Obama will need to do a great deal to repair the damage the current Administration has done to the Constitution and the rule of law. He will also need to do a great deal to repair the damage the current Administration has done to scientific inquiry. And the less said about the economy, and world opinion, and race/ethnic/religious relations, the better.
- Some of what Obama faces in his term depends upon defining "truth." "Truth" is never counterfactual, but sometimes it's easier to find the truth in fiction than in badly written reports with appended tables of numbers (which, because they're numbers, often overwhelm nonspecialists). Even some economists recognize this; some economics scholars recommend fiction to understand poverty. This is important because fiction — unlike nonfiction, and particularly unlike academic and governmental nonfiction (if that last isn't an oxymoron under the current Administration) — always integrates its context into its ultimate argument; that's the very nature of fiction, contrary to some of the experiments attempted in the mid-twentieth century, which instead of being "contextless" merely shifted the definition of "context" onto the reader.
- There isn't a book in everyone, nor an editor for everyone. Not even when the WSJ "partners" with new corporate affiliate HarperCollins; your liberal media at work, eh?
- Booksellers and publishers are already whingeing about the forthcoming holiday season, while simultaneously advocating putting their entire catalogs in electronic form as part of a simultaneous assault on authors' rights and abrogation of their own responsibilities to continue marketing products for which they continue to hold the license. Meanwhile, Google is trying to expand the proposed settlement beyond US, which is even less defensible than the settlement itself... and should scream "antitrust!" to somebody.
- On the more-abstract IP front, a current NBA candidate (winners to be announced in a couple of days) forces the awards community to consider whether fixups are new works, while on the left coast we've been treated to more Bratz spats. I don't see any copyfighters weighing in on this one.
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Law and reality in publishing and entertainment (seldom the same thing) from the creator's side of the slush pile, with occasional forays into politics, military affairs, censorship and the First Amendment, legal theory, and anything else that strikes me as interesting. |
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