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 freelanders' 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…

An Unnatural Mixture

Beware the ingredient labels! Not just the sausages, but the news…

• Since no one really knows what an emolument is anyway, I suppose it's just fine for the entire House of Orange evade IRS scrutiny. At least until some judge or another takes a closer look, and another judge limits branding opportunities, and still other judges determine that he has to pay damages assessed a couple years ago. But at least it isn't more weaponized identity politics, right? Right?
• So the Orange One is demanding that applicants for Green Cards return to their home countries to do so, eh? Well, I nominate some prominent naturalized US citizens for similar (retroactive) treatment, especially those from shithole countries. <SARCASM> If you're going to impose the original intent on immigrants, you just can't allow people to take advantage of loopholes, right? Correcting mistaken noncompliance with that original intent by half a century of prior Administrations is the least that can be done!</SARCASM>
• I've long thought that career politicians were cockroaches, scuttling away from light, spreading dirt and disease, able to survive a nuclear strike… here's proof. And mislabelling "political operative" as "public service" among those who never gave actual national service (let alone dodged the draft when it was in force) gives mislabelling a bad name, even for that reservoir of lower-value human capital.
• That, however, seems positively productive compared to providers of writing advice who don't advocate, first and foremost, "read more, you ignorant gits!" Consider the cognitive dissonance that this is merely a book review appearing in a now-disreputable source that actually doesn't want anything truly creative (and hasn't for four decades) — just a fresh coat of paint on little (quasiliterary) boxes (so long as they're somehow about Manhattan rather than Daly City — and the less said about the true problems with "plaster versus sheetrock" the better… particularly as I've both lived in Daly City and repaired plaster walls).

  Here's a hint to the writing-advice subindustry: Maybe — just maybe — y'all can learn something from the scientific method, in which one looks at data first and theorizes afterward, then tries to confirm the theories with more data. That's how one avoids bullshit like asserting that all stories fit within a limited number of (mislabelled) "plots" , simultaneously ignoring substantial material and silently redefining terms. I realize that may undermine your there's-a-secret-method-for-success-that-only-I-can-explain model, but then I've spent virtually my entire life opposing that bullshit in various contexts. Like this one:

• All of which makes much more sense than relying on USNA graduates to explain military strategy and theory. To identify just a couple of fundamental errors in that article (by the guy who popularized "shock and awe" as a way of life — something that doesn't work against the desperate and the ideologically driven):
  • The British and French did not have "superiority in the quality of and quantity of weapons" during France '40. For one thing, their individual tanks lacked the radios found in virtually every German tank — and rapid, across-battlefield communications are just a little bit important in both quality and quantity of effectively employable motorized weapons platforms. And in the air, the quality/quantity disparity was far, far worse (especially as to the French, and most especially of all as to training and logistical support).
  • The Japanese didn't actually care about making the US "capitulate" prior to Pearl Harbor; they only wanted to establish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and actually preferred nonmilitary means of expansion of influence rather than outright occupation/conquest/"victory" (for values of "victory" requiring acceptance of non-Western conceptions thereof). Yamamoto's writings explicitly denied that anything more than a temporary vacuum, rather than a capitulation, was either necessary or possible.
  • Neither North Vietnam nor the Afghan Taliban were "militarily naked compared to the US and its allies" in their own territories. Abstract measures of the "theoretical balance of forces" without regard to where, when, and how long they will be engaged, let alone for what purpose, have less validity than IQ scores… as demonstrated by the first War of American Secession two and a half centuries ago (c. 1774–81).
  • Ullman's never-explicit (but all too convenient) redefinition of "asymmetric and hybrid tactics" focuses, or tries to, on "the battlefield" rather than the Clausewitzian "what legitimate political objectives can be either advanced or impaired by the organized application of violence." As to the two contemporary conflicts he dances around — Russia-Ukraine and US/Israel-Iran — he never engages with the fundamental asymmetry: The objectives of the various parties. That's the bedrock of "decisive strategic thinking" — understanding and thinking about not just one's own objectives, but one's opponents.' Conversely, the implicitly-redefined "asymmetry" the he does consider never engages with either unconventional forces (the more-traditional context of "asymmetric warfare") or the distinction between force presence and force projection. On the other hand, this is precisely the kind of blindness (and rhetorical shiftiness) that I long ago learned to expect from the Atlantic Council.

  And that's before considering their too-common impulses to prefer immediate policy preferences to the rule of law and the Constitution they swore to support and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic. This BS is not quite as credible as appropriating someone else's comic-book characters as branding for one's weaponry — and less likely to enable conquering the Roman Empire.

In Search of an Alternate Soundtrack

Not just to the news, either.

• Definitive evidence that the Arabian Gulf aggression is nothing but a dick move…
• The increasingly irrational statements from the current resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue seem to be encouraging Democratic Party leadership to advocate for the 25th Amendment. (Unfortunately, there's no equivalent to deal with the party leadership, much of which displays similar evidence of "cognitive challenges.")

  The problem here is that they're not looking at the calendar, not reckoning with the egos on the other side of the aisle. Any grousing about actually invoking § 4 — nonvoluntary removal due to inability "to discharge the powers and duties of his office," upon a certification of the Vice President and a majority of the cabinet — needs also to consider the 22d Amendment, § 1. No matter how obvious such "inability" is, the egos (at minimum verging on narcissism) involved among the Heffalump leadership will desperately seek to avoid doing anything prior to 22 January 2027, because a removal on or after that date would allow Vice President Vance, upon assuming the Presidency, to appear twice more on the electoral ballot. And these nutjobs don't believe they'll ever lose another election, if only because in the words of an astute British political operative: "[F]irstly, we shall fight this campaign on issues, not personalities. Secondly, we shall be the only fresh thing on the menu. And thirdly, of course, we’ll cheat," if only by creating more rotten boroughs — even if Colin the dachshund is a yellow-dog Democrat, he wouldn't be able to vote. So by waiting until one full day less than two years remains in the current term, they get to reelect Baldrick Vance twice.

