Former England rugby star Brian Moore won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2010 last night for his autobiography Beware of the Dog: Rugby’s Hardman Reveals All. The book details his experiences of being sexually abused, being adopted and being a massive rugby star while also holding down a career as a solicitor.
When I saw that a paperboy had won a major prize for gay men’s books, I thought, ‘blimey that’s quite an achievement for a schoolboy.’ Of course, Paperboy is the name of the memoir and the writer is a grown man called Christopher Fowler. He has won the inaugural Green Carnation prize, created this year to celebrate fiction and memoirs penned by gay men. Paperboy concerns Fowler’s lonely childhood in the 1960s. Congratulations to Christopher.
Sign up for the Tor/Forge Newsletter for a chance to win a limited edition leatherbound copy of Ender’s Shadow. Plus, we’ll include an Ender’s Shadow audiobook and an advance reading copy of The Lost Gate with the winner’s prize:
Please note, the Ender’s Shadow limited edition is from the Tor archives and has been opened. There is no plastic seal on it.
About our newsletter: every issue of Tor’s monthly email newsletter features original writing by, and interviews with, Tor authors and editors about upcoming new titles from all Tor and Forge imprints. In addition, we occasionally send out “special edition” newsletters to highlight particularly exciting new projects, programs, or events.
If you’re already a newsletter subscriber, you can enter too. We do not automatically enter subscribers into giveaways. We promise we won’t send you duplicate copies of the newsletter if you sign up more than once.
Sign up for your chance to win today!
Ends 1/4. Open to US only.
……………………………
More giveaways:
Filed under: Giveaways 
-thumb-265x198-56784.jpg)
If a work lifts material protected by a Creative Commons-BY-SA license, does it automatically become CC-BY-SA licensed itself? That is the question being considered this week in France, where a blogger named Florent Gallaire recently posted the entirety of Michel Houllebecq’s latest novel, “La Carte et le Territoire,” a few days ahead of the scheduled release of the e-book, on the grounds that Houllebecq lifted several passages from Wikipedia.
Houllebecq admitted to the borrowing without attributing when it came to light this past September, and it seemed that he could, in theory, face legal action from the contributors of the Wiki entries. But this has not happened, and, aside from the annoyance of having to defend his art in a video interview (perhaps not that annoying a task since it can be done without extinguishing one’s cigarette), it seemed Houellebecq had heard the last of it. And then “La Carte et le Territoire” won the Prix Goncourt, and a blogger devoted to open online culture saw an opportunity, declaring the novel the “first free book” to win a literary prize. It was “free,” Gallaire wrote, because of the Share Alike condition of CC-BY-SA:
If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.
And then he posted the entire book as a PDF.
Flammarion, the publisher of “La Carte et le Territoire,” stated yesterday that it was considering legal action (Gallaire has now taken down the PDF). And Adrienne Alix, the president of Wikimedia France, is similarly unconvinced, saying that although Houellebecq’s use of the Wikipedia passages may not have been entirely above-board, it does not follow that his whole book thereby passes into a Creative Commons license. Gallaire’s reasoning seems predicated on a misunderstanding of how a license like CC-BY-SA works: Houllebecq might indeed be in violation of the license, but the only action he could face would have to be brought by the authors of the work he lifted. He does not forfeit his own copyright by having infringed upon another’s, and a third party (Gallaire) is not free to decide that he has.
Or else Gallaire just wanted to get the conversation going, and going it is. In the French blogosphere, there are some who welcome the uncertainty brought by Gallaire’s action because, essentially, they hate publishing giants like Flammarian whose copyrights they find “oppressive” in an open era (echoes of a similar fight over the sharing of la musique can be heard). And there are a surprising number of French who detest their Frenchiest literary export. The funny blogger Alexander K. Ounadjela views the posting of “La Carte et le Territoire” as “vigilante justice” for Houellebecq’s crimes—not just against the Wiki authors but against Michel Levy, a “little” writer who published a “little” book in 1999 called “La Carte et le Territoire,” which title was lifted by the bad best-selling Houellebecq, who then had the gall to win the Goncourt with it. The big guy steals from the little guy, the big publisher squashes the little guy when he responds in kind…and so on. It’s all very interesting/Houellebecqian. I can’t put it any better than Ounadjela’s headline, though: “Houellebecq : un prix Goncourt et aussi pas mal d’emmerdes.”
(Image via Publick Journal.)
