The Revolution Will Not Be Podcasted

There remains a political undercurrent to everything, and the arts cannot escape.

Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

George Orwell, Why I Write (1946). Nor should they.

• One side aspect of "the arts" is the commercial part that actual creators handle somewhat (often entirely!) orthogonally to mudane reality. The struggle between influence and (noncreator understandings of) originality is just one starting point. (That that student of creative processes fell directly into the swamp of overt political influences should surprise no one.) When it verges on branding-friendly appropriation of descriptions it further masks the brain rot of commercial disdain for the differences between "creative process" and "creative output."
• Those differences are definitely at issue when oligopolists/monopsonists in the commercial aspects of the arts listen only to other oligopolists/monopsonists.^† The key question ignored by this article — and that ignorance is entirely consistent with the venue's prejudices — is how likely listening to only one critical element of a multisided transactional chain is to actually reveal much of anything. Publishers' interests and knowledge bases do not encompass those of their suppliers (the authors) or either the direct (libraries) or final (readers/library patrons) customers. In media res may have a place in some storytelling, but this article very much assumes the can opener without ever wondering how the food got in the can — or whether it needs to be reheated, used as ingredients in other cooking, or is past its shelf life after it's out of the can. Let alone whether it's nonnutritious junk.
• This problem is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in proposed consolidation of access channels and its implications at both source and consumption endpoints. Clarkson's proposed solution to the "problem" of broadcaster "unprofitability" both ignores the freedom-of-expression non-Ricardian rent and embraces the colonial instinct of those already aligned with colonial powers on its way to proposing an increase in oligopolist/monopsonist power and structure… which is rather ironic given Clarkson's own past relations with an oligopolist/monopsonist in that very space that actually has an unusually broad and open conception of "gatekeeping." (Not broad and open enough, but "choosing the lesser evil" and all that…)
• There's that gatekeeper problem again. As Orwell notes in his underappreciated essay — widely cited, seldom contemplated — complete removal of "politics" from writing is impossible. Sometimes, however, the gatekeepers don't even try, even for writing about science and science-related issues. It's one, not-entirely-benign, thing for a publisher to engage with authors on purported style issues to maintain civility or some other purportedly unrelated-to-substance abstraction (that's never entirely independent of politics — or, indeed, of substance). It's much more disturbing when a publisher licenses a work (in a monopsonistic marketplace of ideas), and then attempts to impose its political preferences in opposition to the authors' own position that was known at acquisition time — for a children's book on a hot topic that's just short of 232° C to begin with.
• All of that is disturbing enough when we know who the gatekeepers are, and can at least contemplate the reasons the gatekeepers use their influence to start a war. It's much less clear when instead of a war they're "just" exploiting individuals, not excluding illusory creators busy following the long-con playbook ("enhance credibility, and pretermit outside inquiries, by establishing associations with and linkages to legitimate enterprises").

Looks like I didn't do so well at leaving the politics out, did I?

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†  A quick refresher: In the vocabulary of antitrust, a "monopolist" is a single marketplace vendor with control of the market (an "oligopolist" is a member of a group that does so, either by formal agreement or otherwise), usually measured by ability to inferredly control price and perhaps quantity in that market. A "monopsonist" is similar, but is instead a marketplace purchaser with the same kind of control; the antitrust literature doesn't fully contemplate "oligopsonist." Market role of a dominant player actually matters a lot, especially in any analysis of either the market's scope or quantification; the latter can easily result in multiple divide-by-zero-like errors. In this instance, because the library vendors act as both vendors and purchasers, they're in both parts of the transaction with distortive market power.

Bad Parenting

One of the fundamental tensions in American (and, arguably, Western) culture and law is the five-way tug-of-war amongst privacy, freedom of speech, intellectual property, distrust of monopolies, and access to information. Every nation balances these differently; indeed, every decade balances them differently, and every information user¹ balances them differently. All too often, a display of balance for one user, during one decade, in one particular American (Western) culture, appears to other users as not plates spinning on a finger, but off it.

Thus, the parenting problem with one current set of problem children: Large-language-model generative-response systems, which I'll call "SuperEliza" for now.² Consider what parents do: Teach their children, and model behavior for their children (not always positively; an abusive alcholic parent is a model of what not to do). In no particular order, consider:

• The "parents"' disregard for the rights of others in information that is generally available, especially through mass "ingestion" of digitized textual material (both overtly, and admittedly, piratical³ and otherwise), rationalized by ignoring the second part of the Feist test: Even for those texts that are "factual," it is still necessary to consider whether the way those facts are expressed is "original" that necessarily informs any fair-use analysis. That's the difference between a recitative timeline of the last month before the beginning of the European conflict in 1914 and The Guns of August: One of the two is clearly copyrightable original expression, however much it is expressing "facts."
• The "parents" set their "children" loose with nothing resembling adult supervision. One would expect a "parent" — or a reasonably socialized parent, anyway — to at least yell at their "children" about vandalizing the neighbors' houses after three police visits…
• Those two instances are just at the input end, which is bad enough. Harmful output is worse. These "children" are either stupid or mean — perhaps both — and that's leaving aside the way they encourage misuse even when not formally "wrong" (and even if it turns out this accusation is false — which is certainly possible, even with all of these emdashes that I've used in my writing since the 80s — its very plausibility is itself problematic).
• Then there's the ownership of the product problem: Not of SuperEliza's responses to queries, but of SuperEliza him/her/their/itself. The irony that the reductio ad absurdem of "Information Wants to Be Free" is "there can be no legitimate ownership interest in information-based systems, any more than of the input" gets less attention than "when recess is over, you have to give the ball back to the playground monitor — it hasn't become 'yours' because you used it."

Perhaps, though, with these parents and their endemic disregard for the rights, property, and self-respect/identification of others (and Others), we shouldn't be surprised. As a group, "techbros" aren't… well… the best-socialized voluntary-membership group on the planet.⁴ And their companies are, if anything, worse; they're unruly children, too.

It's not just the parents' personalities, but their substitution of "volume" for "credibility with those who've actually studied the subject matter", the "more input" is better than "higher quality, even paid-for, input" choice that led to, well, every lawsuit over training materials. This is particularly apparent in output for anything related to biology. It's not quite so apparent, though — and dangerously so — when there's a lot of incorrect popular mythology about a subject that's not quite within regular, everyday experience. It's not that Joe the Plumber is stupid; it's that he doesn't actually know a lot about industrial-scale petroleum refineries, no matter how many pictures fo them appear on his social-media feed. The mythologies get turned into blithe, uncontrovertible, unreserved statements of "fact" based on the accessibility of the source materials.⁵

If one is going to ascribe a human characteristic like "intelligence expressed through language, music, or drawing" to the machines, some examination, some acknowledgement of how human "intelligence" develops — and is flawed, in substance or process — seems appropriate. The next stage will necessarily involve incorporating not just a direct response, but exercise of judgment (also a hallmark of human intelligence, let alone "superintelligence").

