#OscarsSoStupidandPredictable

I'm not pleased with the Oscars this year, with the complete domination by Northwest Europeans across the acting and directing categories. On the other hand, the Academy has brought it on itself, with a combination of:

• A stupid eligibility system that allows gaming by doing "special releases" in Los Angeles and New York at the end of the year to move the eligibility date... when a film that is released only in those location cannot possibly show a profit. This year, that means that Selma — a film that almost certainly would have been competitive in the directing and acting categories against what is on the official slate — was not eligible when it was a January 2015 release to over 95% of the country.
• A stupid calendar that starts too damned soon after the end of the year — hell, the voting begins before the end of the year, and even well before the actual release dates of many eligible films. If one wants a meaningful contest for "best," one allows a meaningful opportunity to actually see all of the candidates. Otherwise, it's just a bloody easily manipulated high-school popularity contest for Homecoming Queen (ok, perhaps that was a bit too literal). Frequently among Academy voters whose education too frequently never got past high school, for that matter...
• A stupid refusal to have actual, stateable, agreed-upon criteria for when a role is a "leading role" and when a role is a "supporting role." At least two of the supporting-actor nominations (without regard to gender) are for individuals who gave their all in performances that should be considered "leading" roles... and that, by itself, may very well have knocked persons of color in truly supporting roles off the ballot this year. The awards for 1980 are a disturbing — and by no means unique — example: The best-film winner had no leading actor, and the system manipulated things to give its actual leading actor an award as supporting actor because politics required giving a makeup award to another actor in the lead category (and also neglecting two performances substantially superior to that performance, also by actors who would later get make-up awards). And, meanwhile, there were performances by supporting-role "actors of color" that didn't make it on the ballot so all these white men could get their recognition. (Aside: This is not a slam at Timothy Hutton, whose performance in Ordinary People was good enough and certainly did not tarnish the awards like, say, the preceding year's best actor fiasco. Mr Hoffman deserved a Best Actor award... just not for Kramer v. Kramer, and so on down the line. It's a slam at the Academy.)
• It's not that the Academy has a lot of non-active members that's the problem. It's how those non-active members got to be members in the first place... in an exclusionary industry, and especially in the off-camera roles. If the demographics of the acting branches of the Academy were significantly different (in a meaningful way) from the off-camera branches, one's rhetorical eyebrows might be raised a little higher; in reality, not so much. Bluntly, there's a long history of racism and nepotism in H'wood — starting with class- and race-selecting "unpaid internships" as an entry point — and it takes about thirty to forty years to reverse those. (That's what it took for the US military to move within one standard deviation of national demographics among the junior officer ranks after Truman "desegregated" the military in 1947.)

In short, the Academy has brought #OscarsSoWhite upon itself with decades of neglect, of coded acceptability — of "NY and LA based critics are the only ones who matter" in the era of Gene and Roger and location shooting and Vancouver/Toronto/wherever studios, of the de facto racial hiring practices throughout the industry that have gotten no attention whatsoever from the Academy, of allowing what is supposed to be a set of awards for "excellence" or "outstanding achievement" to be coopted for marketing and ego purposes. It's disturbingly parallel to the FHA setting the table for Trump-family racism... and I sincerely hope that at least one Academy member gets an uncomfortable flinch from that comparison. Failing to acknowledge past misconduct, and further failing to take specific steps to deal structurally with that past misconduct, has consequences; just ask Secretary (General) Powell — or anyone who served as a junior officer supervising/commanding Vietnam-era enlisted personnel, particularly at any base in the former Confederacy (or, hypothetically, New York City — thanks, greedy landlords).

Making America Great? Again?

And so the woman who could see Russia/Moscow from her window (probably a misremembrance of one stop on her five-campus undergraduate meander toward a degree in "communications," when she really could... Moscow, Idaho, that is) is endorsing the Heffalump candidate whose grasp of reality — or absence thereof — most closely approaches her own. I'm shocked — shocked, I say — to find such disingenuousness in American politics. Maybe that transforms Trump into a Palin drone: Makes no sense whatsoever either forward or backward.

