Hate Website File 770 Pirates Bestselling Author’s Work, Refuses To Apologize

I couldn’t be more shocked.

To some degree, I understand the ribbing over politics that goes on. It’s part of the culture, even if these people take it to such extremes that it’s a wonder how they function in their day to day lives (most of them don’t function well from what I’ve seen — otherwise why would SFWA have so many panels on mental illness?).

Instead of appealing to normal folk to read, the backwards industry has decided to focus their efforts on riling up these poor mentally ill individuals, including taking pot shots at very popular authors on a regular basis (see Larry Correia’s recent blog) so that these mostly fledging authors who read this site can take comfort in each other as they snipe at people more successful than them.

We have a similar situation here, where File 770 posted a short story by a bestselling author from a piracy site, giving away this author’s work to everyone who came there, potentially harming the author’s career. I couldn’t believe it myself. Political nonsense is one thing, but this is a new low for File 770, as everyone in the community regardless of politics should hold sacred the author’s right to their work, and to get fairly compensated for their work. Without that, we have no civilization or copyright laws, let alone a science fiction publishing industry.

But they posted it, and when the author emailed about it, the author was greeted with absolute rudness by File 770’s proprietor, Mike Glyer (posted with the author’s permission):

I’ll go over the chain of events because the emails embed backward for the sake of timeline.

1. Author requests the pirated work go down.
2. Mike Glyer is absolutely rude to the author about it — and claimed the file was posted by said author.

I’ll full stop here — if I found that I had a link on my website to a piece of fiction that the author did not want disseminated on the internet, I would immediately say “oh, sorry, my bad I didn’t know, I removed it” and do so. It’s pretty simple business. Even for my enemies I would be courteous. It’s shocking how Mike escalated the situation when there was absolutely no need to.

Glyer proceeds to insult the author–which as File 770 is an agitation and hate website, it makes sense that this would be his goal. No doubt his entire goal was to get the author riled up so this gets blogged about so he can post another out of context quote on his website and rile up his mentally ill minions again. We all know the drill at this point, even if it doesn’t make sense why Glyer does this. It’s sad to watch over and over as so many authors get targeted and harassed in this manner.

I’ll note that this was exactly how I came on the scene as a fledgling author, File 770 making posts harassing me which were then escalated by people like Cat Rambo, Kurt Busiek, John Scalzi, and now is being continued by Mary Robinette Kowal. All of those people owe me an apology and then some for the way they’ve treated me. And they further this behavior by giving File 770 legitimacy. This is why Mike is incentivized to keep doing things like the above to authors with followings.

It’s as the author said, all he had to do was remove the pirated link, but instead he gave the author lip to try to start yet another feud. And he further escalates at the end by adding talk of lawyers — does he want this escalated to a legal conflict? As much as Glyer is glib, if the author’s content is being given illegally, FIle 770 would be the liable one.

Someone really should go after File 770 and the commenters there who harass so many authors it’s absolutely disgusting. It needs to stop. This is so far over the line it’s unbelievable.

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