So we shouldn't be surprised that with this kind of parenting — and this kind of parents — we're seeing more Lord of the Flies than To Kill a Mockingbird. Both of which remain in copyright, so they shouldn't be part of any SuperEliza "training" dataset… but they're in the Bartz dataset…

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1. There's really no satisfactory shorthand for "the people who are in and around information, who consume information, who produce information, and who are affected by information and others' consumption and production of information." For the nonce, I'm adopting "user" because that's the first-in-time for individuals in the modern world, at least as to conscious interface. This carefully neglects the chicken/egg problem regarding where the initial dataset comes from.
2. It is possible that these systems will evolve toward true intelligence, which would require both the ability to pass the Turing Test with an expert in the field being discussed, and the ability to apply not just information and inferences from previously-known information to new disparate contexts, but determine and adapt methods of reasoning from the previously known to new, disparate contexts. We're not there yet. Notwithstanding an ignoramus's attempt to rebrand rename current-generation technology as "Superintelligence", the current branding of "artificial intelligence" isn't just puffery — because it's ultimately descriptive, it's fundamentally (and, arguably, intentionally) misleading. Current-generation systems, and those in the forseeable near future, far more resemble Eliza with a larger dataset and automated incrementing of that dataset than anything else. They can't develop new methods of reasoning, or spontaneously do anything. Fortunately, they can't send astronauts outside to fix a (nondefective) AE-35 unit, either. Plus, they're "SuperEliza" largely because the hardware is so much more capable.
3. One might argue that the settlement reserves that question; however, the settlement documents reserve not the question of whether knowingly pirated material was ingested, but whether the ingestion created liability because there was a potential fair-use defense that had been preliminarily ruled sufficient to avoid summary judgment in the infringed authors' favor. Compare Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc., 788 F.Supp.3d 1026 (N.D. Cal. 2025) with Thomson Reuters Enter. Centre GmbH v. Ross Intelligence Inc., No. [20]25–2153 (3d Cir. 30 Sep 2026).
4. Back in the day, I was one of them. (Some would contest that my socialization is any better now.) I contend it just gives me insight into the only comparable voluntary-membership group: Authors.
5. That this bears a sad relationship to the "statements of facts" found in judicial opinions wrestling with nontraditional contexts is for another time. And it's not just when "science" is involved, either.

Previously Calendared

It's that time of year again: All the quarterly and annual appointments piled up in a relatively short window. It's sort of like ripping the bandaid off instead of slowly and carefully peeling it off — hey, wait, there's another insurance form for that?

• In a rather short, sharp shock to the underlying meme of the fine arts — that "the original" is The Only Thing That Matters, meaning that to appreciate it or learn from it at all one must go to where it is to physically view it (with all of the subtle, and not so subtle, class/ethnic/nationality elements embedded in that journey), and that no copy ever allows for Appropriate Appreciation — the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has digitized its collection for free public access. The sideswipe at the memes of photography-licensing oligopoly, as distinct from the interests of actually engaging in original expression individual photographers, is also highly appropriate; particularly as that subculture is precisely the opposite of encouraging "Progress in the useful Arts."
• The contrast with the, well, dubious competence of the Anthropic claims process — in conception, design, and execution — is pretty obvious to those of us who've been inside the system for both creators and transferee-exploiters. On one hand, the lawyers involved were constrained by both lack of first-hand knowledge and the stated priorities of their clients; on the other, both general ethics and the specifics of class actions required more disinterested effort, in both conception and implementation, than is apparent… for fees on just the plaintiff's side exceeding the gross revenues of almost everyone involved.

  Which really, in the end, leads to the other half of "reform": Don't just criticize, but conceptualize and actually build something better that doesn't itself have large unintended consequences (at least not when predictable). That's the real problem with the "Information Wants to Be Free" movement (especially as exposed in "we refuse to pay anyone for data to train our large-language-model generative systems"): It doesn't — indeed, actively refuses to — engage with both the systemic and individual costs of information-creation mechanisms and environments.

  No, I'm not going to be specific until at least all of the briefs have been filed in the appeal. My concerns relate directly to the stated subjects of the appeals, and it would be inappropriate (not to mention would require taking the conduct of a few of the players outside for a spirited discussion and attitude adjustment assisted with a rhetorical 2x4). Suffice it to say that one of the nonparties has demonstrated that, at least until its entire leadership and senior staff changes, it can never satisfy Fed. R. Civ. Proc. 23(a)(4) due to its built-in blind spots (and borderline narcissism, but we are talking about the arts here…) — and that the concept of the "real party in interest" is also relevant to satisfying that part of the Rule.

• The rhetoric is building, and won't subside until well after 03 January 2027: Expect to hear more and more about "voter fraud" from ill-informed quarters (often with poorly-hidden conflicts of interest and narcissism well beyond anything found in the arts community). For a change, how about some validated data analyzed by, like, experienced nonpartisan interpreters of laboratory and other experimental data on the prevalence of voter fraud? Or, at least, voter fraud measured by its actual standards, and not "they didn't vote for me" (semipaywall).
• That last link sausage leads into contemplating both the ingredients and, perhaps more to the point, the cleanliness of the kitchen — and more likely the lack thereof. Direct election of anyone expected to exercise judgment within the bounds of a profession is incredibly stupid. We're at least smart enough not to do it for military officers (we don't directly elect unit commanders!); we shouldn't for health officials, judges, prosecutors (and Attorneys General), coroners, law-enforcement officials, etc. And especially for that last as to "sheriffs," who historically were not "cops" as we know them but armed tax-collectors and proxies for absentee liege lords (viz. the legendary Sheriff of Nottingham) who more often than not dealt only with writs and "major" crimes like stealing sheep, not driving a horse cart while intoxicated. In this context, direct electoral approval is worse than relying on (all-too-often evaded) professional regulation; the irony that the reason professional regulation often fails — twisted, conflicted concerns for "reputation of the profession" combined with a lingering internal sense of "there but for grace go I" — for the same reasons as "candidate reputation" must be acknowledged but shouldn't detain us for too long.

  But in present law, that remains (but shouldn't be) "constitutional" as consistent with "a Republican form of government." Something can be stupid without being overtly unconstitutional, though, and subjecting professional judgment in individual instances (often wound up with nonpublic information) to approval by direct election is at minimum stupid. We've got enough stupid in government (and any other "institution") without building its structure to elect more stupid.

Mismatched Capabilities

How does one actually build something when the tool available is a hammer and there are no nails — not even any screws — in the inventory?