I'm equally shocked that she's hauling out the "make America great again" meme. I find it interesting, but entirely unsurprising, that every single individual who has pushed this meme would have been equally entitled to push Rosa Parks out of her seat on the bus. Of course, it might be a bit much expecting either Palin or Trump to spell "melanin" in the first place... two days after celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s ever-shifting-thanks-to-the-need-for-middle-class-friendly-three-day-weekends birthday. Maybe they should go watch Gran Torino so they can claim to have at least some awareness. Awareness that they'd be getting from a guy who spoke to an empty chair at a Heffalump national convention, which is more than they have now. And if you don't find that disturbing, you'll have to do what I plan on doing.

Unconscious Time-Based Racism/Classism

So, while zoning out, I was watching one of the cooking-contest shows on Food Network last night, and realized something: Unconscious racism/classism embedded in the time limits for the already-edited-for-length contest segments. A one-half-hour-long total time segment locks out (in no particular order):

• Rice. But it's not a very popular or versatile foodstuff, so blocking a central ingredient in the cuisines of approximately half of the world's population doesn't really matter.
• Yeast-leavened breads. And there goes half of the remainder.
• All other whole-kernel grasses (and, for that matter, buckwheat, which is not a grass/grain at all). Still smaller... now we're down to ahistorical New World-influenced Western Europe.
• Roasted game. Can't do it at high heat, which means it's going to take a while.
• Stews. Yeah, stew can be done in twenty minutes. Riiiiiiiight. And "stew" also includes a lot of curries.

So, instead, we get variation after variation on middle-class-and-above Northern European cooking, with "excitement" from adaptations to foodstuffs found in the western hemisphere. But no biryanis; no judges arguing over which contestant produced the tastiest tehdig; not even any risotto or jambalaya or paella. No red-cooked game fowl. No ragùs. Almost nothing from India or sub-Saharan Africa or the Arabian Gulf.

It's not like these are live or real-time shows; they're already edited for time. Editing down from 45 minutes to 11 for broadcast probably won't be that much harder than editing down from 30 minutes to 11 for broadcast... especially since it takes 15 seconds to show rice being started! Hell, even Iron Chef is edited down from an hour of cooking time to allow for showing the judges preening over their publicity opportunities.

No, the real "culprit" here is the idea that dinner has to be on the table from scratch in half an hour — which is, itself, a very classist and unconsciously racist conceit (you mean you can't use a slow-cooker to make chili????????).

Return of Lovechild of Internet Link Sausages

First platter of sausages in a while...

• A long, interesting review essay at NYTM on the "authenticity" problem in sociology also uncomfortably echoes — at approximately 0.38 (p < 0.70) removes — current arguments going on in various communities in fiction (literature). "Who may speak for whom?" is, indeed, a central question. The antiintellectual undercurrent in the question, though, is as much of a problem as anything else: A de facto requirement to undermine one's very data through overt apologia of positionality implicitly distrusts both the writer and the writer's audience; it proclaims that nobody is smart enough to understand that the data is imperfect and the conclusions drawn from it are conclusions and not fact, regardless of the rhetoric involved. It is, in short, a genteel bigotry of its own — one that denies the validity of research, in a biting-the-hand-that-feeds-one sort of way.

  And it leads to a much more darkly disturbing question in fiction: How does positionality properly manifest itself in an explicitly counterfactual work — even an explicitly counterfactual work that includes substantial factual material? I don't have an answer... but smugly arch exclusion of voices of insufficient "authenticity" sounds far, far too much like pretending that Dr Charles Drew was not a research physician because his background was not sufficiently authentic. Equality and sensitivity do not mean "I get to be the abusive senior fratboy running the hazing rituals now!" There's a huge distinction between acknowledging possible flaws and treating the (largely inherited) basis for some of those flaws as disqualifying one from even expressing an opinion... and the circularity and irony of such courtesy stigma should give the intellectually honest a great deal of discomfort. I'm not sure I know a right way, but excluding voices and evidence is surely wrong. (And the less said about so-called "journalistic standards" in this context, the better; one wonders how many journalists understand that their investigative standards are a direct result of eighteenth-century libel law in England, which in turn was almost exclusively a concern of the white male protestant upper- and upper-middle classes.)

