From the Amazon comments, posted by someone named Inverse Reality.
Let's review a few facts. Jareo's husband, Kevin Walzer, holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Cincinnati and they've both been linked to open-source projects. This establishes both some intelligence and awareness of the situation of copyright and public domain in the U.S. today, as well as possible leftist leanings/sympathies. I'd like to suggest that this may not be as clueless a decision as it seems. Yes, it looks totally idiotic on the surface, but I wonder if this might not be a PR move for challenging established copyright laws gone terribly wrong...
S/he's right, my immediate assumption was that she was just utterly clueless and was going to spoil the fun for the rest of us. As tvnerdgirl said, Lucas isn't known for being very tolerant of fan creation.
But the other side of this could be that she knows exactly what she's doing. Her husband has a doctorate in English. In addition to the vanity press, the two of them run a
poetry publishing company and have apparently been publishing books for some time, at least one of which has been very successful (at least in terms of critical reviews, notoriety). And they managed to convince Amazon, B&N, et al to carry their books. They must know
something about what they're doing.
And apparently they run or ran (the website isn't available) a software company that had produced some
Open Source products. Open Source is, to paraphrase badly, releasing things into the public domain so that others can use or add on them. The Firefox internet browser is an example of this; all of the code to create Firefox is available on their website. This means that independent coders everywhere can write their own extensions or modifications and share them on Mozilla's website without fear of a lawsuit for copyright infringement. Mozilla
encourages them to do so.
So anyway, they both have to know at least a little something about copyright law. Is it possible she thought she was making some sort of statement or protest? (Although, if I were going to stage some sort of protest, I'd at least pick a fanfic the fans liked
.) And it isn't a particularly
effective protest, as what she did falls clearly on the illegal side of the line and doesn't really have any controversy to make it worth protesting for. But it has garnered a lot of attention. Mostly negative, but maybe she was following the old "any publicity is good publicity" adage?
Either that, or all their college education and publishing experience really has left them clueless, which makes it that much sadder. She (and her husband) weren't uneducated people. She should certainly have known better.
Kaylle
