The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by C.E. Petit:

Tangent Warning

390 This statement of moral rights is flawed in the same way as is the earlier statement of the property aspects of copyright: It acknowledges only one possible reason for a position, and then argues that that reason is necessarily the universal and unacceptable motivation. In this instance, another reason for "moral rights" is to avoid perceived harm to artistic vision; yet another is to maintain the author's quality standards across a range of works. Neither falls within the reasoning presented in item 390.

391 note *** A "writer's strike" by freelancers in the US would violate our antitrust laws. Under US law, only "employees" are entitled to collectively bargain. Freelance writers are independent contractors by definition (except for screenwriters, who are employees by implicit exception to that definition, since they're doing work for hire), so they're not entitled to collectively bargain.

Thus, the answer to this is "Never, unless someone were to change the law."

394 If the case referred to here is the one I think it is, it was later overturned by the European Court of First Instance, and the description of the facts is inaccurate. I could be incorrect, though; it would be helpful if Greg would provide a citation to that decision.

397 What appears to be going on here is that the word "property" has different meanings in economics and and law. Copyright is a legal construct that has economic rationales and aspects... but it is not a pure economic concept.

In not-quite-contemporary economic thought, "rivalrousness" is an essential aspect of a property interest.* The short, nontechnical explanation of this concept is that a good or service is nonrivalrous — and, therefore, not economic property — if it is not consumed to exhaustion by use. That's why a physical copy of a book is property (when that copy is sold to an end user, the store can't sell that copy again to another end user unless the first end user returns it to the store) and, on this view, a copyright or electronic book is not.

Conversely, in law, property can be rivalrous... but need not be. One good example of this is the right to continued public assistance payments so long as the program continues unless the public assistance agency holds a hearing (which may be merely submission of documents) on continued eligibility. This is a notoriously tricky bit of doctrine that ordinarily takes several weeks out of the lives of law students, spread out across two or three years of the curriculum, before the light bulb goes on. (I had the dubious advantage of having already suffered that loss of time as a commanding officer before law school, so I sacrificed it to other issues instead.)

In short, this entire thread is based on incompatible definitions of "property."

* Current theory seems to be moving away from this, but it's still a raging argument at the cutting edge of economic theory. Some time in 2012–2015, this argument will start making its way into serious trade nonfiction; until then, we're stuck listening to papers at academic conferences and following footnotes in the Journal of Economic Literature.

I wasn't talking about "permanence," but "divisibility of rights" — something that Greg has still not confronted in his inaccurate and extremist reductio ad absurdum characterization of "copyright." But that's getting off topic.

Still farther off topic: As an aside, Jim's example of the need to pay taxes has nothing to do with the property rights; it has to do with the state's right to regulate and to force beneficiaries to pay for their use of public goods. I realize that's splitting hairs awfully finely, but it's incorrect to say that failure of a personal obligation of the owner means that the property is somehow not property. That the land's "value" is the basis for the taxes is a means of measurement, not an obligation that actually runs with the land.

We're getting way off topic here, so may I suggest that if people want to talk about "property theory and copyright" that it goes to another thread, so we can (cough, cough, hack) keep this thread cleanly focused on its ostensible subject? I'll maintain my tangents as strictly retaliatory weapons.

I was using the example of the farm only to demonstrate that "property" has more than one aspect to it. I thought that "farm" would be far enough from "copyright" that people would understand that without an explicit denial.

In copyright-only terms, then (and I promise this will be less clear, because the language and concepts are both less clear): A copyright includes a whole bundle of different rights, such as the right to control the making of copies (from which it gets its name); the right to create derivative works; the right to abridge; the right to perform in public; the right to claim authorship (to greater or lesser degrees, depending upon nation of origin); and so on. Each of these has different economic and other values, different duration (really — but it's very hard to explain, and it depends a great deal on other aspects of the work in question), different means of trespass, and different values in terms of the relationship to both "free speech" and "information."

I really don't think that's as clear as the farm example for pointing out that property is not an "all or none" concept in law, even if in economics it is too often reduced to an "all or none" concept.

283 I'm afraid that Greg sets up a false dilemma with the way he words his first lemma:

"those who think of copyright as representing a permanent property, like a deed to a farm"

(emphasis in original) There are two fundamental problems with this statement:
(a) The word "permanent" clearly implies "never-ending," despite the attempt to acknowledge limitations later in the statement, and
(b) The assumption that all aspects of "property" have the same duration

This is a common mistake made by economists when they talk about a unitary concept of "property": They forget that property has many, many elements to it. Consider, for example, a family farm. If we look at the deed to the farm, it will say that the land belongs to x. That, however, does not give x the right to exclude aircraft from flying over his land; nor does it give x the right to hoard all of the water from the stream that crosses his land; nor does it give x the right to prevent the nearby city of Oz from renaming his land as part of Emerald City Estates, a low-income housing development well separated from the rich folk at Quail Run; nor... You get the idea.