• RIP Ziggy Stardust David Bowie. I was never an ardent fan, or even really much of a fan... but on grounds of taste more than of substance (well, except for the quasidisco and arch dance music, which was on a substantive basis), and I knew the difference between the two even back in the mid-70s. But I don't have enough East Coast urban authenticity to make that sort of distinction, and my positionality is suspect...
• Meanwhile, The New Republic is up for sale. Again. <SARCASM> Maybe — just maybe — treating the staff humanely might have allowed a sustainable change. Maybe some Bowie bonds would help fund things for a while, too. </SARCASM>
• An increasingly difficult question in IP law — especially as it relates to the 'net — is deceptively easy to state: Where does infringement occur? It matters a great deal, because that affects both the substantive law (e.g., if the infringement "occurs in" the US, the First Amendment comes into play) and procedure (jurisdiction, rules, etc.) necessary to resolve any dispute that can't be dealt with directly.

Merry [solstice-related holiday name deleted because THIS IS WAR]

The coal has been file-stamped and committed to the kind services of an aerial delivery service staffed by Eastern Orthodox reindeer. Whether those reindeer have appropriate FAA clearances for flight over populated areas is their problem, not mine; they're a common carrier who accepted the delivery instructions and bills of lading for 24,098 lumps of coal in two irregularly-sized and -shaped bags (exclusive of exhibits).

In no particular order, then, and carefully ignoring everything political-campaign related as part of my New Year's resolutions:

• Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court has just provided yet another data point for why no judicial or law-enforcement officer should be selected (or retained) through a popular election, with his utterly inane hair-splitting anti-gay bigotry that gives ardent legal hair-splitters a headache. Not only is Justice Moore an elected judge, but (a) he's been in trouble over government-imposed religious "respect" before, and was removed from office as a (partial) result for unethical misconduct inappropriate to any lawyer (let alone a judge); and (b) was elected to his current post after that previous incident of a judicial officer failing to honor the rule of law over... well, an accurate description would contain too many expletives for your screen to safely accept. I'll just have to restrict myself to directing a well-known, anatomically impossible phoneme-fricative imperative to all Heffalump candidates for the highest office in the land, because at various times in the last four months each and every one of them has not just stated tolerance for, but expressed advocacy of, this kind of religious bigotry.

  Damn. That resolution didn't even last a full paragraph. At that, it probably lasted longer than most "get in shape"-type resolutions...

• But at least that was about humanity. As held yesterday by a respected judge in San Francisco, a macaque does not own the copyright in its selfie photograph when the photographer set the camera up to enable the macaque to activate the shutter/record the image. Although it was an oral ruling, it appears to be following the principle that copyright belongs to humans — not to animals, and not to electronic text-generating systems. (I'm somewhat pissed off that I had to go to a non-US neutral source to get a clear, accurate description of a US copyright decision that is not deluged with ads of dubious copyright integrity.)

  That leads to a side issue, though. It seems clear now that monkeys can't own copyrights (or, at least, can't be authors for the purpose of copyright protection). What about the unicorns and silverback gorillas of the tech and entertainment industries, who claim "authorship" under the work-for hire doctrine (see 17 U.S.C. § 201(b))? Or the venture-capital vultures who buy them up? OK, the imagery is a bit excessive, but it's really the same point: If a macaque, because it's an animal, can't be an "author," why can a business entity? (Yeah, the obvious answer is "Because the statute says so." Our statute — nobody else's.) And if the governing statute in a foreign jurisdiction allowed nonhumans to be owners (even in part) of business entities... No, I'm not thinking of Switzerland at all, and anyone who says I am is being just as disingenuous as was PETA in filing this lawsuit in the first place (I have a different jurisdiction in mind).