• RIP Tom Ulen (nothing "official" yet). Yes, I actually maintain(ed) friendships inside the L&E movement, primarily among those like Tom who viewed economic analysis of law — and legal analysis of economics! — as a powerful tool and not an answer per se (or should that be per quod?). He (and his science-fiction fandom) will be missed.
• And as to the latter, just over sixty years ago American TV boldly went where no one had gone before, in particular because it relied upon truly independent freelancers (not mere outside contractors mislabelled as freelancers) telling unpredictable stories premised on surprise and not a single overarching premise (preapproved by the studio). Maybe Disney could learn something, whether for Marvel stuff (of which there are other "ownership" issues that are not well-known, even aside from Stan Lee), or a certain other franchise devoted to ill-conceived fan service since the mid-1980s, or… Oh, wait, that would be the definition of "Not Invented Here," wouldn't it? And the less said about the respect accorded the outside inventors/inventions by transferees and other exploiters, the better… especially when misidentified and poorly-conceived legal workarounds are involved. Since it's a new academic year, here's your homework… which you should be prepared to both criticize and embrace for very much the same reasons (and for many others not visible within its underlying weltanschauung).
• Or we could note that the biggest problem with many cultural debates (and institutions) is a distressing tendency toward binarism, epitomized by CP Snow's regrettable inability to count above two (not that Leavis was any better). "A clash between diametrically opposed alternative views" is almost always oversimplified nonsense, especially when the actual stakes are not those of the argument's subject (semipaywall) — things like "reputation" (and "casualties"). Sometimes everybody involved in these false-dichotomy debates is wrong; the Snow/Leavis controversy was fuelled in part by refusal to even contemplate "boundary conditions," as inherent in the very forum of the debate — both between Snow and Leavis, and in Snow's own conception.

  At present, the purported "debates" over the more-than-two-millennia-long snarl of the Levant in particular and Southwest Asia (the "Middle East") in general epitomize this, and especially so because many of the most vocal participants in those "debates" themselves have no stake in them. Let alone any knowledge of the region, or personal experience with the spillover elsewhere, or the concepts of "hidden agendas" and "undisclosed/overdiscounted conflicts of interest." For it to be meaningful, "Never Again" has to include everyone, else we're just seeing at a social level that those who were themselves abused (literally or by transferred identity) tend to become abusers; very much like, well, Northern Ireland. Meanwhile others exploit the distraction (and you should carefully ponder the meaning of "regime change" in all its multiplicity — and undisclosed conflicts of interest). That allied/proxy leader may — for now — be our bastard, but at his/her/their core still a bastard.

Briefing for a Descent Into the News

Unfortunately, there's no Virgil handy to guide us out afterward, either. Contemporary satirists just aren't enough.

• If you need any further demonstration that Disbarred Rudy has gone bonkers, consider his screed urging the present mayor of New York City to not attend Friday's 25th anniversary eulogies for an atrocity. That screed underlines precisely why Mamdani should participate. It's not just because "he's a nonwhite Muslim," or anything else pointing at Mamdani himself as somehow an "inappropriate" mourner; it's because the attitude of taking action and spewing hate against those Not Just Like Me is precisely the attitude that informed the terrorists. They didn't go after a directly-related target, but a massively multiemployer office building… that employed more than a few members of their own religion, but were somehow lumped in as "Americans." So, too, for the first responders.^† This ironic turn on "We have met the Enemy, and he is us" is no doubt beyond Rudy's narrow-minded consideration.
• As a further demonstration of endemic inability to look outside the box, to judge canonical literature texts by their covers… or to look at context, in the same way that the curriculum itself has been forced to look at context. (Initial aside: Even in 1980, there were paperback editions available… I had to buy one each semester. They fit much better in backpacks than did the casebound editions.) The fundamental problem is that Bauerlein believes that the canon represented by sole focus in even a survey course represents either "literature" or "the study of literature." That's not to say that one cannot impose some structure on the field — only that one cannot do so by preliminarily restricting the data set to material likely to reaffirm entrenched doctrine.

  Somewhat more snarkily, a significant part of any movement away from canon by students (and younger instructors) came from increasing recognition that none of them could, or did, share a first name with Byron: Lord (really, state his "Christian name" without looking it up…). The context in which literature lived mattered more and more as more students from "less-privileged" backgrounds made their way into the better schools, convinced that they needed to be employable immediately after graduation so they could begin paying back student loans. Too, just off campus (even at elite schools) the unwashed kept getting closer, kept becoming more a part of students' lives. And meanwhile, some darned fine writing was coming up from civilization — the parts of the US west of the Hudson (and here, it's also important to remember that nineteenth-century-and-earlier Europe is east of the Hudson…), particularly in comparison to what was being newly published from the mid-1960s onward in the barbarian wilderness to the east.

  Put another way, one absolutely, positively must study the Michelson-Morley experiment and its context to understand modern physics — even the parts that aren't about subatomic particles or the speed of light in a vacuum as a speed limit. The real point is that the experimental results ended up proving that its experimental design was futile; that, more than anything else, is the problem with taking the editorial efforts of Professor Abrams et al. as reflecting not a, but the, foundation of literature and literary study. One might also contrast Beowulf, Chaucer, and dare I say Spenser with even the nascent novels of Sterne and Fielding — let alone Cervantes and the chansons de geste that were already evolving from verse as printing made memorization from oral presentation less essential — but that might be gilding the lily; and it's worth unpacking that metaphor to compare to Bauerlein's explanation, particularly in the midst of the field of orchids and Nepenthe in which students today find themselves. Or, perhaps, it's just some hungry sailor mistaking a priceless tulip bulb for an onion.

  All of which I say with a fondness for (many of the) classics — but, simultaneously, recognition that the classics constitute a corrupted data set, and that due to social and technological factors we simply do not have (and can probably never obtain) the rest of the data. That more lawyers (not excluding judges!) could do with the kind of "close reading skill" Bauerlein describes — one that necessarily asks about context beyond the document, such as why Ophelia should repair to a nunnery — is for another time.

• But that's a different-academic-perspective disagreement with Professor Bauerlein, not the kind of fundamental skepticism I have regarding a certain copyright-related settlement now in the throes of maladministration. The official administrator can't escape some responsibility here, but today I'm just shaking my head at the ignorance — not much of a surprise, but definitely dismaying. I have no idea which lawyers told the President of the Authors' Guild that "less than 25% of claims had any issues at all, and that in most cases the problems stem from typographical errors or other mistakes that can be easily fixed and don’t involve actual disagreements" reflected an acceptable claims administration process — particularly when there's no need to prove initial entitlement (like in a medical mass tort) or uncertainty regarding the facial identity of potential claimants after the settlement class was narrowed inconsistently with governing precedent. Those lawyers clearly had never been involved with significant class-action settlements of this nature, where there's an admission of the relevant conduct (however "excused" it was earlier claimed) regarding a purported closed universe of claims against a specified settlement fund.

  The Authors' Guild's track record in "representing authors" is — generously — abysmal. Ms Rasenberger has not helped matters here, perhaps aided and abetted by PW's own abysmal track record… But that's nothing compared to the noncredible explanation offered by a commercial publisher's CEO for the claim of 100% of payments by that publisher, and in that he's far from unique. The directions for filing claims were not a model of clarity, nor were other explanations offered clear and consistent, but I haven't run into an author yet who didn't understand that "If the publisher still had rights on the relevant date, I write '50%' for my claim because I have to assume the publisher will make its claim for 50% unless I've already been told otherwise" — even without consulting a lawyer. Another failure to engage in "close reading," I suppose.

• Which is still superior to the purported "objective test result" standard for Army cadet officers. Yes, this is tinged a little bit with interservice rivalry; that said, we should be expecting all officers to be substantially more capable than reflected in the fiftieth percentile of, well, darned near any widespread standardized exam issued below the graduate-school level. Indeed, one of the "practical lessons" of officership is that low standards lead to low achievement… and when it comes to making decisions involving the use of force, "the middle of everyone" is a low standard.
• Which is probably less frightening than AIs answer[ing] questions about the course reading for medical, nursing, and allied-health-profession students. The vendor's identity fills me with even less confidence than the probability that this will turn out well for anyone other than the vendor.

