In mid-August SFWA’s (the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) epiracy committee chair, Andrew Burt, sent a notice to Scribd listing documents that SFWA alleged were being hosted in violation of copyright terms. Unfortunately the list of was poorly researched and little more than a list of documents that contained the words “Asimov” or “Silverberg”. After a couple of email exchanges, Scribd removed the documents.

The result was a number of legally published works were replaced with a page displaying “The document … has been removed from Scribd. This content has been removed at the request of copyright agent Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.” One of the authors affected was Cory Doctorow, who wrote an article on Boing Boing denouncing SFWA’s abuse of the DMCA. SFWA has acknowledged for the error, and contacted the affected authors to apologize. As others weighed in, the issue seemed to spiral into a freedom vs. author’s rights battle, with neither Scribd or SFWA looking good.

While reading about this, I was reminded of the issues some publishers and authors had with Google’s plans to build a full-text index of books, their main concern being that it was not a fair use of copyrighted material.

Put these two stories together, and I think there is an opportunity for Google to provide a valuable service that authors would support. By adding copyright information in a standard format to the book index, anyone would be able to check the copyright status of text indexed by Google. Add an API that returned results in a machine readable format, and sites such as Scribd could easily verify if text is copyrighted and under what terms before publishing it.

Google and the authors would each benefit from a copyright search. Google gets support from authors, and could potentially avoid scanning and verify books by having authors or publishers submit the text for indexing. Their search results would likely also contain advertising for places to purchase copyrighted works. The authors get a single point for maintaining copyright information that is easily referenced by others.

This does little to combat the blatant piracy, but legitimate sites hosting content would have access to an easy way to verify copyright information.

A supoena sent to Google asks for the entire contents of a gmail account used by the founder of AmeriDebt. The subpoena asks for not only current e-mail but also deleted e-mail:

“All documents concerning all Gmail accounts of Baker…for the period from Jan. 1, 2003, to present, including but not limited to all e-mails and messages stored in all mailboxes, folders, in-boxes, sent items and deleted items, and all links to related Web pages contained in such e-mail messages.”

I usually recommend gmail as the mail service of choice for non-technical friends. This is a prime example of why I also suggest people run their own server if they can.

The publisher of katie.com has announced they’re renaming the book. Perhaps katie.com, the domain, can be used as intended by the owner again. As Katie Jones points out, the online community’s response to this issue probably tipped the scales.

As an interesting side note, Amazon.com has deleted most of the “reviews” posted on the page for the book that spoke to the domain name dispute.

More on the katie.com saga on Slashdot this morning.

In 2000, Penguin released a book entitled Katie.com authored by Katherine Tarbox, a woman who at 13 years old had been the victim of an online predator. The book title is also a domain name, but katie.com doesn’t belong to, nor is it affiliated in any way with, either Penquin Books or the book’s author. The domain’s owner, Katie Jones, has used the domain as a personal website since 1996, but since the book’s release has been innundated with messages about sexual abuse, etc., none of which are intended for her.

Penguin has thus far refused to apologise for its choice of names for the book. Recently Tarbox has also started making the rounds as a speaker on US television, increasing the profile of the book, and indirectly Jone’s site.

It will likely end up in court at some point, and will make for an interesting case, since clearly Penguin and the author have continued to develop and promote the name with the knowledge that they don’t own it. No offer to buy the name has been made, but Tarbox’s laywer has tried to convince her to “donate the name”, and has advised Jones that she cannot sell the name because it’s associated with the book.

The backlash this story is creating can be seen in the reviews on Amazon.

The Register has things summed up well in Penguin and the great katie.com hijack.

LawGeek commented on Friday about a preliminary injunction being granted to StorageTek, who are seeking to block third party service of their products with claims it violates the DMCA. Logically, and I’m sure legally, the judge is correct to issue the injunction. The concern is where this leads. Companies have tried using the DMCA before but haven’t been completely successful.

Slashdot picked up the story this morning, and the usual comments followed. One of the first questions raised is when car manufacturers will figure out how they can block third party service on vehicles. I’m sure they’ll figure out a way soon enough, and as soon as they do, the DMCA will be overhauled.