• Of course, we really don't want to hurt the delicate feelings of the self-appointed overclass, either. The irony of a "real estate" titan complaining that things are "like" racism, given the real-estate industry's history of redlining (overtly and otherwise), is more than a bit much. So, too, is Ken Griffin complaining that anyone else's policy proposals are "creepy and weird."
• I suppose it beats nepo babies in "serious publishing" as a reason for frothing at the mouth. It's not like the self-appointed overclass has nepo babies of its own, right? It's almost like inheritance of "titles of nobility" aren't prohibited, but encouraged, in the Constitution. (And I didn't even have to reference Chicago politics…)

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.

Misanthropic (7)

In an order issued this morning that should surprise no one at all (see Dkt. 579 (26 Jan 2026), stating that it would be reset), Judge Martinez-Olguin has cancelled the previously-scheduled hearing for 23 April and reset it to 14 May (see Dkt 632 (08 Apr 2026)). The order setting the new hearing date:

1. Resolves some other pending procedural foofery regarding an objection filed by a non-class-member (which I have not reviewed, but — in the nature of these things — probably asserts, at least in part, that it was improper to exclude the objector from the class definition);
2. Sets both the approval hearing (also referred to as the "fairness hearing" — a term I prefer because it's quite rare for approval to be granted at the hearing, and under changes in law since 2003 may no longer be appropriate in any event) and the hearing on attorney's fees for 14 May 2026 at 1400PDT, with instructions for passive listening via Zoom (see Order at 2);
3. And, somewhat between the lines, indicates some judicial discomfort with some of the representations blithely being made by various counsel and parties, without specific criticisms. This is both entirely natural and previously signposted: Judge Martinez-Olguin appears to be taking seriously her duty as a gatekeeper for the public interest regarding a settlement pushed onto her docket three months ago in contexts generally foreign to judicial experience.

Aside: The reset hearing date makes certain that payments will not be in classmembers' hands in August 2026. So there.

March Madness

…it's a break from Everyday Madness in DC, where right now the #1 seed is in trouble against #16. But March Madness is supposed to be about entertainment, thus this platter's selections.¹

• Exploitations of copyrighted materials — and the right to make derivatives works from existing copyrighted works, depending on the (very difficult and not amenable to predictions embedded in statutes) directness of derivation — are definitely in the news. The tide seems to be shifting against generative-language-model-system claims of fair use. This has ranged from government climbdowns to appellate skepticism (at oral argument at least), perhaps best epitomized by attempts to reverse-engineer writing styles and then monetize that without the originators' permission (but using their marks in commerce).

  The fundamental problem — just like everywhere else in "copyright law" — is that far, far too much argument neglects the distinction between "expression" and "factual content." Consider an LLM ingestion of the following passage:

  The charge of the gallant three hundred, the Heavy Brigade!
  Down the hill, down the hill, thousands of Russians,
  Thousands of horsemen, drew to the valley — and stay’d;
  For Scarlett and Scarlett’s three hundred were riding by
  When the points of the Russian lances arose in the sky;
  And he call’d, “Left wheel into line!” and they wheel’d and obey’d.
  Then he look’d at the host that had halted he knew not why,
  And he turn’d half round, and he bade his trumpeter sound
  To the charge, and he rode on ahead, as he waved his blade
  To the gallant three hundred whose glory will never die —
  “Follow,” and up the hill, up the hill, up the hill,
  Follow’d the Heavy Brigade.²

  Using this to train an LLM that the Heavy Brigade was commanded by Scarlett, consisted of approximately 300 cavalrymen, and charged thousands of Russian soldiers after wheeling left into a line upon a trumpeter's (probably off-key!) sound — without regard to the credibility of the source, of alternate purposes, of the Agincourt Problem³ — would be fair use, because even if inaccurate that's not expression, but fact. "To the gallant three hundred whose glory will never die," however, is not only analytic — it's probably not a nonobvious-enough insight to be more than mere fact — but expressive. And another generative-LLM-system response that tries to echo that is echoing expression, not fact, and thus not nearly so clear a "fair use" as LLM proponents would have us believe.

• In a related area of concern, who has the copyright in generative-LLM-system outputs? Is it the system itself? The US Copyright Office doesn't think so, and the Supreme Court refused to review. What this neglects, however, is the distinction between "copyright ownership" (which is property) and "authorship" (which is anything but clear).⁴ Copyright ownership can exist only in a recognized juridical person that can own things… implying that before a specific generative-LLM-system can own a copyright, it has to be aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive (or at least recognized as an entity with the right to sue and be sued). Science-fictional consideration of whether Thaler was, therefore, implicitly violating the Thirteenth Amendment by enslaving a "person" is probably just, well, madness.
• Authors probably can benefit from day jobs. Of some sort, anyway; sure, a writing-related job, or even a subject-matter related job, is an obvious potential benefit (although I draw the line at being a criminal as appropriate, intentional preparation for writing about crime). Maybe being a sporadically-employed longshoreman would be enough, though.

  The real reason for having a "day job" is exposure to Other Stuff. People write what they know or is within the bounds of their existing imaginations, and there's little argument that a workplace is a good place to encounter elements to inspire imaginations ranging from speech patterns and rhythms to personality quirks to actual, ya know, ideas.

• At the opposite (financial) end of things, consider ownership of big-business sport franchises — especially those that "sell" for billions of dollars. My biggest objection is that the NFL appears to be avoiding its own Rooney Rule among those who are charged with complying with it. My second-biggest objection is that the Raiders epitomize the problems with inherited ownership interests. Epitomize, albeit with with lots of company, even and maybe especially within its own league.

