SciFi.com has announced that “as of Friday 15 June 2007, Sci Fiction will no longer be availabe on SciFi.com. SciFi.com would like to thank all those who contributed and those who read the short stories over the past few years.”
Cory Doctorow, on BoingBoing.net asked about the move, noting that a story he co-wrote with Charles Stross has “zillions of links to it, all of which will be nuked on the 15th.” Senior Vice President Craig Engler replied: “The hosting costs are not an issue but there are rights issues around various stories that crop up from time to time. Given how few people visit the Sci Fiction archive it makes more sense to remove it rather than have someone continue to track the rights to all the stories year after year. For instance, although zillions of people may link to ‘Jury Service’ [Doctorow and Stross’s story], in May we recorded only 48 complete visits to it (by that I mean visits to all 4 HTML pages of the story). And for the record we are not using nuclear weapons on Sci Fiction—one of our coders will gently remove the files from the server.”