Closing the Quiz

I've just closed the old quiz. The results:

How many Weasleys will die in Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows? (110 votes tallied)
All of them	10%
None of them	5%
One, but neither Ron nor Ginny	21%
Ron only	5%
Ginny only	5%
Two, but not Fred and George	13%
Fred and George only	5%
Three	6%
Four	2%
Does Hermione count if she keeps snogging Ron?	28%

It looks like wedded bliss may not be in Ron and Hermione's future. I'll put a new, equally whimsical quiz up some time next week.

Methods and Madness

I'm going to take a break for a moment from the real world and delve into that of Harry Potter.

Who am I kidding? Many otherwise intelligent observers persist in claiming "it's only fantasy," as if somehow that means it's necessarily disconnected from the real world to an extent that the upper-middle-class-that-never-existed musings of John Updike; of Ann Beatty and the "K-Mart Realists"; of all those writers who believe that civilization has never made it either west or south of the Hudson River; conversely, of all the post-Southern-Gothic writers; in short, of the so-called mainstream, respectable novelists, somehow never attempted, let alone achieved. And class doesn't matter all that much, either, whether we're talking about the bucolic plague of celebrating certain aspects of agrarianism (while neglecting its all-too-common bigotry) or true upper-class novels of Manners that would make Jane Austen vomit. The point is that all fiction is, in some way or another, about the (or a) human condition. Fantasy is merely one particular window into it; a tradition that includes Cervantes, Rabelais, Voltaire, and Dostoevsky cannot accurately be termed "divorced from reality," no matter the efforts of those who don't accept — or, as is more common, can't understand — the concept of "metaphor." There's a lot more about bigotry, and confronting one's own demons, in the Harry Potter books than in the entire collected works of Nora Roberts (including all of her pseudonymous works), or "James Patterson."

But that's just one bit of madness — and method — that will be building up for the next two weeks. (Query: Did they actually decide there wouldn't be any Orthodox Jewish interest in the book? The release "parties" will all be after sundown on a Friday.) Between the film opening on Wednesday next and the book laydown in a fortnight-plus-a-few-hours, there will be a lot of attention on boy wizards. Certain evil magicians in Washington will no doubt be glad for that.

Darn. I couldn't manage to stay away from the real world after all, could I?

In any event, I'll leave the quiz (see the right-hand panel) open until 1800 GMT on 20 July. Have fun.

Polling Place

Being this close to Chicago, "polling" has a definite attraction (it's not just for living people anymore!). I've decided that this blawg, like many others, needs to constantly poll its extraordinarily limited (and, in all probability, somewhat disturbed) readership. For the present, I'm just bringing the Harry Potter poll I posted a few months ago to the front.

Future topics may include such questions as "Is fan fiction the work of the devil?", "Is the inaccuracy in publishers' royalty statement a result of hiring English majors who think 'math' is a five-letter word?", and "Is it true that the FCC Commissioners are all Lectroids from Planet P?" I seriously doubt, though, that I'll ever ask a question about either Andy Warhol or the Campbell's Tomato Soup can.

Compare and Contrast

Remember all of those awful "compare and contrast" essays that you had to write in high school? Sure you do — if you're reading this blawg, you must have some sense of cynicism and the ridiculous! Well, today, you'll have two more opportunities to relive those halcyon (or Haldol) high-school days, courtesy of Variety.

First up, it shouldn't surprise anyone that the US has filed a complaint against China with the WTO over China's lax (nay, virtually nonexistent) enforcement of copyright law against manufacturers of disk-based media, both audiovisual and audio only. Whether the complaint will eventually concern computer software is a bit hazy at the moment, but that's really beside the point. Compare and contrast the approach to this dispute taken by The Times, which quite properly puts it in the context of China's overall trade relationship with the US, and that taken by Variety, which... does not. I'm suspending the bonus points for explicating all of the "hip" language in Variety that inhibits communication that I ordinarily award for this essay, because there isn't enough of a challenge.