---

1. Noncompliance with prevailing labor and independent contractor compensation requirements guaranteed.
2. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Charge of the Heavy Brigade [at Balaclava, October 25, 1854] (1854) (typography altered to US custom)
3. In accounts of military events, there is a strong predisposition to enhance the heroism of the side favored by the chronicler via inflating (or, occasionally, neglecting) any imbalances between the forces. At Agincourt, for example, most accounts not written by French observers and, later, historians estimate the size of the French army at over 20,000… neglecting that even at close intervals, the three waves agreed upon could not have fit more than 12-13,000 soldiers onto that battlefield without forcing their flanks into the woods on either side… which would have negated the dismounted tactics of the English archers later on. A bigger-than-reality French army suited those emphasizing English valor, from Shakespeare to every public-schoolboy essay. There are similar obvious problems with Tennyson's account; for one, "thousands" of Russians deploying lances (not pikes) raises one's eyebrows given the terrain around Balaclava, especially with the implication that only the Heavy Brigade was deployed against that opposing force. A generative LLM-based system's general inability to discern these kinds of issues is another flaw that gets substantially less attention than it should.
4. The biggest hint that "authorship" is not a pure property interest is that the Copyright Office will allow a petition to correct "authorship" by any "interested party," but copyright infringement suits can be filed only by the owner of an infringed exclusive right. (It's even more confusing in most of the rest of the world where droit moral is integrated into copyright law.) And this matters — a lot — to standing to sue in US courts, which is founded largely on one of two things: Injury to a property right or violation of a statutory right for which explicit right to sue has been granted. (That I believe this a too-stringent conception doesn't change the law as it exists; neither does techbro belief that copyright is an inconvenient barrier to their weltanschauung.) The irony that a more-penetrating linguistic analysis would tend to expose this morass when we're talking about something trained via linguistic constructs — even when purportedly trained on visual depictions — is for another time.

Swinging Gates (and Other Things)

Hopefully, it does mean a thing (at least one thing, anyway):

• The highly esteemed Mr Hendrix would have been entirely unsurprised by monopolistic ticketing practices regarding live performances (in all probability, both directly corrupt and "influenced" by the same forces — if not the same individuals or "organizations" — that gave us payola). In the usual we-didn't-do-nothin'-wrong-and-won't-do-it-again partial resolution of current ticketing issues, the DoJ has announced a settlement of antitrust charges with LiveNation. Not everyone agrees, though; over half of the state Attorneys General have not signed on to this settlement, and continue to push for divestiture as the most-appropriate resolution.¹
• The LiveNation controversy is just one particular window into the gatekeeping problem in the arts. LiveNation and its other-segment counterparts are involved after the snootier gatekeepers have finished (ineptly) imposing their narrow cultural preconceptions on everyone by trying not to "advance the useful Arts," but by repeating what has come before (presumably with better marketing support). The gatekeepers' error is one of projection: I am, therefore everyone should be… when, from inside their bubble, they have an economically ignorant view of the creator's life. Usually not just economically, either, but arguing about the self-proclaimed primacy of a single city in an entire nation's — hell, the entire world's — useful Arts is for another time, being a reflexive issue leading right back into economic irreality. (And more than one city's gatekeepers' attitudes are at issue here…)
• I respectfully suggest that the considered-out-of-touch-by-wingnuts Ninth Circuit needs to confront its current problem with "swinging dicks" by consulting a mohel (there are still a few days, the eighth day after the opinion (PDF) issued is this Saturday, so it can still be… snipped). That the plaintiffs in the underlying litigation should have consulted — and thought about, using available methods of literary and historical analysis — a relevant part of their owner's manual is an issue not amenable to judicial remedy, if only because US courts refuse to engage with pretext so long as a religious basis is proclaimed. It's far too late for this jurist to confront either without some significant guidance from real adults.²
• Sometimes proponents of generative-response systems — it's hard to avoid using the marketing-friendly, and misleadingly inaccurate, "AI" — realize, under pressure, that they've gone too far. (Much, much too far.) Any output will do; competence is optional. One wonders when they'll impose similar restrictions on legal advice, which in many instances is at least equally dangerous and founded on hallucinations. Our doom (or our Doom) at the hands of the machines isn't far off.

  Pardon me, I need to take a call from Cyberdyne Systems…

---

1. This sort of nonsense makes me wish that the American zeitgeist was as enthusiastic about imposing death penalties on bad-actor corporations, which have generally proven incapable of learning to behave better, as it is on disproportionately minority individuals, who often have never been given an opportunity to learn to behave better. The old "but what about the widows and orphans whose investments depend on those corporations?" argument means an awful lot less in the day and age of low-transaction-cost index funds (and specialized mutual funds, and even hedge funds!). Those who choose to reach for higher returns need also to accept higher risk — especially as passive investors whose only job is to choose board members to supervise corporate management.

   I certainly haven't seen all (or even most) of the evidence in the LiveNation matter, although both analogy to other parts of (and pasts of) the entertainment industry and the knowledge I do have indicate it would need to be extraordinary evidence indeed to refute the inference that There's Something Incurably Wrong Here.

2. Compare, e.g., prior issues with that jurist's scholarly deficits with Kitzmiller v. Dover Area Sch. Dist., 400 F.Supp.2d 707 (E.D.Pa. 2005) (in which a court actually did confront pretext… thanks to a web of arrogant and inexplicably stupid errors by the wannabe-theocrats exposing the pretext for what it was).

A Man of Wealth and Taste?

Wealth, certainly. I find it very, very difficult to ascribe taste, and definitely can't find any sympathy. For any hereditary "nobility," anywhere — including the children of the ultrarich who haven't bothered with the titles associated with the peerage (like the new owner of Paramount).

