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Thanks for the responses (and the other responses). The inimitable regis makes the apples and oranges point, which I had in mind as well — the Dixie Chicks aren’t selling politicized songs. She also asks about quality. The book, from the chapters available, appears to be exceedingly poorly written.

Merlin notes that “Perhaps not publishing the novel could be seen as a leftist bias.” I’d disagree with that. One reason I care a lot about this particular book is because I’ve become convinced that media transmitters of extremist beliefs is a problem. (But not one that we should solve with censorship.) Baen does publish a reasonable spectrum of material — they focus on military fiction, which tends to be right-wing, but Spider Robinson gives them a touch of left-wing representation. But in general, yeah.

Giving money to hate groups is not my worry. I tend to be more concerned about validating and amplifying the beliefs of hate groups. It’s not so much the publication of the book which bugs me — I think that Kratman should get published. It’s the fact that the book was published by Baen, which means the ideas and poisonous concepts are going to be semi-legitimized in the minds of some readers. “Oh, sure, Baen does those funny military books with Sluggy Freelance references; let’s check this out.” And some will say “Ew, lame extreme book,” and some will say “Ha, knew it all along.” And some won’t say anything, they’ll just absorb it without thinking about it.

Those are the ones who worry me. So my reaction tends to be “educate, get the word out, spread the antigens.”

Anyhow, thanks for commenting. I actually wasn’t sure anyone would, and I’m honored.

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I’m ready to reassert my position as the foremost White Wolf v. Sony blogger, if it please the court.

I got myself a login for the federal court system, and soon thereafter procured a copy of Sony’s response to the complaint. (If anyone has a bit of bandwidth and wants to host it, I’d be happy to give them a copy.) I don’t speak lawyer, but I think it mostly says “We have no idea what your game says vampires and werewolves do, and we did not copy our ideas from you.”

Some fun excerpts:

61. Defendants are without information and knowledge sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the averments in the first sentence of Paragraph 61 of the Complaint. Defendants admit the second sentence of Paragraph 61. Defendants state further that to the extent any colorable similarity exists between Plaintiffs’ works and the Underworld movie in this respect, any such similarity concerns material that is not original, not protectable expression, lies within the public domain, and/or constitutes unprotectable ideas or scenes a faire.

Paragraph 61 in the original complaint deals with vampires awakening from extended sleep in a mummified condition. “Scenes a faire,” as I understand it, are ideas that are inherent to the conventional telling of a given sort of story.

67. Defendants are without information and knowledge sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the averments in the first sentence of Paragraph 67 of the Complaint. Defendants deny the second sentence of the Paragraph 67 of the Complaint in the form and manner averred and state that the Underworld movie contains no character named “Vee.” Defendants state further that one scene in an early version of an Underworld script contained one extremely minor character named “Vee.”

There’s a fair amount of stuff like that; if I had to guess, I’d say that Sony is trying to make a case that White Wolf was working from a very early and irrelevant copy of the script.

116. Defendants deny the first sentence of Paragraph 116 of the Complaint in the form and manner averred and state that Plaintiff Collins’ work The Love of Monsters speaks for itself. Defendants deny the second sentence of Paragaph 116 of the Complaint in the form and manner averred and state that one werewolf character at one point in the Underworld movie refers to vampires as “Bloods.”

And so on.

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Home run!

Yeah, it’s way dorky to be celebrating a single win when there are two to go. But — this is joy; this is the sweet pleasure of being a Red Sox fan. This is why we put up with the suffering. This is victory in Red Sox Nation.