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October 15, 2007
Copywrong.
I don't care for Cory Doctorow's online persona. His Disney fetish, his OCD haircut and his relentless self-promotion creep me out. For a forward-looking geek, I find him to be one of the most doctrinaire voices on the web.
So it was with a healthy scoop of schadenfreude that I read his apology to Ursula K Le Guin for re-publishing her work against her will. Setting the controversy aside for a moment, I thought it was extremely telling that Doctorow was slow to learn that he'd violated her copyright:
The situation with Ms Le Guin was made more complicated by an accident of circumstances. Andrew Burt, the person whom Ms Le Guin chose to communicate the matter to me, is someone with whom I had put in a killfile following an altercation. I delete all emails from him unread, and if he sent me a message, I did not see it. So I didn't find out that Ms Le Guin objected to the quote until someone sent me a link to a page that Jerry Pournelle had put up about it, in which he quotes a letter from Andrew Burt. Burt is the Science Fiction Writers of America VP who had previously sent a fraudulent takedown notice that resulted in my novel being removed from an Internet document server.
To summarize: because Doctorow does the digital equivalent of sticking his fingers in his ears and singing "la, la, la" when he receives email from someone he doesn't like, he embarrassed himself personally and professionally and undercut his credibility on one of his signature issues.
Maybe the gang at MAKE magazine could knit Cory a replica of Walt Disney's frozen head to soothe his bruised ego?
Posted by Your Protagonist at October 15, 2007 11:12 AM