An apology to Ursula K Le Guin - Boing Boing:
"In a nutshell: I quoted, in its entirety, a one-paragraph story that Ms Le Guin sent to the fanzine Ansible, in which she made fun of a book review in Slate that said that 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.' Le Guin's paragraph was a long one, about 500 words, and I pasted the whole thing in, because I thought it was delightful.
I did this with the understanding 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.
Ms Le Guin disagrees, and though I haven't heard from her personally, my understanding is that she disagrees on the basis that taking the whole story can't be fair use. I have taken the piece down. The last thing I wanted to do was quote Ms Le Guin against her wishes, and had I known sooner that she objected to being quoted, I would have removed it sooner.
However, I still believe that my quotation was fair use. I have discussed it with copyright scholars, and my understanding is that the proportion of the work in quotation is one factor in determining fair use, but not the only one (imagine if "taking the whole thing isn't fair use" was a hard and fast rule -- how would one quote a double-dactyl or a haiku?). I also believe this to be consistent with jurisprudence on the subject. However, fair use is judge-made law, and this is an area where people of good will can have legitimate disagreements. I say this not because I wish to slough off responsibility for a mistake, but because I think fair use is an important concept in the free flow of information.
...Since then, I've worked through mutual friends to convey this to Ms Le Guin. My understanding is that she is unsatisfied and remains upset with me..."
More on copyright, fair use and Creative Commons at the link.
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