Well, this is new. My first ever DMCA takedown notice–from HarperCollins, publisher of Levitt and Dubner’s Superfreakonomics. While other publishers these days are happy to have sample chapters of their authors’ works read and distributed on the internet, not so with HarperCollins.
One thing I can do in response is–tit-for-tat–to remove my praise of and link to E.M. Halliday’s Understanding Thomas Jefferson: there are other better (albeit longer) Jefferson biographies published by firms that have not sent me DMCA notices: read them instead.
I urge everybody–authors and readers alike–to just say no to HarperCollins in the future.
Well, what does everyone think about this? My first reaction is: fair use excerpts aside, authors and publishers all have the right to decide whether they want large chunks of their material available for free on the internet. If HarperCollins decides against that, fine. There’s really no reason to be upset about it.
My second thought, though, is that I’d be plenty pissed off if HarperCollins did this to me without first sending me an email asking me to take down the offending material. Hauling out the lawyers and the DMCA artillery is really uncalled for unless someone refuses a polite request first.
But I don’t know if that’s what happened. Did HarperCollins ask first and shoot later, or was it the other way around?
In the first year or so after I started doing this I had one or two discussions about the length of excerpts, and I’ve always complied with any request (though not without first trying to negotiate, which was more than successful in one case), but my only literal take down request was from the Reserve Bank of Australia. I still don’t understand that one. (When I asked why, they said that if, say, a graph that was part of the post was found to be in error and they changed it, the error would persist on my site. I decided to comply even though it wasn’t an official DMCA notice since if their quality was so bad that that was a significant worry, I didn’t want their stuff on my site anyway)
UPDATE: Andrew Leonard at Salon:
In the annals of bogus Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices, the directive from Harper-Collins ordering Berkeley economist Brad DeLong to remove from the Web the PDF of Chapter 5 of “SuperFreakonomics” that he posted a few weeks ago is not actually an out-of-bounds request. There’s little doubt that DeLong actively wanted to embarrass “SuperFreakonomics” authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner by exposing their “global warming” chapter to public scrutiny. Even bad publicity is usually welcomed by publishing companies, but in this case, the storm of ridicule showered upon “SuperFreakonomics” may ultimately be too much of a bad thing.
So? The DMCA takedown is just as embarrassing for Levitt, Dubner, and Harper-Collins as the content of the chapter; demanding its removal is a tacit admission that this particular excerpt does not work as advertising for the entire book. It may even be achieving exactly the opposite.