Similarly, copyright itself recognizes — if rather ineptly — that a Work has more than one set of rights in it. You might want to ponder Borges' story about Pierre Menard and Don Quixote. Unfortunately, Greg's formulation does not, and it excludes this substantial set:

(1a) Those who think of "copyright" as a set of property rights of varying duration and value, some of which they're willing to give up at different times and under different circumstances than others, which also implicate other property rights. Further, these people accept the concept of a "nonpossessory trespass" as an acceptable diminution of their "property rights."

One word for these people is "professors." That's not the only word for them, but it's certainly an obvious and pretty uniform exception to Greg's formulation... and points out that he has set up a false dilemma.

(1) I'll accept "grumpy" as an accurate description. Some of this comes from back spasms (Flexeril isn't too kind to good writing). Some of it comes from my frustration at not being allowed to thoroughly and publicly bitch-slap several parties for poor judgment (on both sides) and for perpetuating serious errors of fact regarding the whole scribd.com situation. Bluntly, none of the public actors in this little unmellowdrama would emerge without some mud... but scribd.com (if one knows all of the relevant facts) comes off the by far the worst. And that's before getting into the legal-theory issues.

(2) The biggest problem with this entire debate comes from a fundamental problem with the copyright debate. Copyright law treats all "writings" as if they have the same legal characteristics: a copyright term of x that is supposed to encourage "Progress in the useful Arts." The real problem — as the Supreme Court tried to grapple with in Feist, but (due to the procedural posture of the case) wasn't even allowed to reach, let alone resolve — is that not everything that is put in words, or in pictures, or in sound, or in any other creative medium, is purely expressive. In short, there are facts in them there words; there is information hiding amongst the deathless phrases.

Ultimately, this illuminates the blind spot of the IWTBF movement: It cannot see the phrasing for the facts. Perhaps facts do "want" to be free. Perhaps some facts are so bound up with phrasing that the phrasing has to go along with the facts on the jailbreak (e.g., King's "Letters From a Birmingham Jail"). When it comes to works of fiction, though, any facts presented are clearly subordinate to the phrasing, and I'm afraid they're going to have to remain in captivity... unless we want to return to the Renaissance and subsidize everyone who is producing "Art," for some value of "Art."

This also masks another aspect of the problem: Who gets to decide what is "Art" and what is not? We certainly don't want lawyers doing it, as (as a group) lawyers' ineptitude with words is exceeded only by the advertising industry, and it's impossible to overstate lawyers' (as a group) inability to appreciate "Art". That's why the lawyers chose a "one size fits all" solution at the level of law, and made "it's only a set of facts" an implicit defense: That forces any decision on one constitutes a set of facts in front of a jury. In short, the "monolithic copyright" represents a general case determined by lawyers, allowing for exceptions in particular instances to be decided by nonlawyers (after far too much legal posturing, but we too need to get paid!).

Conversely, the most-radical IWTBF approach actually represents a return to the Renaissance concept of the "patron of the arts" as the economic motivator for "Progress in the useful Arts". (I've gone on at length about this in other fora — with the footnotes I promised not to import to Making Light — and the argument is much more nuanced.) The short version, though, is that this sort of thing represents a clash of economic postulates that are both so subject to abuse that one cannot say "I vote for this side, because it has no defects." On the one side, we get Disney, with its selective view of copyright and intellectual property as "whatever keeps anyone else from ever profiting... but we don't have to pay money for children's hospitals, either." On the other side, we get "overenthusiastic fans" harming the resale value of materials a rational economic actor (presuming that we can ascribe "rational" to any artist!) released to the public with an expectation of profit.

There isn't an easy solution. There are only imperfect balances that will inevitably result in some abuses. Remember, a lot of the people I represent — such as my academic clients — rely upon fair use and the fact/expression distinction for their own efforts to promote "Progress in the useful Arts." Don't assume that I'm a "copyright maximalist" merely because in this instance I see that the model adopted by scribd.com as clearly a wrongful one.

Um, what I said was "sounds condescending," primarily because things often sound different on screen than they would in person. Someone else called it "talking nasty," and I merely quoted that... which, in turn, as I read it again, sounds different on screen than it would in person.

So, in any event, I'm stuck. I'm sick and tired of seeing people misrepresent the law and facts of these kinds of situations, and I'm even more sick and tired of not being in a position to calmly correct things because I'm bound by other legal obligations (such as loyalty to other clients I am representing). No doubt that makes me sound more irascible than I really am on the underlying topic — I'm much angrier about misrepresentations and misattributions than about anything else.

So, therefore:
* I didn't participate in the notice Mr Burt sent to scribd.com.
* I do not represent SFWA. I was not consulted on this particular notice, despite being on the committee; and more than that I cannot say, because it goes directly to the fact that
* I represent other persons whose work has been pirated at scribd.com.
* scribd.com is not eligible for DMCA safe harbor protection under either § 512(i) or § 512(c)(3)... and that goes for all aspects of § 512
* It took me three minutes in a public database to confirm the previous point; I'm rather irritated that nobody who is making public attacks on this topic seems to have done so. I'm only being this cryptic because my loyalty to my other clients requires me to do so in this forum... no doubt my communication to scribd.com on behalf of one of those clients has already been posted at chillingeffects.org (which is, itself, a rather misleading site, but that's for another time).
* My position — and my clients' — is that it's the copyright holder's choice. If Eric Flint, or Cory Doctorow, or whomever, wants to have his/her/their works posted on the 'net, that's their business. If my clients don't, it's not some IWTBF activist's business to decide that it's actually to the holder's benefit, whether one is coming from a policy perspective, a legal perspective (see footnote 6 of Tasini), or simple bloody common bloody courtesy. Remember, "overenthusiastic fans" (to quote the district court judge in Ellison), your idea of what is in the author's best interest doesn't consider the author's other plans and obligations.
* I take this "all of SFWA therefore believes" bovine byproduct perhaps too personally, because I (like Lt Macdonald) was a career military officer and suffered through that during and immediately after the late unpleasantness in Southeast Asia. I resent it even more when an extreme position like Pournelle's is taken as representing anyone's other than certain arrogant dinosaurs.