• Quite possibly the only redeeming aspect of the current "generative artificial intelligence" engines based on "large language models" is that they aren't even capable of being accused of behavior like depicted/described/implied in the Epstein files. That said, they're plenty selfish and lack impulse control. So it may be only a matter of time…
• Which is less discouraging than politicians. Especially politicians overtly breaking military regulations on a military base (not to mention being draft dodgers themselves). Of course, if the self-appointed gatekeepers — whether in the just-moved-off-camera smoke-filled rooms or not — were less interested in establishing/maintaining their own (personal) powerbases… ok, then they wouldn't be politicians, never mind.
• Of course, politics is far from the only place that self-appointed gatekeepers screw things up for everyone except themselves. Consider the fundamental problems with NYC-based commercial publishing, which this article completely misses. The fundamental problem with their model is that the trade segments have appointed themselves the gatekeepers for what is "good" in narrative text (especially, but not only, fiction of all categories), but without examining either the distinction between "individual work" and "body of work"… or their own qualifications to make such judgments. And in many ways, they're even less prepared to make the same judgments as to the financials.
• TV isn't any better — nor, for that matter, are the "critics," because this piece for all of its perceptiveness on some kinds of failures mistakenly treats all "serial TV" as if it has the same internal standards for "success." Yellowjackets, All in the Family, Person of Interest, and M*A*S*H can't even be evaluated within the same rubrics. Maybe not even with parallel rubrics. The less said about some non-critics, though, the better.
• But even those two exemplars of self-deception are more honest than finance, and certainly more honest than some jaw-droppingly obtuse criticisms from those even less qualified than TV critics. (Perhaps not as obtuse as TV personalities, though.)

I'll have more to say on the chickening-out and legal reasoning problems with the tariff opinion yesterday before long. The key thing to remember is this: The decision not to decide is itself a decision; and with that in mind, all nine members of the court abrogated substantial parts of their responsibilities. Even though six of them reached the only defensible result (without agreeing on why)…

Mis-Anthropic (6)

A few minor administrative updates on Bartz v. Anthropic, the class action pending for copyright violations in creating one particular large language model supporting one particular generative-AI engine, merit some comment — mainly as assurances, citizens, that there's really nothing to see here, move along (but get your documentation gathered and claims filed on or preferably well before 30 March 2026).

1. Unless there's a full seal on one (or, as tasteless and ominous foreshadowing, Item 2), no further objections to the settlement have been filed after the earlier ones. That doesn't necessarily mean smooth sailing, but it does mean that there's only one potential source of new arguments against the settlement unless the new judge reopens the objection period on motion — which is guaranteed to happen, down the road, if she rejects the settlement and sends everyone back to the bargaining table before they darken her chambers door again:

2. The United States government. Just as in the Google Book Search fiasco (filed about two decades ago now!), the US could move to intervene and object to either the settlement or the award of attorney's fees (see Item 3). The arguments and merits thereof, of course, are purely hypothetical at this stage. Given the massive conflicts of interest presented by "friends" of this Administration (specifically including the Doge of Venice Beach), the hostility of many of those "friends" to plaintiffs' attorneys (insurance defense counsel and mergers-and-acquisitions counsel, however, are encouraged to get rich with outrageous fees), and purported "policy imperatives," nothing would truly surprise me. Appall? — that's a different question entirely.

3. The next scheduled hearing is on 23 April 2026 — at which time only the pending motion for attorney's fees will be heard. The new judge specifically "administratively terminated" all other pending motions, and stated that the fairness hearing currently scheduled for that date "will be re-set by the Court at a later date" (Dkt. 579 (26 Jan 2026) (PDF, public access)). This is completely routine, and I expected it: This judge needs more time to familiarize herself with counsel, with the filings, with the facts, etc. The real point here is only that the settlement will not be either approved or disapproved on 23 April, or in a later ruling based on a hearing on 23 April.

4. The transcripts of the November 2025 hearings — when Judge Alsup is reported to have had some pointed remarks concerning tactics and notices suggesting that authors should opt out and proceed independently for Reasons (that make little practical sense, but that's for another forum) — will be made available to the public by 02 March 2026 absent any further motions relating to them.

5. Perhaps most important in the long run — but not creating any new deadlines (yet) — Judge Alsup appointed a Special Master (a non-judge who will make recommendations to the judge, now Judge Martinez-Olguin) to deal with "claimant disputes" (Dkt. 501 (25 Nov 2025) (PDF, public access)). The Special Master is a professional who will take in the facts and make recommendations. Examples might include an author asserting that the publisher is not due anything because the contract expired in 1996 (decades before either actual copyright infringement by LibGen et al., or Anthropic's copying of that infringement, and massively prior to any tenable extension of the three-year statute of limitations) but the publisher wants its purported 50% share; or ambiguity in the author-publisher contract on the publisher's share, which could be a serious issue for infringement of e-book versus print editions; or two coauthors failing to agree on a split of whatever money is due an author; or — and this is where the fun will be — claims by contributors regarding a collective work. There's no track record for either Judge Martinez-Olguin or Mr Cheng to provide any basis for prediction of how this might work out.

The Day After the Year After the Revolution

The most important question, five years after an attempted coup and a year and a day after the provacateur managed to regain office anyway: Who is absent from the reviewing stand this year, Comrade? And who might be next year?

