copyfight

I am so torn up about the recent clash between Cory Doctorow and Ursula K. Le Guin. The former being a newly-discovered favourite author of mine; the latter being a staple in my inundated-by-scifi upbringing. A few months ago, Doctorow posted a paragraph Le Guin had written to the fanzine Ansible, operating under the Creative Commons assumption that

reproducing, for the purposes of commentary, a single paragraph originally published in a noncommercial venue, was fair use under 17USC, the American copyright statute.

The paragraph by Ms. Le Guin is a deliciously snarky short story in her own lyrical voice, and was written in response to this particular comment from a review posted on Ansible in May 2007:

'Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.' Ruth Franklin (Slate, 8 May 2007)

I won't post the paragraph here, obviously, but here's a little taste:

Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs -- somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly ... but who? And why wet shoes? It hadn't rained. There, again, the heavy, soggy sound. But it hadn't rained for weeks, it was only sultry, the air close, with a cloying hint of mildew or rot, sweet rot, like very old finiocchiona, or perhaps liverwurst gone green.

Basically, Doctorow posted the whole paragraph and felt he had the right to do so under fair use. I'm with him. Le Guin posted the paragraph to her blog and she doesn't appear to charge her online readership for access to her posts. The letter of the law states "single paragraph," which happened to be the entirety of that particular work. At least Doctorow wasn't an ass about it. He could have posted everything but the last sentence or something along those lines.

From what I understand, this became an issue after the San Francisco Chronicle printed the entire work without permission from Le Guin, possibly because Doctorow's post on BoingBoing skewed the intent of the copyright on Le Guin's site. You can read Le Guin's recount of the conflict here, and Doctorow's apology to her here. Doctorow's been criticized for being self-serving even in his apology, but to me, Le Guin comes off the worst. I understand she feels cheated out of $200 or whatever, much less by some upstart young blogger-activist-SF hack with a penchant for Disney World and Digital Rights. So I won't criticize her for her condescending online rebuke of Doctorow. But I will ask, was it entirely necessary for her to turn into a 13-year-old with that last sentence there? "This letter is not copyrighted and may be excerpted or copied entire."

Really?

I dunno, I'm just a disappointed fan here.

(Photo of Cory by Scott Beale; Photo of Ursula by Marion Wood Kolisch.)