28 June 2010

Let me clear my throat

One of the most utterly annoying and unreasonable acts that purveyors of our brand of entertainment and those who love them can do is engage in piracy. I rather think that those currently engaged in the piracy of e-books for personal profit and pleasure should likely be dealt with in the same fashion as the East India Trading Company had, but for that you can watch all three iterations of the Pirates of the Caribbean. Every publisher with whom I'm affiliated has to expend more energy and resources on the task, ensuring that their authors are not being pirated, ensuring that t3h intarweb is duly safe from causing harm to the well tended flock...
To that end, one of the IWOFA leaders has taken it upon herself to craft the following; an open letter, one that is specifically directed and whose purpose is to engage a person with the power to do so in initiating a policy change. So, since her words are all very fine, I shall allow Ms. Cherry to speak for herself - you should all give her your undivided attention:

Open letter to the Presidents of RWA, SFWA, and Authors' Guild concerning copyright infringement.



Dear Scott Turow, Allison Kelley, John Scalzi,


Thank you very much for everything you do to defend authors' copyrights against copyright infringement. We very much appreciate having an address to which to send our complaints, and the comfort of knowing that.
Despite small triumphs, ignorance persists among honest readers; lies about the legality of "sharing" go unchallenged, and the problem is getting much worse.

Please Scott Turow, Allison Kelley, John Scalzi will you talk to one another, set up one powerhouse task force, meet regularly, share resources, engage your members, give authors one central "Go To" address where we can submit complaints, report piracy sites, blogs and yahoogroups, cc our individual take-down notices.

One forceful industry voice could shut down an entire account and insist on a hosting site complying with their own TOS where their TOS has been repeatedly violated, instead of individual authors taking down one file at a time.

Thank you.






Rowena Cherry (IWOFA)
Permission granted to forward, share, repost, or use as a template for other open letters.

A little old school:

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for your post, Don.

    One of the more amusing punishments I've seen suggested for pirates is to constrain them to write a full length novel themselves, and then have the copyrights and all royalties donated elsewhere.

    ReplyDelete