Coal Mining

... for xmas stockings. Orthodox Christmas is in the near future...

Which leads to a bit of political snark. How interesting that an immigrant-hostile candidate for the nomination of an immigrant-hostile political party couldn't come up with a media-acceptable verbal image for the probable-nominee-of-the-other-political-party's 2008 fate at the hands of our biracial President's campaign without resorting to stealing a word from non-xtian, non-Caucasian immigrants. And then blew it by using anatomical slang for an organ involved in the act, instead of the Yiddish equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon fricative that he really meant.

A Letter to the General Assembly

Today's WaPo included a truly illogical defense of organized religion that — even for letters to the editor, let alone something on the editorial page — was far below acceptability for any news outlet, let alone a "paper" purportedly trying to become the "paper of record." Mr Wilcox proclaims:

On average, religion is a clear force for good when it comes to family unity and the welfare of children — the most important aspects of our day-to-day lives. Research, some of it my own, indicates that on average Americans who regularly attend services at a church, synagogue, temple or mosque are less likely to cheat on their partners; less likely to abuse them; more likely to enjoy happier marriages; and less likely to have been divorced.

which is, once one trims away the rest of the soaring rhetoric in his ignorant screed, his warrant for the proclamation that "religion is good."

Not so much, once one looks at the false implications inherent in his statement (even without the contextual dissonance):

• That "family unity" and "welfare of children" are coordinate, even congruent, "aspects of our day-to-day lives"
• That "less likely to cheat on their partners" is not a matter of choice and personal relationships, but inherently to be avoided... which, of course, leaves aside the question of what constitutes "cheating" (let's ask conservative, highly-and-publicly-religious people about that, or perhaps just consider the possibility of forming a deep attachment to more than one adult... or is even a member of a sect that encourages "marriages" or three or more people)
• That a "happier marriage" is necessarily a direct result of and cause for approving of religion, instead of approving of regular social interaction among those sharing similar values... such as, say, faculty symposia in bloody Charlottesville
• That divorce is inherently a bad thing, because nobody ever makes a mistake, nobody every changes... and nobody is ever in an abusive relationship

More to the point, though, there's a huge logical disjuncture in the middle of his piece, in which he glides between "religion is good in the US with its restrictions on religious insertion into temporal affairs" (a premise he never acknowledges) and "religion is good." Perhaps he needs to take a trip to Londonderry or Belfast or Marseilles or Jerusalem or Delhi or Mosul — not just for an academic conference or two, but to actually live in the community for at least six months and engage with multiple groupings in the community. His opinion might just change; many chaplains of my acquaintance while on active duty acknowledged doubts just in the English and German countryside, let alone obvious historical flashpoints.

Mr Wilcox's binary reasoning concerning matters of individual belief also presumes that all religion "follows" a specific Judeo-Christian model. The irony that only the actual separation of temporal and religious affairs in this country provides him with a platform for his divisive rhetoric seems to have escaped him. So, too, does the timing of his publication — during a period purportedly celebrating (for his own religion) private religious revolt against an entanglement of religion and temporal power. One of the things that one learns rather rapidly when actually, umm, embedded in a "foreign" community (and for someone from Los Angeles, Atlanta can be pretty damned foreign... and vice versa) is that preexisting ideology seldom survives first contact with the foreigner. If, that is, one is interested in learning in the first place. On the basis of Mr Wilcox's article, he's interested only in finding data to support his preexisting notions. I beseech him in the bowels of Christ to think it possible he may be mistaken, or at least that his purported imperatives have exceptions worth considering, worth honoring, worth even being treated as the less-harmful default position.

Breaking the Surface

... with my dorsal fin for a moment. Among minor health annoyances, the virtual shut-down of both the entertainment industry and the legal community for the Turkey Day holiday, two Secret Projects, and certain other major annoyances, there hasn't been a lot of energy left for blawging. Plus, there hasn't been a lot of real news to comment upon that wouldn't damage my keyboard and/or your monitor...

