kicker, though: (From VQR Online)

Though reproducing words or original ideas from any uncredited source is widely defined as plagiarism, using text from Wikipedia presents an even more significant problem than reproducing traditional copyrighted text. Under Wikipedia’s Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license, Anderson would be required to credit all contributors to the quoted passages, license his modifications under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, note that the original work has been modified, and provide the text of or a link to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

IMO, the Wikipedia usage goes a bit beyond fair use, so he’s probably violating the license even with footnotes. Of course the ready-made remedy is to release the book under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. I wonder if that’s going to happen?

Now they might be non-partisan, or lobby for specific interests, but it seems that the report they plagiarized came from an agency that is and does.

From Michael Geist:

[The Conference Board's] claims should take a major hit based on last week’s release of a deceptive, plagiarized report on the digital economy that copied text from the International Intellectual Property Alliance (the primary movie, music, and software lobby in the U.S.), at times without full attribution. The report itself was funded by copyright lobby groups (U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Canadian Anti-Counterfeiting Network, Copyright Collective of Canada which represents U.S. film production) along with the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation. The role of the Ontario government obviously raises questions about taxpayer dollars being used to pay for a report that simply recycles the language of a U.S. lobby group paper.

I’ve piled on plagiarists here before, but you’ve sunk to a new low if you’re plagiarizing language specifically to be alarmist about the piracy of intellectual property. So asshats all round.

Now the Author’s Guild says that the new Kindle’s text-to-voice feature is infringing on audio rights.

WTF?!? *headdesk*

Apparently reading a text version of a book is a violation of copyright?  No.  Fail. The “audio rights” are rights you sell to some third party to distribute some audio version.  Hey guys, no distribution of audio here.  This is the end user using material *they bought* and now we want to go all “no, you can’t use it that way.”

Well, I’m going to start stealing people’s translation rights by running manuscripts through babelfish.

The upshot is, the NY Times thinks used bookstores are the reason publishing is in a crisis right now.

Yeah, right.

This is the true sign of a crisis, when the old guard suddenly tries desperately to find something, anything, to blame for their failures other than their own outmoded business practices.

We all know at the wonderful, and oh so successful, way that major content providers (MPAA, RIAA, Viacom etc.) have tried to impose 19th century “this is my widget” mentality to IP law in the digital age. The stupidity these major interests have unleashed onto the legal system and Teh Internets is almost beyond human comprehension. But this draconian effort, suing dancing babies and all, has worked so well that some geniuses in the print realm have decided to take this line of thought back into the physical brick and mortar world.

They want royalties on used books.

Do I even need to explain why this is toxic waste masquerading as a business model? Hell, let’s just suck all the life out of the secondary market so when my books go out of print we can insure that no one ever hears of me ever again. Let’s make it more economic to pulp all these copies then have someone else read them. Good plan. Maybe you can add a review tax, there’s another cannibalistic income stream. Oh, and charge to view the cover blurb…

Proposals include having customs officers report directly to private businesses, and potentially giving border control staff the right to search media players and computers for pirated material.

Wow. Just Wow. Do we want ICE working for the RIAA? Should the MPAA be seizing laptops at the border because someone backed up a DVD of Spaceballs? Is this a good idea? Worse, even though the treaty hasn’t been finalized yet, the stupidity is already beginning.  (Thanks to Weird Universe.)  We have a situation where according to the Press Republican:

Jerilea Zempel was detained at the U.S. border this summer because she had a drawing of a sport-utility vehicle in her sketchbook.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers told Zempel they suspected her of copyright infringement.

You read right.  A sketchbook.  A drawing of an SUV.  Customs saw this and suspected copyright infringement.

Let me repeat that: They looked at a sketch someone drew of a car and decided that it might be a violation of copyright.  A drawing.  A car.  Are these nimrods fucking kidding me?  These are the people who are going to make legal determinations of the provanance of the tracks on my iPod?  Are we to expect the idiots who couldn’t understand that a DRAWING of a CAR is a transformative work whose copyright is probably owned BY THE PERSON WHO DREW IT are actually going to understand the idea of DRM-free music or a video podcast?