• This son of a tyrant isn't uniquely positioned to make an ass of himself in public, but he does so pretty well even though he's got lots of company. But what a great opportunity for the West to fuck up yet again in that part of the world, where by a conservative estimate it has facilitated (intentionally or otherwise) at least thirty repressive governments in just the last century… specifically including that nation (more than once). Neither that family nor the West learned anything from 1953, or even from 1978: In an age of widespread (not even universal) literacy, you rule either with the consent of the governed… or an iron gauntlet, with spikes on the inside as you peacefully shake hands with your prior foes.
• Or you could just look at lower levels, and see what that kind of attitude can do when it entraps cities. Curiously, the article doesn't even mention the circumstances of the original sale (or, for that matter, who earned commissions or kickbacks campaign contributions), throwing it away as a "lopsided deal signed in 2008 by former Mayor Richard M. Daley." Apparently, the purpose of the Mayor of Chicago is not to create corruption/stupidity, it is to preserve corruption/stupidity.
• In a startling example of how even many of those of good intent regarding politics aren't doing very well at target selection, the Brennan Center for Justice offers nine solutions for political corruption that might be helpful — but are already being evaded. For one thing, many of the proposed constitutional amendments are both impossible (given what it takes to amend the Constitution) and unnecessary, being based not on the Constitution or its discernable core values but upon later judicial (mis)interpretations. Dead presidents have neither free-speech rights nor privacy/anonymity rights; remove the wrong-when-decided foundation of Buckley v. Valeo and about half of this list of reforms becomes unnecessary, at least at the constitutional-law level. Then it would at least be at the still-difficult statutory/judicial level, where there's at least some visibility — if not always accountability, the very point of the ire I share with the Brennan Center.

  Simultaneously, however, the list fails to engage with a different kind of corruption that controls the kind that it does. Corruption of the kingmaker(s) is much, much harder to mitigate or remove than even corruption of the king(s). Incompetence is even worse… although it can be really hard to tell the difference — if there is one.

• The world of publishing is a sad, sad mecca of self-sabotage. Whether we're talking about publishing executives trying to be like H'wood producers or authors who believe that no matter how small their output, how audience-negating their subjects, they're entitled to a comfortable middle-class existence just for being authors. In a socialist utopia, all authors and other creators — indeed, everyone — would have that same entitlement. All of those in power would respect both its limits and its minimum ethics, and just might have a sense of humor. And all of the children would be above average. (Sorry, but there is neither a Santa Claus nor a utopia.)

•  •  •

Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me
There lie they and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree

More clove oil for your tea, sir? And please put that book away — there are far too many books distracting people from carefully curated sources of all the information they need.

Morning-Again-in-America Sausages

Would that the origins of these links had partaken of more caffeine before starting the sausage-stuffer…

• From the Department of Rats-Leaving-the-Sinking-Ship, online rag The Vulture adds 28 partially disclosed spices to this link concerning the purported state of the "book industry" — spices that apparently didn't reach academics, indie writers/readers, those actually involved with the implicitly-denigrated "genre fiction" (whose sales were implicitly envied), or more than 1km outside of Manhattan. Fact of which these navel-gazers are apparently unaware: The population of Manhattan — about 1.7 million at the most-recent census — was a hair over 2% of the nation's.

  But that last fact is the actual cause of the seeming demise (and general irrelevance) of The New Yorker. It was predictable at the time this notorious cover, and perhaps even as early as the breakup of the Algonquin Roundtable (the desperate attempts of those like F. Scott Fitzgerald to glom onto the nascent H'wood income-and-exposure apparatus should themselves cause reconsideration). If New York had ever been the "center of American culture (for all the right people)" — and Boston and Philadelphia might object, even without getting to the Left Coast — it sure as hell wasn't by 1976, and sure as hell isn't half a century later. More broadly, looking outside the US would have been educational for the author of this… "hagiography" is wrong as to tone, but there really isn't a better thumbnail, blawg-entry-appropriate description.

  That these two pieces — and, especially, their subjects — share substantial conceptual difficulties is not coincidental. But at least they're not continuing to struggle with/for/against Straussianism. Or are they?

• The business day is usually considered to begin at 0900 — slackers (the "business day" needs to start with barracks inspection just after sunrise… and, of course, those doing the inspecting had to be up before that). Friday, 02 January 2026, being the first business day of 2026, can you guess how long it took for mutiple dubious appellate copyright decisions to issue? Even on a "one-day work week" due to the way the calendar fell this year?

  Around two hours (Pacific time). And were these matters ever dubious…

  Let's take the simple one first, although the Ninth Circuit's inexplicable decision to split it into both a precedential and nonprecedential decision makes it look much less simple than it really is. Sedlik v. von Drachenberg, No. [20]24–3367 (9th Cir. 02 Jan 2026) (precedential and nonprecedential decisions issued simultaneously), concerned a simple question wound up in procedural issues resulting primarily from poor advocacy in the District Court: Does a tattoo based on a nonunique (if "iconic") photographic portrait of a deceased individual infringe the photographer's copyright? (Those of you with long memories may recall that we've been here before (first sausage) — regarding a different eminent treatise author, also in snarled procedural posture.) Leaving aside the nonprecedential opinion, which is largely about the plaintiff's procedural shortcomings in the District Court, the real value in the precedential opinion is in the second concurrence — and even it jumps the gun, ignoring Justice Holmes's warning well over a century ago:

  It would be a dangerous undertaking for persons trained only to the law to constitute themselves final judges of the worth of pictorial illustrations, outside of the narrowest and most obvious limits. At the one extreme some works of genius would be sure to miss appreciation. Their very novelty would make them repulsive until the public had learned the new language in which their author spoke. It may be more than doubted, for instance, whether the etchings of Goya or the paintings of Manet would have been sure of protection when seen for the first time. At the other end, copyright would be denied to pictures which appealed to a public less educated than the judge.

  Bleistein v. Donaldson Litho. Co., 188 U.S. 239, 251–52 (1903). The danger here is quite obvious, especially given the rejection of the "sweat of the brow" rationale for copyright protection in Feist. To even reach any of these issues, one must determine what parts of Sedlik's photographs are original expression (and credit the "iconic" status of the photographs); then whether there was copying of those parts (which was largely admitted by this defendant); and then whether the defendant has any defenses. And here, the court stumbled rather badly by focusing on a fair use defense — whether properly left to the jury or not — without first considering whose originality is at issue in the "copying" of a portrait that largely omits the background, transforms its medium from photograph to tattoo, and — perhaps most to the point — is far from the only photograph (even similar photograph) of a deceased public figure. And this was not helped by the continued reliance on a line of Ninth Circuit cases that try desperately to evade the guidance of another 1990s Supreme Court copyright opinion — 2Live Crew (a/k/a Campbell). That this panel probably reached the "objectively correct" law-school-textbook result just makes the stumbling prone to falling into someone else's dispute.

