hard deadlines

UPDATE: SFWA announces suspending e-Piracy committee, 9-3-07:
The SFWA Board has just passed the following motion:

Finally, that the Board, in conjunction with the findings of the above committee and its own deliberations, will work to develop a new, permanent committee with a clear matrix of operations and goals, whose purposes shall include, but not necessarily be limited to protecting the copyrights of our member authors who desire such protection in a way that complies with the applicable laws, and to help educate both our membership and the public at large in regards to copyright law.

Original post:
In an unfortunate series of events, the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), of which I am a member, sent a DMCA takedown notice to a text file-sharing site, Scribd, which demanded the removal of copyright-infringing files. The list, however, was flawed, and pointed to some documents which had been legally uploaded. One of which, as bad luck would have it, was the first CC-licensed science fiction novel, Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom."

Particularly unfortunate, since Cory is one of the bloggers at BoingBoing, which obviously featured the story. This was followed closely by coverage at top sf discussion site Making Light, and, as a final kick in the teeth, Slashdot. Then, Katy bar the door, it was off and running in the blogosphere. It made SFWA look pretty bad.

Here's what CNET had to say:
"Was SFWA wrong? There's no doubt in my mind that Burt [the chair of the e-piracy committee] mishandled the situation. He had a duty under the DMCA to have "a good faith belief" that each listed document was illegally posted, and the even stronger duty to claim authority to enforce the creator's copyright "under penalty of perjury." Listing documents that were legally posted and documents which SFWA had no authority to control, seriously undermined the rest of the claim.

Also, the claim simply didn't comply with the structural requirements of a takedown notice, and I think it's pretty clear that Burt either didn't know or didn't care what those requirements are. His email makes it sound like he was just trying to intimidate the operator of the pirate site, and intimidation is a terrible substitute for proper legal action."

The bright spot is that SFWA's president, Michael Capobianco, quickly released a statement:
"I want to respond to the flurry of activity that has resulted from Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) mistakenly identifying several works as infringing copyright. First, some background. There have been discussions within SFWA for several months regarding websites that allow users to upload documents of all sorts for other users to download and share. Many hundreds of copyrighted texts have been put online at these sites, and the number is growing quickly. Some SFWA members complained about the pirating of their works to SFWA's e-Piracy Committee and authorized the committee to do something about it. SFWA contacted scribd.com, one of these sites, about removing these authors' works and generated a list of infringing works to be removed.

SFWA's intention was to remove from scribd.com only works copyrighted by SFWA members who had authorized SFWA to act on their behalf. This kind of error will not happen again."

Just want folks to know that there are many members of SFWA who were outraged by this episode, and I was among those who called for the resignation of the chair of the e-piracy committee in a note to the board of directors. While I do not condone piracy, I respect due process and the rights of businesses — even file sharing sites which can potentially host infringing files.

As a gesture of support, I've CC-licensed my award-winning short story, "Jigoku no mokushiroku" and posted it on Scribd.

All SFWAns are not knuckle-dragging troglodytes. Some of us actually try to see the future. Honest.

Jack boards the Magical Mystery Bus (aka Bus 3) to be whisked to his first day of second grade at the most awesome Hathaway School in Portsmouth. Hurray for the institution of public education, and all the dedicated folks — teachers, volunteers, administrators, school committees, town government, and us, the taxpayers, who make it possible.

It might seem like a little thing, kids getting on a bus. But think on it for a minute. Every kid in America, waking up this week, brushing teeth, shrugging into clothes new or old, tingling just a bit with the butterflies of apprehension, all in a vast coordinated movement from home to school. From their vastly different private spaces into our one universal public forum where they all have an equal opportunity to learn. It is one of the crucial threads in the fabric of our democracy, and we should take the opportunity on a day like this to reflect for a moment just how important all the work is that makes it happen.

Thank you, everyone, who makes this possible.

— Via Fake Steve Jobs. Namaste.

Over 100 Portsmouth residents packed the Senior Center this evening for an interactive workshop on commercial development and zoning, and before the evening was over, report-backs from the groups had confirmed that a broad cross-section of the town isn't interested in big boxes, and wants more teeth in the zoning regs.

Tina Dolen, director of the Aquidneck Island Planning Commission (AIPC), facilitated the meeting. "You have a unique opportunity," she told the participants, "This is not just saying 'no' to development you don't want, but saying 'yes' to the hard work [of planning]."

And plan they did, for the next two hours. Teresa Crean, a planner with AIPC, led the group on an exercise, viewing and rating 40 examples of types of development. There were mixed results for residential conversions, and positive ratings for examples of small retail in very controlled designs (a Banana Republic that was virtually indistinguishable from a two-story house) but overwhelmingly negative results from the group on the big box designs. Her team will continue to crunch the numbers and pass the results to the town. She also encouraged folks to snap pictures of developments they'd like to see. "We can tap best practices," she said, but it helps to have grassroots input."

The bulk of the meeting was breakout sessions at individual tables, of 5-6 people each, discussing some key questions: Shopping preferences (kinds of products in Portsmouth, acceptable distance), Impacts of large scale retail (cost and benefit, trust in town regulation), Where in town commercial is acceptable, and Comprehensive Plan language (which already has permitting requirements for all retail over 5K feet.)

After an hour of discussion, each table reported back their key takeaways, and while some of them were unsurprising (only a few positive words for big boxes) there were a lot of creative, thought provoking ideas. A sample:

• Good jobs and economic benefit should have been part of the survey of acceptable designs for context
• Proof of impact on the tax base should be a criterion
• Gradated zoning (C1, C2) related to impact should be considered in different areas
• We need family-oriented activities like miniature golf (WTF?)
• If we have a choice between light industrial/technology and retail, we should choose the former
• Several groups mentioned a hardware store and the desire to shop locally
• Adverse impact on quality of life needs to be something the boards have the power to consider and act on
• One proposed metric: If we shoved the Island off into the ocean, how big would stores need to be?

Wrapping the meeting up shortly after 9 pm, Town Admin Bob Driscoll praised the hard work of all the participants. "This will be a major source of raw material — it confirmed some things, and put a spin on some things." Most importantly, he promised, "This will inform the process."

It was pretty clear that there is significant energy and political will to make whatever changes need to be made in the zoning to preserve Portsmouth's character, and to ensure that there is both enough rigor in the regulations, and, especially, that there are mechanisms for vigorous enforcement.

We had a very rich discussion in our breakout, an experience that was pretty clearly replicated around the room. It was great to see every table packed with people, and everyone was engaged. It really made me proud of the folks we have in town tonight. Good job, everyone.