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†  It's just not worth going in to the broader bigotry that has followed 9/11. Followed, but (unfortunately) was merely amplified by — not caused by.

Misanthropic (9)

I thought it prudent after the last entry to refrain from further comment on Bartz until after all appeals were timely filed. Two were:

• Edelson, PC v. Anthropic PBC, No. 26–5391 (9th Cir., filed 18 Aug 2026) identifies its subject matter as:

  [F]rom the Judgment entered on July 20, 2026 (dkt. 680), including all prior orders encompassed in that decision. Edelson PC and O+Z intend to focus their appeal on issues related to the Order Granting in Part Motion for Attorneys’ Fees, Reimbursement of Expenses.

  ("O+Z" is another law firm "aggrieved" by the fees/expenses allocations.) This appeal has a full and active docket at the Ninth Circuit.

• Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard LLP v. Anthropic PBC, No. 26–5455 (9th Cir., filed 19 Aug 2026) identifies its subject matter as:

  [F]rom the Judgment entered on July 20, 2026 (ECF No. 680), solely relating to the District Court’s Order Granting in Part Motion for Attorneys’ Fees (and incorporated prior orders, including ECF No. 515; the “Order”).

  This appeal does not have a full and active docket at the Ninth Circuit as of this writing, indicating that it may have been administratively consolidated with the Edelson appeal. Or not, it's still early and there's no formal notation. Update 29 Aug: The docket now treats this as an associated case with the Edelson appeal.

First, one preliminary matter: The statements of intent to limit the appeals to the attorneys' fees and reimbursements serve two purposes. First, they demonstrate standing to appeal — a law firm stating it has a greater claim on reimbursements and fees has standing to appeal. Second, it limits the amount of any prospective appeal bond, should one be required — not the whole $1.5 billion stated value of the settlement, but whatever portion of attorney's fees are at issue (at least an order of magnitude smaller). However, those statements voluntarily limiting the respective appeals' scope are nonbinding because the Notices each reference the Judgment.¹ That puts the whole thing in play, and certainly for amici.

So what happens next? The overworked clerks in the District Court's office have to prepare, and supply to the appellant(s), the "appeal transcript" — a certified and indexed copy of all "relevant proceedings" below. And because the Edelson appeal specifically includes "all prior orders encompassed in that decision" — which, because it relates to a settlement, includes the prior maneuvering regarding fair use — that's nontrivial, even in this day of electronic submissions on disk instead of boxes and boxes and boxes of paper. This is due by 01 October… and unlikely to be completed by then, if only because by law criminal matters have priority.

Then comes the part in which lawyers cannot be distinguished from vampires, because they're indoors in the library/their desks during all daylight hours and much of the night too: The briefing (even California lawyers look pale!). In the Ninth Circuit, the appellant's brief is due 40 days afterward, currently set for 10 November but frequently extended either on application (see Cir. R. 31-2) or because the appeal transcript was late. Amicus briefs supporting the appellant will be due seven days later, on 17 November. The response brief is due 30 days after the due date for the appellant's brief, currently set for 10 December (and frequently extended), and amicus briefs in support of the defendant (or of neither party… a nontrivial probability in this case) seven days later, currently 17 December. The appellant's reply brief, if any (yeah, these law firms will pass up an opportunity to put more words in front of the judges), is due 21 days after the due date for the response brief, currently 30 December.

And then things get really chaotic: Assignment to a panel, determination of a need for oral argument, scheduling of oral argument, and then the decision. Meanwhile, any motions regarding the amount of appeal bond, stay of the order/judgment being appealed from, etc. are also in play. Lots to do! More on this when the briefs — and motions! — are in; typically, in the Ninth Circuit this means that unless the appeal is either expedited or horribly defective the decision on the appeal itself will be in late 2027 or 2028. Decisions on motions — stay motions and expediting motions in particular — will be sooner.

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1. This is slightly misleading. A Judgment must be a separate document under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and there isn't one labelled "Judgment." The rules do, however, provide for appeals from nonfinal orders in some circumstances, and approval of a class settlement is sort of one and sort of the other (and appeals regarding classes Are Special anyway).

Go Badgers!

Badgers in the UK are demonstrating their commitment to public service by tearing up golf courses that — unlike parks and recreational areas accessible to the great unwashed — are being allowed to water their greens during the worst drought in England in a century. Just don't tell Bill Murray or he might get ideas.

• It was stolen from Count Binface! Send Lindell! Send Eastman! The Clacton electorate needs all the helplaughs it can get! (And yes, something similar could happen Over Here… but without the formally acknowledged gerrymandering and even rotten boroughs.)

  I suppose it could happen regarding election of a more corrupt, dumber, more assholish candidate. Hmm, let me think, are there any examples Over Here?

• It's not like anyone Over Here has ever misused government agencies against their political opponents. Well, not since the Sixties, anyway. No, we let the private sector do it and the government just buys the data. That's better, right?
• Meanwhile, the Ninth Circuit is howling at the moon. Again. In a "parody versus trademark tarnishment" decision. Again. Involving Jack Daniels and dog chew toys. Again. And, worse yet, on remand from the Supreme Court…

  While not trying to pretend this is necessarily easy, I find it distressingly amusing that in parody of trademark the Ninth Circuit has a better sense of humor than the Supreme Court, as apparent comparing the Supreme Court's… effort with the recent remand, while it's exactly the opposite (albeit not on remand) for "parody versus copyright infringement," comparing "big hairy women" to not-quite-telegenic judges or anything else in the Geisel oeuvre. And all the while, they're missing the real point on "parody versus satire," but that would require understanding literary history and not gun-control-effort history so it's clearly outside of judicial awareness.

  I'm really not sure what has happened to Jack Daniels in the last decade and a half. Once upon a time, that company (or at least its lawyer!) had a sense of humor and respect for First Amendment rights that overlap with commercial advantage regarding resemblance to the packaging of its (43% poo!) products. No more, it seems; one has to wonder if the graphic artist who created the most-recent version somehow got into senior management (graphic artists, as a group, don't handle parody/satire regarding their own works very gracefully). Or, perhaps, the board was just partaking of too many free in-house samples when they approved this lawsuit. This sort of nonsense, however — the overblown response, not the parody/satire — makes me want to buy some Bad Spaniels merch.

Misanthropic (8)

The first question on the mind of Bartz claimants is going to be "When will I get paid?" In technical legal terms, It Depends.