• Unfortunately, a very similar is-it-protectable-expression? problem arose in Yonay v. Paramount Pictures Corp., No. [20]24–2897 (9th Cir. 02 Jan 2026). (One ironic similarity: Both Yonay and Sedlik were argued, for losing plaintiffs, by individuals with significant prior records in establishing copyright law.) This time, the court — an entirely different panel of judges — did better in separating "fact" from "expression" for a (IMNSHO bad) film based in part on a nonfiction article; or, rather, the later sequel thereto, and claims by the author of the article that the later sequel infringed the article's copyright, breached the original license, or both.

  However, this panel's better copyright analysis was partially overcome by a contract analysis that managed to ignore the context of entertainment-industry contracting in the 1980s and the context-driven "rational expectations" of the parties concerning "life story"-type material. The conclusion may well be correct — the entire text of that contract is not in the opinion, only purported "critical phrases" and an allegation that "nothing in the context of the agreement suggests any reason to depart from" grade-school-grammar analysis of conjunctions. This rather elides away that most entertainment-industry contracts are replete with compound nominatives that embed one or more conjuctions, so hidebound by tradition that a grammatical analysis is positively misleading.^† So I'm not convinced: The context of the agreement exactly suggests that simplistic grammar rules probably don't reflect the understanding of the parties, and almost certainly don't resolve the problem of internal definitions that assume familiarity with relevant commercial customs. I seem to recall some discussion of that in 1L Contracts, particularly Rest.(2d) Contracts § 222. Now combine that with the bad writing endemic to entertainment-industry contracts…

• On a seemingly lighter note, the Court of Justice of the European Union attempted recently to discern when a designer's name attached to things he/she/they didn't design is unlawfully deceptive. But maybe this isn't lighter after all, in company with the other sausages on this platter. Nor is it really lighter than the broader questions of "artistic attribution" that it implicates, ranging from trivialities like the darkness of the "painter of light" and dubious employment practices of esteemed local artists that ironically protected his copyright claims to weightier questions like the aphids on the (wilted) flowers in the attic and the propriety of proclaiming "A Film By". I guess the reason this sausage seems lighter is that the CJEU just didn't bulk it out with enough filler.

---

†  As you can well imagine, this can lead to some real headaches while negotiating these agreements. One on which I was a silent/undisclosed consultant about twenty years ago went through twelve iterations of we-remove-a-clause-they-reinsert-it — because the wet-behind-the-ears negotiators for [name of major studio withheld] were working from company boilerplate etched on stone before the Copyright Act of 1978 made their clause both unnecessary and arguably unlawful. They claimed to not have authority to change their well-tested language. We eventually got the removal approved, but still…

The publishing segment of the entertainment industry is no better. Buried in many contracts, even today, are references to "the plates" used to print the books (obsolete since the early 1990s), ipso facto clauses purporting to return all rights to the author upon the publisher's bankruptcy (contra 11 U.S.C. § 362 (1978)), declarations that a freelance (and not commissioned prior to creation) work outside the categories in the Copyright Act § 101 definition is a "work made for hire," and a variety of other problems ranging from definitions of "subordinate rights" made obsolete by both the 1976 Copyright Act and commercial/technological changes since to outright defiance of Supreme Court opinions. How much of this reflects honest disagreement with (what at least I see as) binding law and how much is an attempt to "contract around" that law under some para-Lochner conception is for another time, another few hundred footnotes.

Coal in My Stocking

I can see the lumps already, probably because I'm not getting actually rewarded for not being enough of a shithead — or at least the right kind of prominent shithead. It could be, too, that I'm anticoal on "the science (as stated by those lacking obvious conflicts of interest) says there's global warming" grounds. At least at the moment, I'm not desperate enough to burn the coal to keep warm for a few minutes in Northern Hemisphere winter weather.

• On what should be a cheerier note but really isn't, perhaps a visit to a bookstore might be appropriate. Even one governmentally approved as an instrument of postcolonial cultural imperialism (fully aligned with past governmental appropriational bullshit that was pointed at durned furriners). In the relatively near future, it'll be more poorly stocked with the most-affordable editions… at least, and even increasingly, in disfavored subcategories like the misnamed "genre fiction" (the very name of which reflects disrespect for substance and inept recharacterization depending upon definitions that shift within the same paragraph — even same sentence — of the "industry analysis"). Of course, given the source of that last, maybe a little skepticism regarding its conflicts of interest is appropriate.
• Perhaps as much skepticism as should regard this piece of utter crap from the same source.

  "Writers create comp lists, look at databases, ask friends, read acknowledgements...and yet, if our data is correct, they are not identifying the correct agent for them 66% of the time."

  * * *

  Representatives from Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Neighborhood Literary, GO Literary, DeFiore & Company, Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Laura Gross Literary Agency, Aevitas Creative Management, Writers House, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency, United Talent Agency, Curtis Brown, and Creative Artists Agency are also among those participating.

  Actually, the failure of the authors to blithely accept "expression of interest" as sufficient grounds to inquire further probably reflects that the authors actually are doing research — just not the kind of research that these arrogant conflicted assholes want them doing. Of that list of publishing-industry actors that (by implication) were not being contacted enough after expressing interest, a significant plurality have been either found liable or publicly criticized with facially-sufficient confirmation for engaging in fraud/fraud-like conduct with their own author-client/business-partners in the past few years. That they're being avoided by some authors indicates to me that some of those authors are doing appropriate research — which pleasantly surprises me, given the historical credulousness of the author community regarding business matters, especially when inexperienced with commercial publishing. It's not just about getting "an offer to commercially publish"; it concerns business relationships that, thanks to historical unfair negotiating tactics and abuse of monopoly power, frequently extend for the life of the copyright. I just wish things like this were rarer than the suppressed public notice implies (not to mention confidential settlement agreements, confidential arbitrations, and bullying).