Of course, it is very unlikely to become a pro writer doing fan fiction. Most franchises (those that do hire new writers to write new material) will expect a writer to have established some professional chops on their own before considering letting them play in their sandbox. In other words, it is unlikely that anyone’s first sale is going to be a Star Wars novel. Then there are the franchises that aren’t going to let anyone write new stuff, so don’t expect to sell your Potter slash until 75 years after J. K. Rowling kicks the bucket.

Since a lot of beginners are cutting their teeth on the stuff, and at least a few are interested in breaking into the pro market, I have a suggestion that grows out of my recent experience writing Lilly’s Song. The genesis of that novel was in an anime series I saw last year; one that I felt had one hell of an impact aside from its flaws. The impulse I had after watching it was, I think, the same impulse most fan authors feel— being caught up so much in a story that there’s almost a need to express your own take on it. The difference was, since I want to get paid for what I write, I couldn’t just write in someone else’s universe. What I did was a more thorough analysis of that need. I spent a lot of time thinking about exactly what it was about this other fictional work I was so affected and interested in. It boiled down to two main things, a particular tone (combination of tone, actually) along with a very particular relationship between two characters. Picking out those elements, and a thread of plot, I was able to take those elements and transplant them into another universe with a different set of characters (a fantasy 13th Century Prussia vs. a sfnal 21st Century Japan).

If you want to break out of writing fan fiction, I’d suggest following a similar procedure. Think deeply about why you want to write about Buffy, or the X-files, or Harry Potter. Be honest, and think about what attracts you, what is it you want to write about: Are you writing about your own characters running around a cool setting? Is it one of the cool characters in your own setting? The storyline? A mood? Once you find that element or elements, divorce it from the original context and rebuild it inside your own fictional world, one that can be universes away from your inspiration. If you write Trek fiction because you like the K/S dynamic, you can write your slash in any military organization in any period of history. If you decide you like Harry Potter’s boarding-school setting, that’s conducive to just about any type of story, even if you still want the mysterious magical campus, its still doable if you change enough of the surroundings; making it a hub of cross-universe study, an orbital habitat that might be an alien being, or maybe its a steampunk building run by a clockwork AI. What elements of a character attract you? A particular attitude? An element of the backstory? Intellect? Martial ability? Fashion sense?

The trick in taking a fictional inspiration and turning it into something original is to isolate what excites you as narrowly as possible, and build back out from there. Once you know what it is you’re trying to capture, you become free to change anything else, and the act of changing can itself become a creative engine.

NOTE: I’m only being coy about the anime that inspired Lilly’s Song because, for those who’ve seen it, it would end up being a substantial spoiler. I do give credit in the acknowledgements.

First off, have skin as thin as possible. Make sure that every negative comment about your work is taken personally and make sure you attack Amazon reviewers by name on your blog. Brag about gaming Amazon to get those nasty evil comments by those nasty evil people removed.

Second, if someone sends you fan mail that says “I like most of your stuff, but this latest series, not so much” make sure to rant, rant, rant. Of course we know this is no fan, after all, this person dared to criticize your work, and we know that no real fan would dare do such a thing. So make sure you publicly threaten this fan, to wit:

And so, come September…my little “fan” and some of her close friends and family will likely read about a character with a very similar name, (i.e. nearly identical but not enough to get me sued) depicted in one of the most comical and fabulously scandalous scenes within Death Perception. And trust me…this isn’t a scene which in any way flatters that character. (Also trust me….you’ll know it when you read it!)

Third, just for the hell of it, draw your editor into it:

And by the way – anyone else out there thinking they can just arbitrarily slam an author and feel good about being particularly nasty…be warned….my editor thinks this concept of mine is hilarious and she’s going to suggest the idea to her other authors who are fed up with being targets for the mentally deranged…in other words I’d advise being very careful whom you choose to direct a personal barb at lest your alter ego appear in a less than flattering way in that author’s next book.

Fourth, and most important, when it’s clear you made a pile of poo and stepped in it, and other bloggers start to notice and point out the shit covering your face, make sure you panic, take down the original post on your blog and start sending lawyer-like letters to people making bogus IP claims of copyright infringement for daring to quote the ludicrously stupid things you’ve said.

Bonus Points, make sure that you use an unflattering analogy of yourself as a waiter spitting in someone’s food. That’ll leave an impression.

