Dan, Diana, Oldtimers, Newtimers,
What I want to say is short simple and just sweet enough to be digested.
Authors have rights. Morally, legally. Editors have obligations, and the
first of these is to seek and obtain proper permissions from authors, both
on the project in general and on the specific result. That remains true
whether the resultant publication is electronic or paper, held in a few
private collections and distributed by hand, or stratospheric in the
bestseller lists and piled up in the windows of Barnes and Noble.
Period.
But let us put the morality and the laws of our various lands to one side
for a moment, and look at this purely from the point of view of Quality,
without raising the popular question of how morality as so and so
understands it relates to Quality as such and such perceives it.
How high quality is it to produce a public representation of moq.org, the
main upshot of which is anger and discord? Not very.
Now, a little while ago, and without familiarity with Dan's project, I
posted a little post about producing a book from moq.discuss along the lines
of 'wouldn't it be great if..... ?'. In that same post or in the next I
then said that the toughest job would be editing the posts to everyone's
satisfaction - and that this would be a job to tax any editor, the biggest
part of which job would be diplomacy and tact.
Well now, how tactful and diplomatic is it to have reached a position where
an editor has first of all gone ahead with the project without seeking
appropriate permissions, and secondly asserts his intention to continue in
the face of explicit opposition from contributors? Not very.
Such a situation exceeds Pirsig's concerns about Robert Redford's Movie
project by a country mile.
I suggest that in the light of this it would be tactful and diplomatic for
Dan to either:
(1) Remove Diana's name and work (and such other contribitors and
contributions for which he has not obtained publishing permissions) from
Lila's Child werever posted and without delay.
Or
(2) Remove Lila's Child from his website.
Dan, if you want LC to be a private accomplishment shown only to a few
friends, that's fine. In that case I should do (2) and pronto.
If one wants to speak of the Law, than I myself have to be careful not, for
instance, to publish on my website material for which I have conceeded
copyright elsewhere: not without permission that is. And all the papers
which I have submitted for publication elsewhere - these too I have to hold
fire on. This is only common-sense.
When I think of the trouble I went to to be sure that I had permission to
post even my own Masters thesis on the Web (in case the univerity had some
prior right of intellectual property or objection in principle, as is often
the case (and was for years preceeding my thesis)), the current situation
seems to me to result from an unfortunate lack of proper care and attention.
We might need a book of the moq.org . But there is a right way and a wrong
way to go about this.
Elephant
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