  To put it another way: Interest from this guy wouldn't convince me to send him even ideas that would support a Desny claim, let alone handle my money. I've done my research (well, professionally so, but still). Commercial publishing is actually no different from/better than H'wood (or N'ville) in that. That PW and the "matching service" credulously given free publicity in that article would rather not acknowledge that results directly from their own conflicts of interest.

• Or you could just consider vendors with conflicts of interest. This conflict arises from both fairly obvious sources (the 'zon's own programs and sale/provision of material to other "GAI" providers, all of which presumably provides substantial compensation distressingly similar in concept to this), and less-obvious ones like "fundamental legal-basis misinterpretation." The latter is a bit complex, but it concerns the rights of a licensee (the publisher) to consent to conduct outside the licensor's (the author's) pre-agreement conception of what is in the license — and, more to the point, a sublicensee's iteratively-reflexive misconduct. One can't excuse everything by claiming it's marketing-and-publicity support… not even in the abstract, not even in the law-journal article and law-school-casebook context that doesn't consider the considerable effort, financial, and emotional costs to the plaintiff of objecting to 500kg gorillas with both ability and propensity to blacklist.

We now return you to our program of actually appropriate and relevant holiday music.

A Candle in the Window

Gotta crank out these sausages so there's room in the kitchen for Turkey Day preparations. Maybe if the shutdown ends soon, SNAP recipients won't have to be satisfied with a Cornish game hen split six ways. (There will still be plenty of other shenanigans.)

• I suppose I should start by noting The Further Adventures of Eliza — the true ancestor of so-called "generative AI" systems. (By now, she's probably just another old lady.) Some proponents of these systems really, honestly believe that "information wants to be free (and everything is just information)," so they disrespect "opt-outs" (leaving aside that under the basic premises of copyright — indeed, all intellectual property law, whether US-centric or otherwise — opting out is for waiving protection, not waiving rights).¹
• The obvious consequence is underinclusive class actions. Now I say that in the abstract; in the best of all possible worlds, all of the defendants engaging in similar schemes would be in a defendant class, all owners of copyright interests would be in the plaintiff class, and the judge would be authorized — indeed, enthusiastic about — using a chainsaw on prevaricating briefs. And lawyers. And outside commentators (especially those with conflicts of interest). This, however, is not that world, so we have to deal with… well, the realities of litigation. Such as the underinclusive list of eligible works — a list that, as usual for anything with which the Authors' Guild is involved, neglects "abnormal" publications by their concept of "normal," such as requiring an ISBN or ASIN, and dismissing self-help books that outsell all but a few of their actual members — in the context of the realities of the primarily-cost-effectiveness narrowing of the case.

  The perfect is the enemy of the good enough, and definitely the enemy of the achievable. Don't be fooled by carrion-eating "advocates" searching for scraps in pursuit not of an achievable better deal for the actual rightsholders, but for their own award of attorney's fees. If you, as an author, choose to opt out, do so only after having experienced IP litigation counsel review the details of your specific circumstances — not based on spam². (This is explicitly not an offer of representation or solicitation of business for me.)

• Which beats worrying about how unearned inherited wealth is warping social values. It's even worse Over There… until you look at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in which each Heffalump resident in the last third-of-a-century-plus has been a scion of inherited wealth.
• In somewhat better news, wingnuts took Election Day results in very delicate portions of their anatomies indeed. Not just Over Here, either; even the "governing party" in the Netherlands (which doesn't mean quite the same thing as Americans think it does). The wingnuts really don't like hearing any of this from a mixed-race… individual (sarcasm tag superfluous, doncha think?).
• Wingnuts also need to rethink exactly how they approach institutions that seem not to welcome them as much as they think they deserve. Oh, wait, that would undermine their sense of entitlement, so maybe it's as unrealistic as the suggestions running around to opt out of the Anthropic settlement without a competent evaluation of particular circumstances…

---

1. Also leaving aside the deceptive naming habit of damned near everyone in this conversation — "Copyright Alliance" without conflicts of interest my avulsed toenails.
2. From what I've seen — and I suspect I haven't seen all of it — spam that arguably violates applicable legal ethics rules, neglects Fed. R. Civ. Proc. 23 and the parts of the Manual for Complex Litigation (sorry, the web reference isn't working during shutdown) relating to management of class-member options, misrepresents the most-relevant facts, and completely fails to acknowledge the uncertainties and costs of proceeding with individual suits, or even alternate class actions. The preceding has been edited for the benefit of your screen; my real opinion of the opt-out spam that I have seen drips acid. I've got more respect for your computer than that; the people who came up with these campaigns… didn't. At least they're not porno trolls — at least, not yet.

Tiptoe Through the Tulip Bulbs

I'm shocked — shocked, I say — to hear that cryptobros lost a lot of money on a major downturn. Now all we need is some hungry sailor to eat some cryptobro's SIM card…