I do have one thing to say to the NRA, and its proclamation that I can have its the-only-purpose-is-killing-people non-hunting-appropriate firearms when I pry them from their cold, dead fingers: "Your proposal is acceptable." Just because some lawyers (and even judges) have indicated an inability to read or consider the well-regulated-militia predicate to the Second Amendment doesn't mean I have to make the same mistake. And the less said about the christianity of an evangelist who vows to arm an entire substandard evangelical university to take out muslims, the better.

The 2015 Turkey Awards

An annual tradition for over a decade! This is my list of ridiculous people from 2015 (so far). If you're not named and disappointed, you're not a loser (wait a minute...), just not quite ridiculous enough in those categories; the competition was especially stiff (limp?) this year. Pass me one of those rolls, please:

• The Greasy Gravy Award for oily publicity that makes the main dish inedible goes to the leadership of the Russian Athletics Federation for throwing all of its athletes under the doping bus... now and when it mistreated them in the past. Meanwhile, there will be no effective change in management, nor of the ridiculous overreaction by WADA that does not have athlete health as its first and only priority.
• The Red-Tide Oyster Stuffing Award for carelessly poisoning an otherwise tasty dish goes to the sad and/or rabid puppies who found a tiny thing to complain about and ignored multiple dancing elephants in the room.
• The Broken Wishbone Award for shattering dreams goes to American governors (and a few congresscritters) who know nothing of history... or of compassion. And, more to the point, of their own familial history.
• The Golden Gristle Award for assertions far too difficult to digest (and usually stuck in one's teeth) goes to the entire Heffalump presidential candidate pool, with a special shout-out to the thing on Trump's head. And we still have nearly a year more of this crap before the election (Jackasses, you're not much better).
• The Crabapple Pie Award for marketing something sour as something sweet goes to the industrial leadership of the entertainment industry for utterly forgetting about the human element that makes up — and is the purpose of — entertainment, ranging from H'wood's treatment of women to the entire Western industry's treatment of "persons of color" (which is quotated because I'm not "entitled" to be their advocate, despite my three-decade-long appreciation for that particular actor/comedian/entertainer, as I'm not one myself... an argument for another time).
• The Wilted Salad Award for the one part of the meal that's supposed to be "good for you," but is instead rather past its sell-by date, goes to the anti-processed-food movement for its constant rhetorical distortion of reality that masks its actual, worthwhile concerns. All modern food is "genetically modified organisms" in that at minimum it results from selective breeding over centuries, and all food except salt is "organic" in that it consists of mixtures and compounds based on carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. The distrust of science in the lab (instead of trial and error, however scientifically informed, in the field) so seriously undermines the movement's message that it's more harmful than helpful... especially when advocates of blanket restrictions proudly proclaim that "Im [sic] not a scientist and not an authority on agriculture," disturbingly reminiscent of the Know-Nothings (at the same time some of their proposed practices, such as inadequate clearning and sterilization and certain pest control, encourage the spread of disease).
• The Brussels Sprout Award for stinky, slimy, overcooked, gentrified little cabbages goes to "law and order" advocates who encourage law enforcement systems to focus on "undesireables" and property crimes against the Establishment with consequences predictable in their nature if not their detail. When you treat a substantial portion of your citizenry as less than full citizens on the basis of their ancestry, you already have (and you're inviting more) problems.
• The Dried-Out Breastmeat Award for overcooking the books goes to Sepp Blatter and the rest of the senior leadership at FIFA... if only because they made John Oliver chug a Bud Light Lime (which, despite his highly competent technique, he could not finish).
• The Rancid Drumstick Award for something that should be edible, but isn't, goes to Vladimir Putin, leader of the (purportedly) post-Soviet Russia, who seems to be trying his best to be the sort of clown-like dictator sitting in Moscow often depicted in English-language fiction and film of the fifties through seventies... when his original remit under Sobchek and Yeltsin was as a reformer, even if now he's an antagonist for Rocky & Bullwinkle.

