Back in April, I told you about the argument that erupted when outgoing Science Fiction Writers of America vice-president Howard V. Hendrix referred to authors who distributed their work online for free as “webscabs,” but that was merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the deep philosophical divide among various SF writers about how to handle copyright in the digital age. In August, SFWA’s new vice-president, Andrew Burt, attempted to serve notice on an online repository he accused of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, when in fact many of the works he cited were put on the site with the approval of the copyright holders. The negative publicity from that incident was strong enough that SFWA disbanded Burt’s e-piracy committee and invited a group of writers to brainstorm on how to move forward.
As Cory Doctorow—one of the authors who got burned by Burt’s overreaching—reported last week, SFWA disregarded one of the committee’s key recommendations, albeit a privately made one, by reinstating Burt as head of a new copyright committee, thus signalling to many in SFWA that no significant changes in the organization’s policy were to be expected. Charles Stross, one of the internal problem-solving group’s members, was understandably furious, describing the move as “fuckwitted” and “a betrayal of trust.” He would later report back that he’d learned that SFWA’s by-laws give the vice-president the authority to appoint members to committees or remove them; “consequently the only person who could act on our call to prevent [Burt] from having anything to do with the SFWA copyright committee was … Andrew Burt.”
Meanwhile, SFWA’s president, Michael Capobianco, assures his membership that “this is not just a return to business as usual,” reiterating the promise he made after the August fiasco: “I said that SFWA would not send out any other mistaken DMCA notices, and I’ll say it again. The procedure we establish, including double-checking the data, will be followed to the letter, but, more than that, I, personally, will only allow notices to be issued if I am satisfied that due diligence has been carried out.”