The first, and perhaps most obvious, barrier would be an appeal. But who can appeal, and when? Even that is very much an "It Depends" sort of thing:

• The obvious deadline is that established in the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure: Thirty days after judgment... but, too, the so-called "collateral order" doctrine may make some orders ripe for appeal, and the rule governing class actions makes the decision on class certification ripe for appeal. This is a hard deadline: Excusing a late appeal — especially in a class action — is rare and requires specific findings; "size of the matter" and "number of class members" and similar laments will be unavailing. Since this particular order was issued on 20 July 2026, the appeal deadline is Wednesday, 19 August 2026, at 2359 PDT (remember, July has 31 days).
• But absent a stay — which would require a separate motion — an appeal won't halt processing of the claims. Not all claims are going to be paid based just on the face of the claim. For some, there will be obvious fraud (a problem in all class actions), or questions raised with a legitimate response (also a problem in all class actions… and with well over 400,000 claims, some of them will be surprising). For others, there will be resolution of competing claims for the same work; most obviously, this will include multiple-publisher claims and publisher-versus-author disputes over whether the publisher actually had rights. On occasion, this will include author-versus-author claims, both formal coauthors and authors-as-partial-contributors (for example, Dangerous Visions, a multiply-reprinted 1967 anthology that is in the canonical list of works infringed, has at least 37 claimants to the author's portion of the settlement… and the publisher's portion is, to say the least, "subject to disagreement").
• Under US jurisprudence, an appeal can be filed by an "aggrieved party"… and that includes winning plaintiffs dissatisfied with with the amount, timing, or anything else of forthcoming relief, including absent class members (that is, claimants who weren't designated as class representatives). There are, of course, procedural hoops to jump through. Here's the area that gives the most latitude for appeal in Judge Martínez-Olguín's final approval order:

  Third, a number of objections take issue with the requirement that any book listed on the Works List must possess a copyright registration number (registered within a certain timeframe, as set out in the Class definition) as well as an ISBN or ASIN for certainty regarding the eligible and included works. These Objections are overruled: “The class certification order recognized that the related limitations let all class works use registrations as evidence of certain facts and pursue statutory damages.” Bartz, 2025 WL 2961371, at *1-2. “The class is limited to books for which an ISBN or ASIN exists. From the metadata[,]… as well as through commercial metadata associated with ISBNs or ASINs, copyright registrations associated with these works can be identified. For every certificate of registration presented by named plaintiffs, for example, there is an associated ISBN (e.g., Br. Exh. 30). And, because the classes are limited to works registered within five years of first publication, these certificates and the facts therein are presumed valid.” Bartz, 791 F. Supp. 3d at 1059.

  Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, No. [20]24-5417 (N.D. Cal.) Dkt. 0680 (20 Jul 2026), slip op. at 10 (emphasis added, typography corrected, footnotes omitted). Consideration of precisely why this narrowing of the "well-pled" (term of art) class allegations — see Bartz Dkt. 0070 (First Amended Complaint, 04 Dec 2024) at ¶¶ 63–71 — is fair to the non-named-plaintiff members of the class as defined in the complaint has received little or no attention. Consider, for the moment, a published-in-Canada work, republished in the US, for which the US publisher failed to obtain a copyright registration within five years after publication but is required under the Berne Convention to be fully protected. Then there's the Muchnick declaration by the Supreme Court that a registration is not a prerequisite to settling on behalf of other than registered works, so long as the named plaintiffs' works are registered. The issue here is not that the negotiation process leading to such narrowing is inherently improper, but that this opinion does not disclose the judge's reasoned basis for exercising her discretion and thereby opens matters up for an appeal (especially given certain intraclass conflicts blithely ignored by just about everyone). This is far from exhaustive, too; consider the inaccuracies in stated work identification in the accepted database (exceeding 2% in my sample… that is, somewhere around 10,000 potential claims), incorrect identification of claimants, and so on. In short, this is ripe with potential at minimum bases for appeal just on the class definition.

• And then… there's the jurisprudential error. The Final Approval order blithely concludes that "any putative Objection filed by a non-class member is stricken because non-class members lack standing to object to the settlement" (slip op. at 7), citing to an unpublished opinion in the same district that in turn… "overreaches" is the nicest thing I can say about it. There is a substantial difference between lacking standing and lacking merit — and in this particular instance (but not quite as much in the cases underlying the authority relied upon!), some excluded parties fall within the Amended Complaint's class definition but not that of the settlement.¹ There may be meritorious reasons for later narrowing… but those excluded by that narrowing do have standing to object. Consider a hypothetical class action, pled in broad terms, against a pharmaceutical firm that is later settled on behalf only of a narrower class consisting of white female class members; Hispanic men who otherwise fall within the pleaded class definition certainly have standing to object to being cut out. Returning to Bartz, this particular error does affect a wide variety of considerations of "fairness" to the settlement, precisely because Judge Martínez-Olguín did not consider such objections on their merits so as to exercise her discretion in a reasoned matter. (That it's an error with momentum of custom does not make it correct, guys.)

This, of course, is just an outline. It should be sufficient to demonstrate that a party that actually has standing to object — and every class member named or otherwise identified in the Final Approval has at least standing — is in a position to file an appeal that will result in every guilty/liable defendant's preferred remedy: Delay. None of this is to say that no payments whatsoever will be made on or about 17 September 2026, only that it's dubious as to their scope or anything else. Authors: Don't budget an expected September payment toward your 01 October mortgage/rent payment. Publishers: Don't expect to make otherwise-due royalty (or staff salary — I'm lookin' at you, [redacted]) payments out of it, either.

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1. The reasoning behind tolling of statutes of limitations for absent class members expressed in American Pipe & Constr. Co. v. Utah, 414 US 538, 554 (1974), rather compels this. Details and explanation, however, are beyond the scope of reasonable blawgs, let alone reasonable people.

Misanthropic (7.5)

Before diving in to any of the details regarding the actual meaning of "final approval" of the Settlement on 20 July, it's fairly important to revisit a couple of context items.

First, and perhaps most important, one must remember that any settlement is a least-worst-outcome compromise. By definition, a difficult-to-value harm has already occurred, and reducing that to certainty — a number of dollars, a clear promise to do/not do something in the future, compensating all of the professionals who facilitated reaching the settlement — is by its very nature an ephemeral agreement that outsiders can find fault with. The very existence of statutory damages in copyright actions (presuming a number of prerequisites have been met) represents recognition that a hypothetical infringer's accounting might not be sufficiently clear to determine "lost profits," let alone any other aspect of "valuing" a particular copyright infringement claim in the moment. Now multiply, or even exponentiate, that by multiple parties, let alone class actions, and one can reach a pretty clear conclusion: No matter what or how a copyright-infringement claim is resolved, via settlement all the way through trial, outsiders can always criticize it as either inadequate or excessive (sometimes both simultaneously!), and even the parties will remain dissatisfied. If there's one aspect of conflict resolution to which the aphorism "It's easier to ask forgiveness than get permission" does not apply, it's "control of individual expression."¹ "Because it would be kewl" doesn't transfer well when an author's mortgage payment is on the line… or, more to the point, the author's ability to pay a professional or agent to review a prospective authorized use of their material in advance of making that blockbuster.