A Few Notes for the Ignorant Twenty-Odd

So, in a display of partisan ignorance that should surprise exactly no one, twenty-odd Heffalump governors and candidates have (mis)used their powers and candidacies to try to keep dark-skinned semitic Syrian refugees out of their respective states... and sightlines. Anyone with even a moderate connection to reality, however, should be able to see right through the almost-overt racism with little difficulty — presuming, that is, that one is inclined to look.

Consider, for example, Mr Huckleberryabee's slave-state crocodile tears for the insuperable difficulties that Syrian refugees will have adapting to Minnesota winters. Actually comparing Minnesota's climate data (January average temperature: 12F, not "twenty below"; but we have to excuse his ignorance, he's only off thirty bloody Fahrenheit degrees and describing conditions fifteen degrees worse than the January average in Nome, Alaska) to the Syrian mountains pretty well refutes his ignorant statement... and leaves one wondering whether internal immigrants from near the Rio Grande River should get equal, or even greater, sympathy. At least those whose native language isn't Spanish.

More broadly, consider the converse: Moving from a cold, wet Northern European climate to the harshness of the Great Plains or the American South and Southwest. One can easily imagine this same "humanitarian concern for inability to adapt" argument being raised against requiring the Irish of the late 1840s to endure the horrifying summers of Atlanta... back when the Irish were not classed as "white"... I wonder what Mr O'Reilly might think of that?

Then, too, all of this assumes that local citizens — Somalis in Minneapolis, Palestinians in Detroit, and native 'murikans everywhere — would provide no help at all for refugees seeking to adapt to local conditions. There is a three-hundred-year history of exactly the opposite in the Americas. Those of us who remember the influx of refugees from Southeast Asia in the 1970s — when some nativists raised the very same objections — are also rather puzzled by this assumption.

The "security" issues don't seem to be much better thought out. The US is taking in approximately ten thousand Syrian refugees (out of over four million registered refugees). Curiously, there's no comparison to NRA membership offered — which, coincidentally, is about four million (according to the NRA, anyway). Sadly, there is at least as much reason to distrust the collective terrorist threat from four million NRA members as there is from ten thousand refugees who've been living in bloody refugee camps. After all, the NRA members already have their guns, and won't need to acquire them over here before we pry them from their cold, dead fingers... (Yes, this is intended to disparage the NRA, but primarily under the law of large numbers.)

The shorter, sharper version: Read the inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!"
cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your
poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

and if we can't live up to it, send it back to bloody France where it immigrated from. That'll show real solidarity against the menace of da'esh.

While we're at it, let's send back every politician whose ancestry is primarily of immigrant stock, or are themselves immigrants.

Neglect

Two thoughts and a postscript for Veterans' Day.

1.

2. Spot the missing part of the proverb:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost,
for want of a shoe the horse was lost;
and for want of a horse the rider was lost;
being overtaken and slain by the enemy,
all for want of care about a horse-shoe nail.

Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth (1758).

Sure, this is just one version of an old proverb that utterly ignores every human being involved except the rider (officer who purchased his commission)/knight/king. There's no blacksmith to make the nail, nor farrier to properly install it, nor breeder nor stablekeeper to care for the horse, nor quartermaster to outfit the horse and rider, nor communications technician to make the message being carried by the rider (in other variants) both intelligible and secure, nor infantry dying on the field of battle waiting for the bloody message. The military-industrial complex, however, seems to be doing just fine... as is the bookkeeper or entrepreneur who was too damned cheap to pay either the people or the manufacturer for the damned nail in the first place.

 
PS I still say that Election Day should be moved to Veterans' Day... or, if it's too much interpretive gyration, move Veterans' Day to Election Day.

Silencing Creators Again

And now the House Judiciary Committee is participating in silencing the actual creators of copyrightable materials.