Then, there's a dispute of very little brain. Why is it that every children's book series of lasting popularity seems to have at least one central character who is dumber than a box of rocks? Well, this time around another of the main actors in the US-China copyright dispute is refusing to negotiate with what it sees as extortionists (never mind the tactics used to obtain all of those "extensions" in the first place). Compare and contrast Variety's description of Disney's refusal to participate in mediation in front of a federal Magistrate Judge — which doesn't even state what's at issue until the tenth fake paragraph — with this much shorter, but more informative, article in WaPo. Again, bonus points must be suspended.

Now that we've got that out of our system, today's Times again provides a window on some of the dubious practices in the publishing world:

When readers see a famous name on a book jacket, it does not tell them that the author has written every word in the book, but that someone has ensured that they will get the product they are expecting. Rather than waiting a year for a book genuinely written by the author, the sales figures show that readers are only too grateful to the co-authors for giving them their fix of thrills and spills several times a year.

Alice Fordham, "You Write It — We'll Fill in the Words" (10 Apr 2007). Contrast this with recent attempts by the same publisher's US affiliate to force redirects of authors' own publicity efforts and websites back to the publisher. And, for a bonus point, ask yourself these questions:

• Presuming that authorial identity is a "brand," is that "brand" controlled by copyright law; by trademark law; by the law of consumer deception, including but not limited to false advertising; by some combination of these three; or by another legal rubric entirely?
• If copyright law controls, under what legal theory does the creative process described properly ascribe copyright to the named author only? Are there any statutory defects in this theory? (Hint: Read the second clause of 17 U.S.C. § 101 carefully.)
• If trademark law controls, who owns the mark — the named author, the publisher, or a joint venture between the two? Does the contract between the named author and the publisher, with its inevitable disclaimer of any "partnership" or other joint venture, influence your answer?
• If consumer deception law controls, describe the outcome for the following definitions of "least sophisticated consumer":
  • Fans of that "author"'s work who already know how those works are written;
  • Fans of that "author"'s work, regardless of knowledge;
  • Fans of the commercial category in which that "author"'s work falls;
  • The bookbuying public;
  • The general public.
• If another legal rubric controls this conundrum, name it and describe its applicability, both internally to the US and internationally.

Comparative Law

Too many people in the entertainment industry — of which the publishing industry is a segment — are isolationists in the old Hawley-Smoot mold. It's not a coincidence that the "manufacturing clause" remained part of US copyright law until 1976! As Professor Patry noted earlier today — and as he implied yesterday — there are lots of interesting things about entertainment and related "stuff" outside the three-mile limit. (Leaving aside, for the moment, that the US is one of a small minority of nations that says the territorial limit is only three miles.)

Sometimes it's amusing to look at foreign coverage of US-based patent issues, and think about what they might mean in a copyright context. Consider, for example, cellphones. Increasingly, bleeding-edge users employ their cellphones as content containers — not just as a phone booth, but for a downloaded copy of Phone Booth. Leaving aside for the moment whether that downloaded copy was a pirate copy on YouTube — which we'll return to in a moment — consider the technology one finds in the cellphone. Many cellphones these days include a digital camera. Well, who exactly has the right to license that technology to cellphone manufacturers? Could creating copyrightable expression using an unlicensed implementation of that technology have implications for ownership of that copyright? Or should we just return to the "lawyers need jobs too!" paradigm? (Hopefully, the University of Washington is getting better legal counsel than did the University of Illinois in a case that virtually every first-year law student has encountered.)

And, in the reflexive interest of providing entertainment on this blawg, I offer the following test question for a course in copyright law. The embedded video may not be work-safe.

View the embedded video presentation below and discuss. You may assume that the presentation appears on YouTube. Do not limit your perspective to United States law, as the video raises several issues implicating non-US copyright law.

Hint: Your answer should specifically reference other cartoon characters, and should consider the content of the embedded video.
Suggested time: 60 minutes.

Of course, that question does cause some problems for the hearing- and/or visually impaired student...