• Saturday afternoon was mildly nostalgic; very few people on the monorail understood why I mentioned "burning draft cards." (My hat — my last active-duty BDU hat, with an exceptionally obscure unit designator and subdued grade insignia — might not have helped.) Not surprisingly, the current Speaker alleged that the demonstrations were Marxist. I'm very much afraid that he knows no history regarding demonstrations, either in his lifetime or not quite a century past — or just how (in)correct the central authorities' kneejerk accusations of "Marxist control" proved then, either. Perhaps, though, he's been impaired of late by poor choice of beverages (and additives), on advice of Secretary Brainworm.
• At least the No Kings protesters were noticed, even if they end up getting precisely as much substantive attention.
• I'm certainly not booking any Caribbean cruises from 12 December onward. OK, I'm not booking one at any time (just not my style), but you shouldn't then, either.
• It normally takes about a decade or so to remove the "carpetbagger" label from politicians when they significantly change their residences. That's perhaps the best explanation for the "at least a decade" prospective delay in seeking elective office proposed by this guy; if he moves to where he's most qualified to hold office right now — Illinois, as Governor (since despite the commutation he's still a convicted felon) — he'll have a couple years to practice on the Cook County Council before the 2038 election cycle. He'd be breaking a campaign promise to run in 2034… oh, who am I kidding?
• With all due respect to the Chancellor of my undergraduate institution, I think he is making a mistake "engaging in dialogue" on some subjects; in this particular instance, it is all-but-formal negotiation with terrorists. That is not a winning strategy — especially when that terrorist organization has previously, and repeatedly, demonstrated that it will not in fact "engage in dialogue" but will instead seek further opportunities to propagandize based on at best out-of-context statements by those with whom it purports to communicate. Dialogue does note mean "provide further opportunities to make demands without actually listening to responses," nor "meaningless opportunity to try to explain reality to those whose minds are already made up on ideological (fact-free) grounds."

  In this, Chancellor Martin is at least being explicit that he's not agreeing to anything. Which is not at all to say that this terrorist organization won't mischaracterize "agreeing to sit at the table" as "agreement," whether tacit or explicit — because it will (which is one of the major reasons not to negotiate with terrorists). Anyone who doesn't perceive that organization, and particularly the militant wing of the IRA Department of Education, as a terrorist organization for these purposes is respectfully referred to Zillow to peruse valuations and financing options for purchase of several acres of waterfront property approximately 45km east of Mar-a-Lago.

• Meanwhile, PW continues to demonstrate its utter obliviousness with its annual list of "the world's largest publishers" that ignores at least three publishers with greater revenues than their #1. Oh, but those publishers don't sell to "the trade," so they don't count. That's sort of like ranking the biggest bookstores in the world and excluding the 'zon because they couldn't find it on a street map.

  The real point here is that this is far from an isolated instance when talking about "publishing": Virtually everyone — and absolutely all "publishing news outlets" — silently restrict their datasets to exclude things they just don't want to talk about. Or, more frequently, can't get paid to talk about… or have any present/recent conflict of interest talking about. That doesn't meet even the minimal standards of Faux News and the WSJ…

• All of the above really make me want to exercise my linguistic skills as acquired from the real experts: Senior NCOs.

If this platter — despite the current-events flavor profile of the individual sausages — somehow makes you nostalgic for the late 1960s, you need to brush up a bit on the full context of 1968. Perhaps you can ponder one of the gaping loopholes in the XXVth Amendment, too: There's no similar mechanism regarding cabinet members, only at most the President's own ability to fire them, and if we're thinking about XXV that's already in play otherwise…

Unavoidably Delayed

Unscheduled tech challenges delayed this platter of link sausages. Don't worry, though: With modern preservative techniques, they're just as fresh and wholesome as they ever were. Admittedly that's "not very much," but at least I'm not charging more for any extra ingredients.

• Censorship pisses me off. It doesn't matter whether it's general "think of the children's morals" bullshit (all too often originating with truly upstanding "community leaders"), or just harassment of academics who (peacefully) undermine Establishment narratives (presuming he makes it out). Not so ironically, but rather predictably, many of the prospective censors haven't actually read the books themselves, and just don't get that with many entertainers, "It's an act, lady!" Hell, they're doing better in Blighty.

  Dammit, the entire point of "freedom of speech," and in general of "representative democracy," is that you just might learn something if you hear from — and more particularly listen to — people whose viewpoints vary from yours. It's rather interesting how few of those advocating censorship (and restrictive visions of "morality") have, or have had, those "good factory jobs" on which some want American education to focus (entirely unlike this guy, of course). What that implies about limiting education and libraries and bookstores and music to unchallenging, preapproved pablum is not very favorable; but you'd have to hear it first…

• …which won't happen anywhere near the Pentagon if Major Major Major gets his druthers. Fortunately, it appears that at least some media outlets give at least lip service to their constitutional role over their financial advantage. Right now, that is; we'll see in three to six months, won't we? Not at FEMA, though. Or the Department of Justice. And maybe Blighty has similar problems, so I'm rescinding the faint praise buried in the preceding sausage's ingredient list (right after sodium erythrobate), unlimited surveillance being the flip side of supressing journalistic "oversight."
• How about something a little cheerier? (Uhoh — when he says something like that it's usually anything but.) Consider the social advances that might be made by "AI"-based inventions and patents — at least while they're not hallucinating — and in music, especially the quasiindustrial kind.
• Meanwhile, musicians and authors continue to be underpaid as gamblers unqualified to either perform music or write books end up making all of the critical decisions about which ones to distribute and how to promote them. Not to mention that pay scale in the first place; it simply would not do for expectations of prosperity, or even bland middle-class comfort, of actual practitioners in the arts to take any profit-making potential away from trust-fund kids and techbros riding their luck as if it reflects actual merit, or enhances their private collections of objects in a way reminiscent of formalized magic.
• All of which is substantially less disturbing — at least to nerds like me, of whom there appear to relatively few (perhaps for the best) — than rows over the pending (purported) "Restatement of Copyright" that blithely ignores that at least in the US, we already have a Restatement of Copyright. For all its flaws, the Nimmer treatise is treated almost exactly like a Restatement, quite similarly to other (flawed!) Restatements like Conflicts of Law and Torts. Of course, the "guiding members" of the committee pushing the Restatement and I have had our disagreements in the past, especially regarding misuse of mislabelled, cherry-picked evidence to support a predisposition. It's even been in public, more than once. So I'm not precisely the most disinterested, neutral evaluator of this ALI effort; just because I believe many of its precepts and interpretations are so wrong that they're unworthy of being adopted by the ALI doesn't mean you should believe me uncritically. Which rather brings this ring of link sausages back to the first one, doesn't it?