letters of note (David Foster Wallace Literary Trust)

Dear Mr Kohner:

I would like to bring to your attention a subject that may be of
concern in connection with your work for the David Foster Wallace
Literary Trust. I'm an emotionally invested but otherwise unconcerned
third party.

I noticed that someone is using the file sharing site Github to host
the full text of David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest". The text of
the novel has been marked up with some HTML-like tags that facilitate
analysis. It is available for direct download online.

I am assuming that the person who has put together this repository
does not have your permission to make the content available in this
form, because they make no statement to that effect. (Curiously, the
uploader has the family name Wallace, so the possibility that they are
a rights holder in the work did occur to me, but, again, no statement
about rights is mentioned.)

You can find the repository I'm speaking of here:
https://github.com/bwallace/computationaljest

The text of the novel as a whole (with the extra annotations that I
mentioned) is available for direct download via this link:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bwallace/computationaljest/master/infinite_jest_annotated.txt

Individual sections of the book are available in plain text format in
a ZIP file that can be downloaded together with the rest of the
repository.

It does not appear that the main aim of the uploader is "piracy", but
rather, this is an (in my opinion rather misguided) attempt to do "open
science".

The text tagging contributed to a textual analysis that is described
in the following published paper:

Byron C. Wallace. Multiple Narrative Disentanglement: Unraveling
Infinite Jest. In Proc. of the North American Chapter of the
Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
(NAACL-HLT), 2012. (http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/N12-1001.pdf)

I'd guess that the analysis itself falls at least somewhat within the
broad wishes of the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust -- "open to
working with artists, writers, directors and performers who are
interested in using Wallace's work." If I may be so bold, making the
text of an ambitious contemporary novel like "Infinite Jest" available
under an open source license would be a pretty darn interesting thing
to do. However, I don't get the remotest sense that that's what's
going on in the present case.

I have not written to Byron Wallace about this issue: again, it's not
really my business to do so. I did however contact Github support
(see appended message). In short, they told me they will only take
content offline in response to a copyright violation if they receive
communications from the rights holder, following the protocol outlined
here:

https://help.github.com/articles/dmca-takedown-policy/

Please note the following piece of text in that policy:

"GitHub will not automatically disable forks when disabling a parent
repository. This is because forks belong to different users, may have
been altered in significant ways, and may be licensed or used in a
different way that is protected by the fair-use doctrine."

In the current case, there are 4 forks in total
(https://github.com/bwallace/computationaljest/network/members) which
would presumably mean you'd need to submit 4 notice and takedown
requests.

That's about all I have to say on the subject, but if I can usefully
answer any questions please feel to write.

Regards,

Joseph Corneli, PhD