Spontaneous Derivation

Okay, there’s been a lot of FAIL on the interwebs lately, and the most recent one is the hubbub about the Rowling and Vander Ark case. A lot of people think Rowling’s being a big meanie. What I want to say about that I’ll keep under wraps, because I think there’s been more misleading articles than not in the media.

Right now I’ll just say: it’s a shame that, while Stanford Law seems unable to read court documents, especially the ones from the history of the case—you know, why read what’s been going on when you pass judgment in public or something [/sarcasm]—fandom_wank, as a collective entity, can.¹

For people who may be wondering about the “Pie Chart of Doom”, it’s a breakdown, in graphical form, of the amount of text that’s been plagiarized by Vander Ark’s book from the Harry Potter books versus other kinds of text. It’s also available in bar graph form. For larger images, clicky to embiggen:

pics extracted from documents by B.K. DeLong

It may be a surprise to some, but it’s not only professional writers who live on LiveJournal; there are professional lawyers as well. Thankfully they’re less obtuse on LJ, and tend to break down testimonies and documents into easily digestible forms for the layman:

• praetorianguard covers the circus that the case became, and also highlights from the trial.
• praetorianguard explains why settling is good and why the defendant’s attorneys are awful; if only RDR had a dream team I suppose.²
• Not on LJ, but Dan Slater covers the following: RDR refuses to settle. And of course, Steven Vander Ark, no matter what he wishes he could do, is along for the ride.
• foresthouse breaks down the ruling, starting with Part I: Findings of Fact.
• foresthouse continues ruling breakdown: Part II: Conclusions of Law, Copyright Infringement.
• Update: foresthouse continues with: Part III: Conclusions of Law, Derivative Work. (Also lists more links to ruminations, past and present, on the case.)
• Update: foresthouse continues with: Part IV: Conclusions of Law, Fair Use; Part V, Damages and Conclusion
• Update: praetorianguard breaks down the ruling as well.
• And Scrivener’s Error, not on LJ but on Blogger, weighs in.
• Update: At Harvard’s Info/Law blog, Derek Bambauer speaks.

And finally, Nora Roberts, who tends to be a clueful and reader/fandom-with-it author (along with Diane Duane) comments curtly here.

For those who wonder what would have happened if RDR won: it would have been the worst thing possible for fandom. The ruling would prod studios, lawyers for authors, and other copyright holders to crack down on fan fiction and other fan creations; while they’ve always been looked at with a wary and willingly ignoring eye before, now they would actually pose a legal threat due to precedent set by Rowling vs. RDR Books. We’d start seeing fanfiction sites get shut down left and right, in other words.

So digest before you judge and shout.

(By the way, for folks who might wonder where I was yesterday, since the 8th (sob!) is without a blog post: on Twitter, mostly, since I was traveling to and from a doctor’s appointment and then to and from the pharmacy, which took its sweet time in preparing some of the stuff.)

1. For those who don’t remember Orson Scott Card’s opinion: he thought Rowling was wrong. These days, being on the same side as OSC tends to be a strong indicator of being on the wrong side. [↩]
2. Another point for those just coming in: Vander Ark is not the defendant. His publisher, RDR Books, is. [↩]

As you may all know by now, the rumors on the web about a Kindle 2.0 this year are not true. Is this Amazon’s fault, as some say?

Well, no. Mostly because the rumors never came from Amazon officially, and Amazon (the company) never dropped any “snrr snrr snrr” hints. The rumor originated from CrunchGear on July 15th, which claimed an insider had “let it slip”, which is completely different from a statement by the company itself. Despite all attempts to the contrary, employees are not actually all part of a hive mind, and some people screw up (or are bragging. Unfortunately, it happens).

However, you can get a Kindle for $259 if you sign up for an Amazon rewards card. I have one myself, and have had it for three years. It’s a normal credit card, no weird strings attached. Well, except the one where you get $25 in rebates for every $100 you spend on Amazon stuff. Which I do not count as a string per se, because you aren’t required to do that, although it’s a strong incentive to. Indeed, it’s how I got my own Kindle for $259; I ended up with a bunch of $25 gift certificates over a year and then just piled them on the Kindle order.

C’est la vie.

An update to the glorious trainwreck that is William Sanders and Helix SF Magazine.

Over at Rachel Swirsky’s That which deranges the senses, the writers whom Sanders has either called “pantiwadulous”, or denied their requests to remove stories from his archive, have banded together. The result is Transcriptase, a mirror of Helix—without the racist lunatic at the wheel, of course.

And yes, this effort is entirely legal—the Helix contract doesn’t disallow stories being placed in other web archives.

So visit Transcriptase and take a peek at the wonderful stories there—and all packaged in a far better website, too.

Goodbye, Sanders. Thanks for playing.

Is it worth it to submit to some place or other in the mere hopes of publication?

As the worms turned up from Helix: A Speculative Fiction Quarterly’s recent wankery show, sometimes it is decidedly not.

Come with me as we explore a trail of

• racism, bigotry, and rejection letters;
• the acts of nonprofessional spewage from an editor of a Hugo-nominated semi-prozine;
• what happens when your contract with your publisher is not well-examined;
• and how to deal with the blatant wankery.

Continue reading “Summary of a Train Wreck: Helix Speculative Fiction Magazine’s Sordid Bigotry and Blunders”