I do have to wonder a bit what we’re even doing as a society when writers are fighting tooth and nail to not have their stories be in places where people can still read them.
And yeah, I know… but still.
The line between “stolen” and “lovingly preserved” is so precariously thin these days.
As an editor, I read and publish a lot of stories. But my favorite story ever written was published in Daily Science Fiction. I know nothing about the author, because there was no information I could find beyond the byline.
I saved this story to my personal hard drive, in the same folder as I keep my own stories, before DailySF went down, because it’s really important to me.
But no one else can read it. Not legally. Maybe they’ll never be able to again.
And that’s really sad. But sure, copyright.
And before anyone comes at me, I was also published in Daily Science Fiction. I had 44 stories there, more than any other author. I know the rules, and I know all the arguments.
But sometimes, fighting for control is a losing battle. There’s an important reason for the commons.
I hear writers hope all the time that the AI “bubble” will pop. And I think, yeah, there is a bubble that needs to pop. But it’s not AI.
AI is helping to cure diseases and diagnose people who get ignored by doctors. And that’s the same AI. They’re all the same under the hood.
The bubble that needs to pop is copyright.
The internet has been pushing at the edges of it for a long time. Memes and gifs from shows. Fan fiction. Piracy saving pieces of culture that would’ve been lost forever if someone hadn’t treasured that one beloved VHS tape for decades.
And seriously, I have heard all the arguments. I’ve been in the writing community for many years. I’ve been paying attention, and I’ve been listening.
But at some point, you really need to stop and ask: who does it help that these stories have been disappeared?
The stories in Daily Science Fiction were already paid for and appreciated. Sure, the occasional author might be savvy enough to resell some of those stories as reprints, getting paid a minor pittance. But reprints are generally (except in weird, rare cases) non-exclusive.
Some of us make sure to keep our own stories in print somewhere, perhaps on a personal archive. Mine are all available to read for free on my own website. But not every author has the wherewithal or the bulk of stories necessary to make that worth doing.
I have long wished that it was easier to track down stories, books, and videos I encountered years ago that left an impression on me. Or amazing things I’ve heard about from before my time… but have been lost.
And we could make that so much easier.
When I was selling stories to Daily Science Fiction, their payments made up the majority of my fiction-writing profits each year, even though I had several novels out. They paid an excellent rate for short fiction.
It was still a pathetically bad way to make money.
Sometimes, the whole system is rotten, and you need to take a step back to really look at it.
Short fiction is a truly wonderful thing. Short stories can be absolutely life-changing. I personally pay authors to let me publish their stories in the magazine I run.
But there is something deeply, deeply, profoundly wrong about watching an entire community go up in arms over the idea that an important magazine that published a massive amount of beloved fiction has suddenly been preserved.
It should be preserved.
I can’t respect the writing communities I used to frequent anymore. Not when they get angry that individual copies of books are destroyed in the process of digitizing them, because THE BOOKS! WE LOVE THEM!
But a massive archive of recent fiction gets resurrected? Burn it down.
And okay, maybe this wasn’t the best way.
But where was the righteous indignation when Daily SF (which did have the right to archive our stories forever) went down? Where is the push for proper archiving?
I guess, we only care about reading when someone is paying to do it.