Second, and somewhat less abstractly, one needs to remember that just as the map is not the territory, a settlement — and especially a class-action settlement — does not define the interests of the parties at the outset. Instead, those interests relate to what is recognized and explicated by the parties. In this context, consider whose interests actually control (and that is a relatively simple example, because that author didn't work with a lot of coauthors), and it's incredibly easy to imagine that changing even between the infringement and the expiration of the statute of limitations. Authors are mortal, too… and their heirs and executors usually ill-qualified to judge or serve the interests of either the author or the ouevre. The interests of the individual authors — and other copyright holders — are at most an intersection, let alone a union or congruence, even before considering temporal-change issues. This should, but never does, mean that one should not map "interests served by a class settlement" onto "interests of an individual copyright holder… or infringer," let alone onto "Progress of… useful Arts" related to a specific instance of infringement of a specific work.²

Third, and last for the moment, any judicial remedy reflects the compromise of not allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good (or good enough, or satisfactory, or less-bad-than-the-alternatives) when it applies to organizational conduct. The Bartz v. Anthropic matter makes it even murkier because there are multiple organizations, both formal and de facto, on both sides of the v.… including objectively "bad actors" on both sides. Consider, for the moment, a hypothetical supervisor (if that's not an overstatement of power/influence/responsibility) at Anthropic whose only role was to recommend against using this convenient database of material as a training corpus, but who was ignored/overruled, and how that supervisor's reality interacts with this settlement.³ What is having "Anthropic" on one's work history with a job title indicating this going to do in five years when applying for a job at Disney?

Put together, the real point here is "don't overgeneralize" — a generalization that is not itself reflexively too broad.

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1. Techbros generally haven't figured this out yet, because they conflate "identical means of storage and manipulation of information" with "the means of storage and manipulation of information determines the nature of the information." Those who have figured it out warp and/or deny it due to lack of relevant context and conflicts of interest. Consider, for example, the "context" that would be applied by someone whose only experience is abstract manipulation of a large dataset (Newtonian mechanics) to both the expression "That which we call a rose | By any other name would smell as sweet" and its connotations in context and generally (quantum mechanics regarding a single molecule, let alone its constituent parts… or presence and function in a cellular organelle).

   More to the point, as a group techbros have a semiinstitutionalized tendency to overgeneralization, epitomized by shrieking of "Information wants to be free!" at communication by metaphor merely because the literal bounds of the metaphor can be recorded… and imputing motivation and conduct of some prominent bad-actor owners of copyright interests to all of copyright. CP Snow was far too optimistic when he divided knowledge-communities only binarially — there's a lot of fuzziness, and it comes from more than two sources.

2. Put another way, the interests of whoever-owns-Simon-&-Schuster-today are not the same as those who wrote Star Trek™ novels, and contributed to Star Trek™ collections and nonfictional works, that appear in the data set of the Bartz matter. And there are more than a few.
3. As foreshadowing of an issue that I will discuss down the road — I'm not even going to identify the potential conflict because that would give it away and activate the conflict — consider the publisher's claim in the Bartz matter based on a contractual agreement where the relevant contractual clause was itself unlawful, however customary and however "agreed to" by the actual author(s). Consider this the creepy music playing just before the teenagers agree to spend a night in the old haunted house down the road, notwithstanding their later choices (and that's an unduly optimistic view concerning authors!). Foreshadowing: Your mark of quality literature.

Hawley Smoot!

There's only one Canadian product that merits a punitive tariff: Wildfire smoke. But then, I'd say the same thing about coal-fired electrical generators, the Tacoma Aroma, and other negative externalities with unclear cost factors. Whether that should be applied directly to real-estate developers is… complicated.

• Speaking of negative externalities, we just had a six-weeks-long event full of them: The Men's World Cup. (And for anyone who says "men is the default, we have to separately designate women as the inherently less-athletic product," I suggest competing with Abby Wambach for a header in the penalty area.) Whether considering the perfidy of agents or of dubious fanbases — not to mention dubious individual fans with little understanding of the game (especially when their efforts are utterly meaningless) — this quadrennial event always ends up fighting mythology. In two years in/around Los Angeles, it'll be same process/different flavor…
• I've not seen Nolan's The Odyssey, if only because it's not showing in an appropriate venue: My living room. I've beaten the dead horse of miserable cinema experiences well past the glue bottle, so I'll leave that there and just point out that for those of us who wear thick glasses, 70mm widescreen and IMAX are actually less immersive than our TVs. The more-amusing side battle is Mu5k's "promise" to create a "historically-accurate proprietary-LLM-engine-generated version of his own"; one wonders whether it will include the rampant disease, festering post-battle wounds, and… well… adult content. Perhaps more to the point, one wonders if Grok can/will refrain from the Lara Crofting of the female characters, especially Helen and Athena but also Arete, Calypso, Cassandra, Circe, Eurycleia, Melantho, Nausicaa (not this one), and last alphabetically but not in importance Penelope. A "historically accurate" adaptation of Homer — one, the other, together — will have to be toned down to get a "hard R" rating, and that would put it out of reach of the adolescent boys forming so much of Mu5k's fanbase (at least until it comes out on a streaming platform with lots of ads for worthless-at-best crap).
• Meanwhile, Major Major Major has been busy "suggesting" that "older" military personnel have low testosterone (projecting much?), which rather begs the question of what qualities are normally appropriate in "older" military members — that is, more senior, whether enlisted or commissioned. And frankly, I'd much rather any military surgeon treating me after an honorable wound in battle didn't have any steroid-induced shakiness in fine motor control.

  On the Malibar Front (or at least nearer to it than headlines make it seem), journalists are beginning to recognize that among Persian rulers, it's not turtles but monsters all the way down, back to not later than the Sasanids. But then, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia…

• I've been one of the literati since I was writing my age in single digits (well, at latest single hexadecimal digits). I've never been one of the hot literati, though, and there's no chance that I'm about to start.

Comments on the final (snort!) approval of the Bartz/Anthropic lawsuit are forthcoming. Short preview: It's not nearly as "final" as the words "final approval" imply, and nobody should count on payments being made Real Soon Now.

Circadian Link Sausage Platter

(Not cicadian, no bugs approved here.) Given that this Sunday's big game is between two Spanish-speaking nations, I'm feeling somewhat copacetic about being forced to rely on Telemundo due to the incompetence of the local Fox station.

• It's become quite apparent over the last year and a half that we have endemic chemical imbalances at the top of this Administration, ranging from 'roid rage at the DoD to damned near every-non-scientifically-validated-thing down the street to reasonably probable psychotropics, intoxicants, and other "mind-altering" things at 1600. I'd suggest installing some biochemists in senior positions, but "biochemist" has at least one too many syllables to be within the contemplation of the senior officials in this Administration… although, curiously, "testosterone" seems just fine with (at least some of) them.