On Monday 09 November, the so-called Copyright Listening Tour will make it to the Bay Area. The list of invited participants (courtesy of the somewhat-caught-in-the-middle hosts at the Santa Clara University School of Law) almost entirely cuts out actual creators, as is usual for these things:

• Steve Bene, General Counsel, Pandora
• Laura Covington, Vice President of Intellectual Property Policy, Yahoo
• Clint Cox, VP of Technical Operations, Ultimate Fighting Championship
• Tony Falzone, Deputy General Counsel, Pinterest
• Alex Feerst, Attorney, Legal Team, Medium
• Brewster Kahle, Founder and Digital Librarian, Internet Archive
• Zoe Keating, Cellist, Composer and Technologist
• Michael Keller, University Librarian, Stanford University
• Lisamaria Martinez, Director of Community Services, Lighthouse for the Blind of San Francisco
• Tyler Ochoa, Professor of Law, Santa Clara University School of Law
• Matthew M. Sarboraria, Vice President of Intellectual Property, Oracle
• Brianna Schofield, Teaching Fellow, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology
• Ellen Seidler, independent filmmaker
• Ted Ullyot, Partner, Andreesen Horowitz
• Ruth Vitale, Chief Executive Officer, Creative Future
• Timothy Vollmer, Manager of Public Policy, Creative Commons
• Kit Walsh, Staff Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Kyle Wiens, Founder and CEO, iFixit
• Matt Zinn, General Counsel, TiVO

And it's actually even worse than it looks; there are no representatives of writing, or of fine art; there's the usual dominance by distributors and transferees; there's... well, to quote myself yet again:

Last, and far from least, a British lament on the various copyright debates that goes not nearly far enough — because the writer is being measured and academic, not because he's incorrect. One of the IPKitties is concerned about the absence of authors in the debates on copyright. The US Copyright Office's Orphan Works Inquiries are one example of the problem. I remember being awfully lonely at the west coast public "roundtable" on orphan works in 2005; I was the only representative of natural-person authors (and I include creators of nonwritten works) at the table — the other 19 represented transferees. Sadly, that reflected the makeup of comments in the 2005 Inquiry all too well, particularly in the initial-comment round (when only one written-works-authors' organization even provided an independent comment... out of over 600 received). The situation in the current round on orphan works is a little bit better, but human creators' interests — even including those who are primarily reusers of others' material — are advocated in less than a quarter of the comments provided. Things are even worse when considering information-age infringement issues, such as this all-too-typical "conference" on the DMCA that has no panelists whose perspective is that — or arguably primarily aligns with that — of the individual creators who most need a low-cost, low-formality means of objecting to online infringements of their works.

This is unacceptable and inexcusable. It's easily explained as a combination of the power of financial initial positions to set agendas and, specific to the Copyright Office, agency capture, but that's not an excuse. The ground was set when Congress — possibly, indeed probably, exceeding its constitutional power to do so — redefined "author" to include, and often exclusively mean, "patron" in the 1976 Act... without ever using the word "patron" in subsection (b). No other nation has gone so far, so claiming that it's a necessary means of complying with international norms is more than a bit much. The echoes of the complaints about "bureaucracy" in and around the second sausage on this platter should not be ignored... because in this instance there really is an unfulfilled entitlement; it's not only an ethical one, but a constitutional one. Indeed, there's an excellent argument that, under the current confused jurisprudential framework, virtually all of the proposed systems for dealing with orphan works constitute regulatory takings.

The current debate over copyright, especially as it is on the 'net, uncomfortably resembles the partition of a colony by colonial powers without a voice at the table for the indigenous peoples (or at least not one drowned out by moneyed interests like the East India Company). It seems to me that we've made that mistake a few times before with unsatisfactory results. We really, really shouldn't be repeating it.

C.E. Petit, Giant Squid, Anyone?, Scrivener's Error (23 Feb 2013) (links and emphasis in original).

Not acceptable. As usual, Congress is only going to listen to positions consistent with what its respective members' reelection finance chairmen want to hear. And the irony that what I'm quoting above would be fair use (if, that is, I wasn't the creator and copyright holder in the first place) will, no doubt, be lost upon the a**holes who think this sort of refusal to grant an audience to those who are not Party members has a damned thing to do with either good policy or democracy.