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.

12 December 2011

link to: 12:21 [GMT-6]

From the Illinois Governors' Wing of the Federal Penitentiary:

The flu is so much more fun at one remove with remoras also going through end-of-semester panic...

So EyeOfNewt doesn't think that "Palestinian" is a "real" ethnicity worthy of political recognition, eh? I was always taught that glib generalizations should have at least some basis in fact, unless they're being used solely for comic relief. This one must have been for comic relief.

The most obvious, relatively nearby counterexamples to EyeOfNewt's lie only a few hundred kilometers due north of Palestine: Kurds and Armenians. Of course, the implicit comparison of Israel to the atrocities committed by the decaying Ottoman empire as it sank into a two-class society consisting of a decadent, "religiously correct" ruling class determined solely by ancestry and a randomly oppressed peasantry isn't exactly what EyeOfNewt intended, now, is it? One could also point to the "former Yugoslavia" (or, if one is feeling particularly whimsical, the "former Austro-Hungarian/eastern Hapsburg domain") for exactly the same problems with self-designation of ethnic groups seeking political independence. Gavrilo Princip, anyone?

More to the point — especially if one likes one's political rhetoric like Turkish coffee (which is to say strong, black, and bitter) — EyeOfNewt's denigration of Palestinians as an "invented people" exactly matches Georgia during the civil rights era (and I mean EyeOfNewt's home state, not the former Soviet Republic — although come to think of it...). It also exactly matches the idea of "Americans" as a distinct "people." More to the point, it also matches the idea of consolidating all of the various tribal factions on the eastern seaboard of North America into "Native American" or "Indian", and then adding to the designation by later conquest so that it includes tribes that would have slaughtered each other on sight. Somehow, I don't think that EyeOfNewt has ever considered the kinds of animosities between pre-Balfour Declaration "native residents" of Galilee and the Negev... or, for that matter, considered the friction between Ashkenazim and Sephards, or the undercurrents in the story of "the Good Samaritan." No, it's all just another version of manifest destiny, because the implicit presumption is that arch-Zionist dominance of the region and displacement of its population is right... and has no exceptions or limitations.

EyeOfNewt's position would have been more defensible if he had extended it to its extreme: All "ethnicity" is an invented psychosocial construct that changes substantially over time and geography. That's a position I could, and do, agree with... but it contradicts "American exceptionalism," and in particular "white christian American exceptionalism," so you're just not going to see it considered seriously in American political debate. From or by anyone.
On a lighter note, how about invented languages to go along with the invented ethnicity?
One of the downsides of patronage as a model for supporting the arts is that sometimes it's a choice between starving and sleazebuckets. At least in the marketplace one can pretend that it's just the handing over of greasy currency — or, these days, electronic banking transfers — in an arms'-length transaction. I, too, though, have seen PBS acknowledgements of Koch "charitable foundations" on science shows that skewed away from discussing climate change...
Of course, that also brings up the problem of the buggy-whip industry — that is, the existing publishing apparatus, and in particular that devoted to scholarly works. The problem here is not transition to different models while retaining the (imperfect, but better than the alternatives) peer-review system, such as SSRN and arXiv and PLOS, but the destructive effects on some of Schumpeterian creative economic destruction — that is, the casualties/collateral damage of change. For some reason, those whose personal interests are most directly intertwined with the status quo always seem to be most strongly set against changing it... even, or perhaps especially, when change is inevitable.

Conversely, it also implicates antitrust problems in the existing industry subsegment, and the fact that no matter where one comes down on the question, the answer isn't going to be quick. Or cheap. Or casualty-free.
Professor Bambauer describes one response to Facebook's facial-recognition software in startlingly clear terms:

One proposal raised was to provide people with copyright in their faceprints or facial features. This idea has two demerits: it is unconstitutional, and it is insane. Otherwise, it seems fine.

More than anything else, this points out just how difficult it is to adapt the common-law model to rapid change in context.
On another lighter note, smoking may make your nipples fall off. That I'm calling that a "lighter note" may tell you more about my sense of humor and prediliction for multilayered puns than you really want to know.

Labels: copyright, culture, intellectual property, politics, publishing, science

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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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