BoingBoing has an excellent shakedown of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America who are allegedly promoting and perpetuating the fear of book piracy amongst their members. They publish FAQs about the dangers of ‘ePiracy’ and run a report service for writers to post piracy problems to: reporting an offender and so forth.

Now the organization has sent out a “push poll” to its members about Amazon’s tool for searching and retrieving the fulltext of the books it sells, in which writers were asked questions like “how much of [your work] would you like customers (and pirates) to be able to read without paying?” Additionally, it included brief editorials about the coming infocalypse that “piracy” would bring about. Clearly, this poll was intended to tell SFWA’s members how to feel, not gauge how they feel, which is very much in keeping with the organization’s creations of loyalty oaths on “intellectual property” in which members are instructed to take vows not to violate patents (again: patents? Huh?)

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