  And as to military personnel and testosterone: Leaving aside that "'roid rage" is rather the opposite of what one needs in leadership positions, muscle mass isn't going to help maintain weapons systems; or analyze observational data ranging from intercepts to downrange clearance; or evade hostile fire; or prevent unfitness for duty due to cardiovascular disease, or gastrointestinal irregularities, or gynocomastia preventing proper fit of body armor (designed by and for Manly Men); or a host of other side effects of not just supplements used, but lifestyle and exercise changes — consider the obvious problem of joint and other flexion deficits. Much of the time, rather the opposite. And despite Major Major Major's hostility to half of the population participating in the military, testosterone isn't everything; but then, if he'd actually taken advantage of an elite education to bloody learn something or just acknowledge how much he doesn't know…¹

• Meanwhile, this Administration has demonstrated yet again that its main method of persuasion is turning assertions of the inherent perfidy of those not personally loyal to them up to 11 without any factual basis (sometimes in less than an hour). I can't — quite — call it "lying" or "perjury" because that requires self-awareness of falsity; that's a deficit that should have been apparent to everyone who actually read even part of the Orange One's self-congratulatory/aggrandizing publicity tome of the 1980s. (In case that isn't a clear-enough reference, I mean the ghostwritten one that the ghostwriter regrets, the one that's a work of fiction as much as a memoir.) That I can't quite call it "lying" or "perjury" does not invalidate an inference of inability to discharge the powers and duties of the office of the Presidency — a distinction in degree from other Administrations so great as to be a distinction in nature.
• I suppose we could just argue about daylight savings time. Again. I'd prefer permanent standard time, but absolutely disdain the twice-a-year changeovers. And to those who whinge about the dangers of sending children to school in the dark, you're asking the wrong question entirely: Why send them to school that early at all, especially since the agricultural sector is going to work when there's daylight no matter what the clocks say… and there's much less reliance on child-of-farmer labor now than even half a century ago?
• At least Peppa Pig isn't an instrument of propaganda and bigotry.² Well, not much bigotry, anyway; even though it depicts anthropomorphized pigs, it's not about antisemitism. Meanwhile, the stampeding herd of elephants in the room is not only being ignored, but proclaimed as nonexistent by techbros/allies who can't conceive of a distinction between "fact" and "expression" — unable to distinguish between "87" and "four score and seven"…

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1. One of the surest ways to earn the disdain of mid-grade NCOs — the backbone of the military, and this also applies to their civilian equivalents even far from the military — is the pretense of deciveness and certainty coming from ignorance, and specifically when those mid-grade NCOs do have knowledge inconsistent with that pretended certainty. Of course, Major Major Major in his last active-duty assignment was in a role in which everybody (all the way up and down) is ignorant, and often intentionally so.
2. Aside: It wasn't just that the CIA's propaganda alterations of Animal Farm for that wretched cartoon distorted the political subtext of the original; it was that they were objectively inept, both as "fiction" and by ironically weakening the original's anticommunism, quite probably because the idiots involved hadn't read the book, or done any research on its context, or worse yet hadn't read Homage to Catalonia or Why I Write. Either of those last two items would, or at least should, have resulted in a "wait a minute, did we misunderstand the original?" moment or three. That they didn't is rather consistent with the US tradition of marginal-at-best competence at human intelligence.

Established Sausage Platter

Burn sinners at the stake! OK, maybe not such a good idea.

• Next time, read your own bloody book before "peace negotiations" start. Better yet, don't go to war — excuse me, "exert irresistible 'murikan military prowess in pursuit of critical national objectives (not a 'war,' never that)" — without defining the bloody "critical national objectives" and determining whether military force can or will achieve them. As a veteran, I'm carefully avoiding consideration of whether what we've got is irresistible.

  It would obviously be expecting far too much to contemplate preconflict ethical rationales (and post hoc rationalizations/evasions). Or cost/benefit considerations. Or that cartoon. Or any visit to Dover AFB.

• This sausage is made from special cuts from S. zuckerbeast. That a swine is at issue is well demonstrated by legal adventures in the UK and right down the road demonstrating that it's special. Which just anticipates cannibalism among teh piggies.
• At that, another dubious information leech has its own legal difficulties regarding criticism, and this in a nation with no First Amendment.
• Turning from BigTech to BigMedia provides little — if any — relief from the assholery. (Surprised much?) Whether we're talking mergers well within the preexisting scrutiny guidelines for any market definition that isn't artificially expanded or unshared windfalls (that were themselves ineptly handled) — and not at all limited to electronic media — the distributors (and their owners) are obviously entitled to all benefits of freelancers' creativity. And I mean all benefits (this shouldn't be an issue!). Some rights, associations, and rights to exclude interlopers are more equal than others.

  But at least BigMedia isn't FIFA.

• It doesn't have to be mass entertainment, either. As to one recent controversy that remains problematic even after a partial retreat, there's really only one, Taylor-Swiftian description for anyone who knows the conglomerate (and its past conduct) very well: Elsevier gonna Elsevier. This was predictable almost a decade back when Elsevier bought SSRN, and I strongly suspect that it would have happened five years ago but for COVID. Enhanced branding, coming up… notwithstanding one of the ingredients in the preceding sausage (or the intellectual dishonesty of exploiting distributor branding for in draft academic work).
• All of that, however, is the enemy without. The enemy within will remain more dangerous until we get our eighteenth-century concepts of how to elect in the first place into even the mid-twentieth century. Which will not be happening any time soon, if only because it would undermine the individual power-bases of the self-selected political gatekeepers — the unelected ones who determine what's on the ballot in the first place.

Meanwhile, I'm having to watch today's US-Australia match in Spanish, on Telemundo, thanks to the typical neglect of the local Fox station. About 20% of the city has difficulty just in time for major live events (including sport) with the broadcast signal; curiously, it's never a problem for ad-laden local news and/or infomercials, or for any other broadcast group. Hmm, when is their FCC license up for renewal…

Joe Isuzu Salesmanship Award Platter

Almost no-one engages with the undercurrent: Isuzu was, in fact, selling not-so-great vehicles. Sort of like LLM-based chatbots^† selling not-so-great answers ("if the minimum wasn't good enough, it wouldn't be the minimum"). Nor with the place that most deception takes place: The "Finance Manager," because deception includes intentional omission (especially when disclosure is already required).

• Speaking of deception not just by, but about the ownership and profitability of, LLM-based chatbots, here's an excellent example of "Why can't they both lose?" The lawsuit over whether El0n Mu5k lost billyuns more when OpenAI changed its "charitable" structure has exposed that nobody (or almost nobody) in the industry trusts one of the decisionmakers — and the other one's trustworthiness (or lack thereof) was already, shall we say, in the public domain.

  Further, it's not a "charitable structure" when virtually all of "management" is busy becoming multimillionaires with top-1% compensation packages, nor when one initial financier sues because he didn't earn a far-above-market return on his financing package.

• Which is marginally less dishonest than entertainment-industry royalty accounting and practices. And that's in a part of the industry in which end-user sales are "certified" by a third party (which is admittedly impaired by conflicts of interest so severe that even the tobacco industry wouldn't engage in them)… unlike, say, print publishing.
• At least Mr Clinton isn't a (starving) early-career artist… although once upon a time, he was. This exposes the serious logical problem with entertainment-industry compensation for content providers (individually, like authors, or multielement/multirole teams, like cinema): The circular transfer of "greater risk justifies greater reward" in both directions between individual transactions and commercial-segment-wide practices.
• Financially, all of the above represents a self-defeating type of cost-minimization: Don't pay for what you think you can get away with taking for free, because that will only harm someone else. Even when that "someone else" is a party that you rely upon for continuing production of the raw materials of your business model (and even when your business model is excused as "charitable"). I find their lack of payment… disturbing, and at least equally so as to permission.
• Every sausage on this platter results from turning "creativity" into "someone else's profit," whether through participation in the chain from creator to audience — or not, in the present or the past.