UPDATE: She doesn’t want to blog about it . . . but let’s post a long rambling rant on how we’re being persecuted by nutcases, post their e-mail addresses on our blog post, drag our editor into it again, and turn off the comments ’cause we just can’t deal with that shit. Mr. Foot, please to meet Mr. Mouth, I am sure you will be so happy together.

UPDATE #2: Then again, if you can’t write a post that doesn’t make you look like a complete psychotic loon, you can always nuke the whole effing blog. You, however, see Victoria’s last gasp, which bordered on actionable slander, (or is it libel, I can’t keep those straight) in part on Jane’s letter to our fair asshat’s editor as posted on Dear Author.

First up, the Associated Press, in what seems to be a belated panic about news distribution over the internet, has decided to get all RIAA over the web (and, of course, the recording industry can tell you all how well that’s going) and try to sue anyone who dares quote from their stories without paying license fees protection money. Apparently the threshold for AP calling out the lawyers is 79 words. Fair use anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Is this the new way to monetize the news business? Print stories and then obsessively Google phrases hoping for a Cassie Edwards with deep pockets? So what if I embed a Google news feed into my blog, am I liable for the AP stories that come up in it? Have these asswits thought any of this through? Do they know how stupid they look? Have they ever seen a web browser? I’m waiting for some blogger to sue the AP for quoting 75 words of their content without permission. Wonder how far that will go?

Second group of thuggish IP imperialists going over the line, really went over the line. As in criminal. As in, if they did this to a fortune 500 company they might be up on terrorist charges. Quick synopsis somewhat de-geeked: You have BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file-sharing system that, like all file sharing methods, can be used for good or ill. It is best to distribute large files such as Linux distributions, or HD movies. Enter MediaDefender, a company that uses an arsenal of techniques suited to Russian virus authors and Viagra spam merchants, whose mission statement is to prevent piracy of their clients’ media. One favored technique is to flood the internet with bogus copies of pirate files. The way they do this is posing links to said fakes on torrent indexing sites. Now enter Revision3, a small internet TV station that produces video for users to download— via BitTorrent. (dun-dun-dunnn.)

Now, of course, Revision3 would offer a indexing site for their torrents, right? Sure. Now, these indexing sites can be open or closed, and for a time because of technical issues, Revision3′s index was open. That meant anyone could post the location of a torrent there. It should have been closed down so the index only responded to requests for Revision3′s own shows. The response of MediaDefender was not to call up the Revision3 IT staff and say, “Hey, you got an open torrent index here, you sure you want that?” No, their reaction was exactly the same as a pirate’s reaction, “Hey, this index is open. I can post my own (bogus) torrents, Yea!”

Now, so far it’s morally questionable, but not criminal. However, when Revision3 discovers the configuration error on their server (with no help from MediaDefender, which, as you remember, is supposed to stop this sort of thing themselves) their response is to close the index.

One would think that MediaDefender would be happy that the conduit for pirated content was shut down. Apparently they weren’t happy. In fact, their servers were pissed. After being shut out of Revision3′s torrent index, they promptly launched a denial of service attack on Revision3 that took the site down for Memorial Day weekend.

Let that sink in.

They launched a cyber-attack on a legitimate business because the legitimate business stopped linking to pirated torrents. This requires a Doctorate in Stupidity.

I think the AP should hire MediaDefender to protect their copyrighted content. The combined weight of arrogance, cluelessness and stupidity might just shatter the whole structure of IP law as we know it— which I am beginning to think is not a bad thing.

Then again, if your English teacher was James Twitchell, I expect that flunking his students for plagiarism was not all that high on his priority list. Seems he’s owned up to plagiarizing sections of his book for Simon & Schuster, Shopping for God. (via GalleyCat)

In his own words (we hope):

It’s my responsibility to make sure that the words and ideas are my own and, if not, that they are properly credited. In many cases, I have not done this. [...] I have used the words of others and not properly attributed them. I am always in a hurry to get past descriptions to make my points, a hurry that has now rightly resulted in much shame and embarrassment. I have cheated by using pieces of descriptions written by others.

Which is a fine mea culpa, except when you consider he’s been publishing since 1995 and initially blamed the lifting in the latest book on sloppy research even as earlier incidences in prior books came to light. Where have we heard that one before?