Big controversy in the science-fiction world this week. One or more websites were making copyrighted works of fiction available for download, so the Science-Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) used a program to scan through the available files and list which were copyrighted and available illegally. With lawsuit threatened, the site took down the offending materials. Turns out there were a lot of false positives, including a work written by Corey Doctorow under the Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to do just about anything with it they want. Doctorow was then up in arms that he had told his fans that his works were given away for free, and now they had cause to doubt his word due to the takedown notice posted at the offending website.

At first I was very in favor of Doctorow on this one, but I think the SFWA has a point. Sure, they definitely made mistakes and took down some of the wrong stuff, but the website did far worse, publishing many a work they did not have permission for, yet Doctorow acts like the SFWA is the bad guy here.

Do I think copyright law should be altered and the terms vastly shortened? Yes. But for the nonce, the law right now is the law. Even in a moral sense I think Doctorow is wrong. He's right to be upset his work was mistakenly taken down, but wrong to ascribe the blame to the SFWA. Instead blame the website that created the situation in the first place.