Scrivener's Error

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Scrivener's Error	Law and reality in publishing (seldom the same thing) from the author's side of the slush pile, with occasional forays into military affairs, censorship and the First Amendment, legal theory, and anything else that strikes me as interesting.

27 January 2007

22:54 [GMT-6]

Still More Whining About Annoyances

Another crop of meaningless, trivial, self-revealing annoyances:

Those of your having trouble reading this blawg should check to see what browser you're using. If you're still using an Internet Exploder version prior to 7, you need to upgrade. Version 7 fixes a longstanding Microsoft refusal to comply with the CSS standard that appears to affect versions 6 and before, not to mention a passel of security problems. (Or you could just switch to Firefox 2 as a browser and Thunderbird for e-mail instead of OE, but some work-based machines may not let you.)

And, in the tradition of computer upgrade warnings everywhere, the ones who most need to see this suggestion — which is also good for your system security — won't be able to read it. Thanks, Bill. And thanks for requiring people to use Internet Exploder for all Windows-based security upgrades... even critical upgrades patching critical problems with Internet Exploder itself.
Hipness sucks. Just try quoting an article from Variety or The Hollywood Reporter in a scholarly piece. It's worse than Le Monde! It's hard to believe that going from French to English is harder than from Californian Narcissist to English, but at least there's a dictionary for the French problem. Or maybe there needs to be another option in BabelFish. Oh, wait a minute: BabelFish is about communication. Hollywood is about ego, not communication. I guess this was just a silly misunderstanding of their intent.
Public-organization webmasters: If you insist on using Flash and other non-textual means as the only navigation options on your organization's webpage, you'd better hide — I've loaded the 106mm recoilless rifle and I'm waiting in your parking lot. And you're getting two rounds, not just one through the windshield, if you put schedules — especially those announcing facility closure for private parties — in Flash or another non-textual display. You could also try reading the Americans With Disabilities Act and ponder what happened to Target recently...
Sometimes even the tort-reform crowd accurately assesses a lawsuit. In this instance, I'm referring to Walter Olson of Overlawyered (who isn't as unreasonable as most of the tort-reform crowd) and his comments on the bogus "You miscategorized my book for racially motivated reasons!" lawsuit against Penguin. Sure, the "industry" organizes books (in part) by purported "racial interests", which isn't the highest-personal-integrity method available.

Unfortunately, that article — although it describes what happened reasonably well — falls prey to the problems plaguing virtually every article originally sourced to the WSJ on the publishing industry: It displays no understanding whatsoever of the "why"s in the industry, and in particular the economic basis for them. (Explicating the irony of the WSJ completely neglecting the economic and financial foundations of a story is left as an exercise for the student.) As I remarked in an e-mail to Mr Olson (formatting corrected):

The real problem in this instance is not with Penguin. The real problem is an antitrust nightmare: the book distribution system, which is probably the paradigmatic example of "one man's antitrust is another man's economy of scale" — at least until you look into the financing and terms of doing business, which makes me ask "What economies of scale?" The distributors are the ones who demand "pigeonholing" of books, and Penguin's best defense will be to point out that books that are released without a category tend to stay in distributors' warehouses unshipped. In other words, "We had to put some category on it as a business necessity, and this is the one that in our commercial judgment was the best fit."

In short, "Millenia Black"'s lawsuit needs to be dismissed for failure to join an indispensible party before we even begin consideration of the merits. And that's my overly lawyerly contribution to the debate at Overlawyered. In other words, "It's the procedure, stupid!"

Labels: culture, internet, jurisprudence, miscellany

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Now live at the new site. I have arranged some of the more infamous threads that have appeared here by unravelling them from the blawg tapestry (and hopefully eliminating some of the sillier typos). Sometimes, the threads have been slightly reordered for clarity.

Links of Interest

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Writer Beware and the Writer Beware Blog provide essential knowledge for writers who don't want to be ripped off
Writing-World.com published by the former managing editor of the now-defunct Inklings
Agent Research & Evaluation provides both free and paid analyses of literary agents
US Copyright Office, including both registration forms and records and quite a bit of other helpful information
Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) allows searches of granted, pending, and some rejected trademark registrations
US Supreme Court Opinions from the current and past couple of terms
Law Library of Congress includes statutes for free
The Public Library of Law can help you find the law... but not use it in court, as many of its resources are not in proper form and do not provide all of the citation information needed in court papers
Legal, free e-books are available through Online Books (University of Pennsylvania) and Shakespeare (MIT)
Legal, free music is available through
- ClassicCat.net (what kind of music do you think you'll find here?)
- Music.Download.com (long-awaited successor to MP3.com)
- Janis Ian (artist)
- John McCutcheon (artist)

Other Blawgs, Blogs, and Journals

These may be of interest; I do not necessarily agree with opinions expressed in them, although the reasoning and writing are almost always first-rate (and represent a standard seldom, if ever, achieved in "mainstream" journalism). I'm picky, and have eclectic tastes, so don't expect a comprehensive listing.

A blawg is sort of like a blog on legal issues, but usually has a lot more links to outside resources (other than other blogs) than does a typical blog. Scrivener's Error is a blawg, not just a blog. You can find other blawgs at < ? law blogs # >.

How Appealing is aimed at appellate lawyers and legal news in general. If you care about the state of the law, start here — Howard's commentary is far better balanced, better informed, and better considered than any of the media outlets. To concentrate on the Supreme Court, don't forget SCOTUSBlog.
Some academics' blawgs with a variety of political (and doctrinal) viewpoints:
- Professor Anthony Arend (Georgetown Law)
- Professor Stephen Bainbridge (UCLA Law) (aka "The Perfesser")
- Professor Jack Balkin (Yale Law)
- Professor Dennis Crouch (Missouri Law) (better known as Patently-O)
- Professor Michael Froomkin (University of Miami Law)
- Professor Eric Goldman (Santa Clara University Law)
- Professor Rick Hasen (Loyola-LA Law)
- Professor Brian Leiter (U of Chicago Law/Philosophy)
- Professor Lawrence Lessig (Stanford Law)
- Professor Michael Madison (Pitt Law)
- Professor Larry Ribstein (University of Illinois Law)
- Professor Lawrence Solum (University of Illinois Law)
- Professor Rebecca Tushnet (Georgetown Law)
- Professor Tom Ulen (University of Illinois Law)
BoingBoing, by speculative fiction writer (and 'net activist) Cory Doctorow, is quite hostile to copyright enforcement efforts, particularly regarding file-sharing
The main European IP blawg of interest remains the UK-based IPKat, on a variety of intellectual property issues, with some overlap (with a less Eurocentric view) at IPFinance
Cyberlaw (Stanford) has its agenda grounded firmly in the so-called "digital commons," which might make a bit more sense if any of the advocates of that viewpoint understood diddly-squat about population ecology
The American Constitution Society blawg is a purportedly "liberal" counterweight to the so-called "Federalist Society" (which, despite its claims, should be called "Tory Society") that has yet to establish much coherence... but maybe that's all to the good.

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