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.

26 February 2011

link to: 12:17 [GMT-6]

Link Sausages Delayed by Technical Issues

Well, I was forced to spend money on a new laptop — the old one fried last August, and a look at my productivity over the last six months just made things too clear. Thus, the last couple of days have been spent installing software, copying data, doing setup, etc. On to the link sausages (some of which are cooking slowly for dinner in a very proper German stew with dark beer at the moment):

"Johnson" offers some interesting comments on the myth that passive voice is always bad writing. The problem is not passive voice — which is, after all, a required form in many languages — but passive logic... and even then, only when the logic is being used to prevent communication by obfuscation and not to enhance communication by emphasizing the most-relevant material.
Some interesting news from the publishing/library/e-books world for which just about nobody is making all of the links. HarperCollins (a NewsCorp company) is unilaterally changing the terms of e-book licenses for libraries in two respects: Demanding user data (implicating the PATRIOT Act) and limiting each license to 26 transactions, after which the library must purchase another license. Of course, part of the problem here is that there is yet to be a standard for the form of e-books established, and that has led to some less-than-entirely-satisfactory systems like Overdrive. Imagine, if you will, that popular music in 1962 was struggling simultaneously with mono, stereo, and quadrophonic 33¹/₃rpm LPs; 78rpm vinyl discs; 45rpm singles; 8-track tapes; reel-to-reel tapes; cassette tapes; CDs; minidiscs; MP3s; Windows Media files; and iTunes, at the same time as it became culturally mandatory to switch from radio to recorded music. That's an understatement of what things are like in e-books at present...

On the one hand, I understand perfectly well why Harper is doing this. Some beancounter somewhere has noted that the "standard" is for libraries to expect to replace paperbacks after twenty-five-or-so loans, and twenty-six makes perfect sense to a beancounter who presumes that every e-book will be (a) based upon a paperback edition and (b) constantly on loan for a two-week period. (That libraries expect a great deal more durability from their casebound copies — and many e-books are based upon casebound editions — is something that I suspect the beancounter either didn't know or hoped would be swept under the rug.) That is, the 26-loan license is intended to guarantee to HarperCollins the same equivalent periodic income stream that it would ordinarily get over time from selling paperback editions to libraries.

Then, too, I understand that HarperCollins's parent is among the more unethical publishing conglomerates on the planet (and that's up against some pretty stiff competition). Many libraries have stopped collecting much of the data that HarperCollins appears to demand precisely because of the undue civil liberties implications of the PATRIOT Act, which would otherwise allow federal authorities to get patrons' lending records essentially at whim and essentially just by asking for them. Hmm; wasn't there a potential Supreme Court justice who went through something like this to massive public outrage a couple of decades back with his video rental records?

But what really irritates me about this story is that I'm reasonably certain that it's inconsistent with the authors' contracts. I just reread a relatively recent HarperCollins contract that included a "standard" (or at least "boilerplate") e-rights clause, and it does not appear to allow HarperCollins to transfer anything less than a permanent copy to a third party. Hmmm.
Paul Weimar ponders why fantasyoid speculative fiction seems to be overtaking sciencefictionoid speculative fiction in current popularity, and comes close to making some sense. The thing that he's failed to do is look at who's writing the books, and for that both his demographics argument and a side issue in his educational argument (that, outside of the elite and want-to-be-elite schools more likely to produce hoity-toity-ivory-tower-lit-fic writers, our universities don't train scientists to write worth a damn or humanities/social sciences/business majors enough core science to matter) should get a lot more attention. During the purported "Golden Age of Science Fiction," 80% or more of the authors had science and/or engineering backgrounds... or, at least, 80% or more of the authors whose works were reread after initial publication in pulp magazines, and all of the "leading" authors of the time accept Fred Pohl and Lester Del Rey had that kind of background. If you look today, or even a decade ago, that's simply no longer true. And things were even worse on the demographic front, with only one or two female authors of any real significance to the field as it evolved by the 1960s, let alone today, having been part of that authorial clique (specifically, Leigh Brackett and Catherine Moore). I'm not sure whether this counts as "chicken" or "egg," though...
The Borders bankruptcy proceeds apace... which is to say that there haven't been a lot of significant filings or public moves, but instead the action is taking place behind the scenes. The official meeting of creditors has now been set for 22 March, but that is virtually guaranteed to screw smaller publishers even more than they're already being screwed; a § 341 meeting in a retail-sector proceeding focuses on the interests of the large creditors (and the large lawfirms they bring to the meeting) almost to the exclusion of the small creditors (who are often unrepresented). The only amusing filing was an objection to the superpriority grant for debtor-in-possession financing (see The Definitive Work on Pain (2)) filed by a group of Texas tax authorities. What a surprise: The taxman cometh. Otherwise, it's been administrivia like notices of appearance, service of papers issues, and applications for (and grants of) motions to appear pro hac vice (which would be unnecessary if we just went to national lawyer licensing).

Labels: civil rights, culture, law practice, politics, publishing

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Sausages?

Internet link sausages, as frequently appear here, are gathered from uninspected meaty internet products and byproducts via processes you really, really don't want to observe; spiced with my own secret, snarky, sarcastic blend; quite possibly extended with sawdust or other indigestibles; and stuffed into your monitor (instead of either real or artificial casings). They're sort of like "link salad" or "pot pourri" or "miscellaneous musings" (or, for that matter, "making law"), but far more disturbing.

I am not responsible for any changes to your lipid counts or blood pressure from consuming these sausages... nor for your monitor if you insist on covering them with mash or sauce.

Archives

Warped Weft

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 Rebecca Tushnet (Georgetown 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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