First up, John Scalzi put up a "Whatever" blod entry expanding on a story from Metafilter about Cudo. Cudo is an Australian bargain seller, which is offering an AUD 99 package for an e-reader complete with a CD-ROM full of books to load onto it. Great, except they probably don't own the rights to distribute those e-books. We're not talking about public domain works, here. These include hundreds of titles that Scalzi (President of the SF Writers of America) recognizes as belonging to active SFWA members. Seriously, this is "200-proof stupidity" to use Scalzi's phrase for it.

On the flip side was have Techdirt reporting on how important Google search results related to SOPA/PIPA reporting had been blocked out due to a bogus takedown notice. Although the post has been reinstated, it appears that the notice was a targeted action by a company named Armovore whose sole purpose is to send out notices on behalf of others. Given the target of the notice, the timing, and the complete lack of relevance to the claimed infringement, it's hard not to see this as a grotesque attempt to block people from reading things that Armovore's Cartel masters don't want them to read. When a government does it, that's censorship. When private companies do it... can we bring a case for fraud and civil damages at least?

There are a whole raft of problems here, not least of which is the hidden nature of things. Techdirt had no idea its content was being blocked - they only found out by accident. I'd bet that the vast majority of authors whose books are on Cudo's CD have no idea about it either. The second problem seems to be that nobody is applying any thought to these processes. How hard is it to ask "do we have the rights to these books?" or "do you own that copyright your'e claiming is being violated?"

It seems to me that the process is broken and people are not following the laws-as-written. How about we focus on fixing what's on the books and in operation already before we go passing more new laws and further restrictions?