Morning Edition

This is the morning edition. Later today, I'll have some comments on an event that too many in the publishing world seem to have ignored over the last few days — the bankruptcy filing last Friday by Advanced Marketing. (I've been too busy with health and family stuff to blawg for the last week; I'll be making up for it...) In any event, onward and sideways:

• The NRA is scared of the new Congress. Or, at least, the NRA is reverting to form by engaging in scare tactics over the purported "threat" to gunowners from the Democrat-controlled Congress. "Democrat-controlled" my emaciated little toe! Leaving aside whether the political position stated by the NRA has any connection to reality, does anyone really think that the gun nut in the White House will sign any legislation that restricts gun ownership, or that anybody could come up with a veto-proof majority in this Congress for anything short of apple pie? (With the current anti-gay-marriage backlash, I'm no longer sure that motherhood would be safe... in any form.)
• A fascinating item in the NYT yesterday on the relationship between brain function and music leads me off on my usual tangents. How does that relationship influence other, simultaneous brain activity, such as appreciation for visual art or prose? And does the apparent relationship between autism and Williams syndrome tell us anything about "math rock"?
• There have been lots of information technology items over the last few days. Unlike most who follow ink-and-paper publishing, I follow IT closely, and I'm comfortable with it; I just don't comment on it that often, given the sheer quantity of bloviating on IT issues that overwhelms the 'net and the blogosphere. As an excellent relief from the bloviating, I recommend Denise Howell's not-updated-as-often-as-I'd-like — that is, not updated hourly! — Lawgarithms column at ZDNet. In any event, here are a few IT-related items of interest that have some interesting implications for publishing (etc.):
  • These days, we can't talk turkey about information technology without invoking Linux's potential as a dominant OS... at least twice. And this from a direct descendant of the operating system that epitomizes "user hostile." Compare to —
  • Randy Newman was right: it's money that matters. Even to the already superrich, like Steve Jobs. I've never been a big fan of Apple, particularly in the Macintosh era. It seems somewhat disingenuous to, on the one hand, claim to be the "people's champion" with all of those "ease of use" features, while simultaneously embracing closed-source software, DRM, and closed-architecture hardware. But then, I'm one of those old-school hackers who thinks that if the Flying Spaghetti Monster had meant us to use a GUI, He wouldn't have invented the command line, let alone punch cards. And yes, I still understand JCL; why do you ask?
  • There's been an interesting confluence of Google-related news items. Leaving aside the company's dubious grasp of copyright for the moment, we've got claims that Google is a probable victim of the IT-industry version of Moore's Law; questions about Gmail features and reliability; and Google's hiring of a new special counsel on copyright issues who can actually spell copyright, and understand the history of creators' rights at a visceral level.
  • Antitrust? What's that? Neither publishing nor IT thinks principles of antitrust law apply to them, because they're special. Riiiiiight. Of course, there's a difference between "antitrust" and "protection by patent" — at least, until we consider the nonsense of "business-method patents" (and even more nonsensical "innovations").
  • Of course, the whole point of IT is to enable sharing of information, and access to information by those who need it. Sort of like the ideal of the newspaper. This article on the WaPo's website — which seems oblivious to the irony of its own source — is an all-too-common bit of navel-gazing. And that gets us back toward the publishing industry...
• Without further comment, here's the usual holiday-period story extolling POD technology everywhere without considering either consumables or operator training. I've never seen one of these stories sourced back to someone who understands either the returns, distribution, and sales-reporting system or blems; that should be a big hint that it's not just the technology. At this stage, POD is about up to the turn-the-removable-crank-to-start-the-engine level of the Model A. It's not ready to substitute for all other means of getting people from Point A to Point B (ignoring, for the moment, the potholes). Infrastructure ordinarily determines the commercial success or failure of any specific technology... and I see no attention being paid to the relationship between local-origin POD and infrastructure whatsoever. And the less said of the publishing industry's (and POD proponents') neglect of the relationship between product packaging/definition and commercial success, the better. Gee, I didn't do so well at "without further comment," did I?
• Two emperors. No clothes. No rationality. And no concern for the wellbeing of their respective empires' citizens.

Finally, in "celebration" of Joanne Rowling's (requires flash) announcement of the last Harry Potter title, I offer the following poll (a dubious first for this blawg).

How many Weasleys will die in Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows?
	All of them
	None of them
	One, but neither Ron nor Ginny
	Ron only
	Ginny only
	Two, but not Fred and George
	Fred and George only
	Three
	Four
	Does Hermione count if she keeps snogging Ron?

For a bonus, I'd ask in which chapter (number) the first Weasley death will occur... but that's fill-in-the-blank, and too annoying to code and track. Not to mention even less meaningful than the basic poll itself...