Don't worry — now that the fairness hearing has been held, I'll have more substantive comments on the proposed Bartz v. Anthropic settlement. Or, maybe, do worry…

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†  They're not "artificial intelligence" — not even when the term is modified with "generative" — because they neither exercise independent judgment nor alter their behavior/output in instance n+5 based on being instructed that their behavior/output in instance n was incorrect. That this resembles stereotypical politicians and stereotypical used-car salesmen isn't beside the point; it is the point, because "generative artificial intelligence" is an inherently deceptive term, much like "a chicken in every pot"… or "dealer-applied anticorrosion undercoating."

Always Greener

We know what's on the other side of the fence, given both the date and the policy decisions in DC, right? Or at least one might, rather forlornly, hope that those policy decisions are being driven more by overindulgence in mild hallucinogens and intoxicants than by, say, fundamental character defects — not excluding those sniping. Maybe we just disagree on definitions:

• I am still refraining from much comment concerning the merits — practically and theoretically — of the Bartz v. Anthropic lawsuit. The publicly-accessible reason is that I have conflicts that make most such public statements inappropriate, at least prior to the fairness hearing next month. The less-publicly-accessible reasons, however, are quite a bit more theoretical with distressing practical hooks. One of those underlies a recent parallel action, in which the proprietors of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series have sued separately — and it has taken me a month to make this comment marginally civil.

  The CSS parallel lawsuit exposes two critical, self-defeating, and self-aggrandizing problems with the way American copyright law has developed. That exposure, however, is in the end less about copyright law itself than about who makes it — and who doesn't. American copyright law as it has developed has made the proprietors of CSS copyright claimants with standing to sue, because the misbegotten work-made-for-hire doctrine makes them the owners of the compilations at issue… and abusive (but nonetheless so common as to be default) contracts have made them the owners of the individual-piece copyrights. Or, at least, owners under judicial and Congressional decisions reifying their colonial-master interests notwithstanding the Constitutional definition of the protected parties (which the remainder of that commentary elides — at best).

  In a truly just world, both sides would lose, and all relief would be granted to other victims for the various misconduct. But as they'd have to lose to parties not before the court — those "indigenous peoples" who weren't at the table, both the authors and the public — this is nowhere near a just world. The irony of inserting "justice" (and "ethics") into these musings given the prior conduct of the particular parties is too much for a wartime-in-all-but-name Monday morning. Not to mention that this is the civil version…

• At least in the copyright arena, the conflicts of interest are about 0.5 removes from the underlying subject matter. Not so much with business disparagement, in which the conflict of interest all too often is the actual subject.
• Then there's the complete mislabelling of what's actually going on in the author-turns-down-prize brouhaha. The mislabelling begins with the word "prize": It's not a "prize," but a "paid celebrity endorsement opportunity." And viewed in that light, Ms DeWitt's rejection of the "opportunity" is far more understandable. For all the abuse, at least actors are being paid for and are directly connected to their products on film tours… author tours in support of outside-sponsored "book" or "writing" awards, not so much. (And we're just not going to go into the opportunities for dubious conduct on tours, either.)
• Despite my lack of academic credentials in the discipline, I must profoundly disagree with Professor Larsen's assertion that there's no such thing as a "psychopath". It's perhaps possible to view his position as saying that the term is misdefined, at least in the public imagination; or that what is general known as a "psychopath" should instead be termed "sociopath not amenable to internalization of adverse social-personal consequences," a description both infelicitous and incomplete. It's also perhaps possible that the disagreement arises from experiential and professional interfaces that differ between encountering those who categorically disregard adverse impacts on third parties in pursuit of their own interests and those who relish those adverse impacts on third parties as demonstrating their own worth. "Disregarding the bad and collateral" is fundamentally different from "aspiring to supervillainy." Now I'm not accusing any particular individuals in world governments (now or in the past) of that latter — oh, wait, yes I am…
• The most obvious response to losing the war on poverty is a war on fraud, right? Probably only if one has been overindulging in the allegedly mild hallucinogen that's this date's subject after attempted eradication in another failed war.

Link Sausages Past the Blockade(s)

I'm afraid the ingredients have been piling up, but they've finally made it past the Strait of Hormuz for your reading pleasure. And their undoubted (and unpredictable) effects on the world economy.

• I'm not entirely sure which is less credible — Drumpf as Jesus or as a doctor.
  • Depending upon which version of the propaganda one credits, Jesus was one or more of a rabbi (certainly in its sense as "teacher"), a man of peace, an advocate of tolerance for others both different and (in particular) less financially fortunate, the son of Yhwh and/or a tripartite aspect of Yhwh and/or a deity in his own capacity, an ardently Semitic Jew, a nonviolent opponent of the Roman Empire (and, more generally, Western classicalism as projected by privileged-class scholars a millennium-and-a-half later), and an ethicist who did his best to conform to those ethics. Not all that credible in any respect.
  • Conversely, a doctor is learned in the sciences, constantly seeks to understand more about the sciences and circumstances of patients, cares for patients individually (and at least aspirationally whichever patient is at hand, regardless of circumstances or ability to pay or politicoreligious opposition), and pledges first of all to do no harm. A doctor definitely doesn't prescribe drinking bleach… and understands that labelling such advice as satire (or considering satire in the health advice one is giving) is inappropriate at best. Not all that credible in any respect.

  This comparison seems more apt. So does this one. So does remembering that (paraphrasing a quotation often attributed to Twain, inaccurately) the man who doesn't read (or write) more than 140 characters at a time has no advantage over the one who can't.

• Speaking of self-appointed stable geniuses, albeit in London this time, the compensation structure at Tottenham Hotspur explains a lot. I'm no Arsenal fan, but I do have antipathy to Spurs stretching back more than half a century, so I'm somewhat pleased that on current form they'll be swapping leagues with the Tractor Boys for next season. But this is just the current economic consensus in action, right? The righteous exploitation of an an advantaged-without-merit initial position, right?
• At that, the Spurs women's programs are (not surprisingly) better off than writers, than publishers, than the arts in general. Both the self-manufactured crises at Spurs and the general problems throughout the arts have a common nexus — not necessarily "the" cause, but a common point of failure — in inept, overcompensated gatekeepers who seldom have actual experience with the process, but only with the product (if that).
• Conversely, thieves would deny the property rights of authors and other creators however original. In part, this is a jurisprudential problem, because the last few centuries have steadily eroded "personal rights" to the point at which "an impaired property interest" is the only practicable entre to any dispute-resolution system. In even greater part, this results from too many people — not just techbros! — actually believing that information wants to be free (and it's all just information) while simultaneously ignoring that "originality" is itself informational. That a mutation of an existing gene is not an expected result does not change its nature as new information.
• And, from the distressingly-old part of the meat drawer that I just didn't manage to work into any prior sausages, consider conceptual problems with fuel efficiency of hybrid vehicles. What this really points out, however, is that the measures of "efficiency" are inappropriate; the figures stated correlate to real-world fuel economy. More distressingly, the article doesn't provide context, like comparison to "more-conventional" vehicles' fuel consumption — which demonstrates that even if not perfect, hybrids are better. Context matters.