And muscle relaxants don't tend to make for the most lucid posts... which is one reason that I'm not writing up any legal documents this weekend.

My "talking nasty" is intended only to stop people from continuing their misuse of the transitive property of equality:

SFWA made a mistake
x is a member of SFWA
Therefore, x is responsible for the mistake, and agrees with the policies behind the mistake (which, of course, are Evil)

For that matter, the same goes for a committee member who was not involved in the mistake and can't defend him/herself effectively due to other obligations.

I'm still seeing that in this thread, although it looks like it has toned down a bit. Fortunately, it's not as bad as on BoingBoing, which is degenerating further than I thought probable over a holiday weekend.

Two general points:

(1) I'm not representing SFWA. I'm representing others whose interests happen, in a general sense, to align with SFWA's: authors whose works are being egregiously infringed by a non-DMCA-compliant ISP (scribd). Thus, it may look like my comments are "supporting SFWA"; that they do so is not precisely coincidental, but a side effect.

(2) I don't like the way the DMCA was thought through, written, or in some senses interpreted. Basically, that's what you get for letting C students at Harvard who got their jobs as legislative aides and/or lobbyists through political connections write laws. In fact, as I wrote in our briefs on Ellison — and was essentially accepted by the court, and by many other courts since — the only way one can understand § 512 is by reading it from back to front.

Section 512 is not a clear statute with a clear meaning. However, it is possible — in fact, virtually mandatory — to say that some interpretations are wrong. The EFF's interpretation that a DMCA notice must comply perfectly to require any action at all on the part of the ISP is wrong and unsupported by any reading of authority in context... except the EFF's own policy writings and preferences. I don't claim to know the exact boundaries of what kind of notice is sufficient, but I'm really getting sick of the absolutist bovine byproduct.

"Glory" may not have a clear and exact meaning, but it does not mean "a good knock-down argument." Neither does "promptly attempts to contact the person making the notification or takes other reasonable steps to assist in the receipt of notification that substantially complies with all the provisions of subparagraph (A)" have a clear and exact meaning, but it does not mean "[t]he law clearly entitles [an ISP] to ignore noncompliant DMCA notices entirely."

Why am I not surprised that Fred von Lohman made this incorrect comment (as quoted above)?

"The law clearly entitles Scribd.com to ignore noncompliant DMCA notices entirely. See 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3)(b)(ii)."

Umm, no. Absolutely not. Try reading the statute:

17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3)(B)(ii) In a case in which the notification that is provided to the service provider's designated agent fails to comply substantially with all the provisions of subparagraph (A) but substantially complies with clauses (ii), (iii), and (iv) of subparagraph (A), clause (i) of this subparagraph applies only if the service provider promptly attempts to contact the person making the notification or takes other reasonable steps to assist in the receipt of notification that substantially complies with all the provisions of subparagraph (A).

Then try reading Napster, Aimster, Grokster, and half a dozen other opinions in which the various courts — including two of the judges who sat on that Perfect10 decision that they're so fond of at EFF, while ignoring the other two Perfect10 opinions. And while you're at it, try reading the next two paragraphs after the one in the 488 F.3d Perfect10 opinion cited in von Lohman's letter and see if it applies... because Perfect10 made no attempt whatsoever to identify specifically infringing material.

Then try reading the legislative history on what they meant by "substantially complies."

Bottom line: Only someone who was trying to rewrite the law to say what he/she wants it to say can interpret that in good faith as allowing an ISP to "ignore noncompliant DMCA notices
entirely."

Jerry Pournelle's position is not SFWA's, and probably represents only the cranky unreasonable dinosaurs. Or, at least, the cranky and unreasonable... some of whom are probably young.

I'm really, really getting sick of the "if you're not with me on every nuance, you're an extremist on the wrong side of everything I believe" rhetoric on this topic. Bluntly, Cory's rhetoric harms his position, and it's no better when transported here. There's plenty of room for disagreement on what policy should be, or whether someone's take on policy is reasonable. There's much less room for disagreement on what the law is. And, since nobody has yet come up with (a) a correct, complete factual statement regarding the errors and correct statements in the notice sent to scribd.com, (b) the complete context in question, or (c) any reference to how a comparable combination of a and b has been treated in the past by both policymakers and the courts, may I respectfully suggest that y'all:
(1) stop tarring organizations and persons with misstatements or out-of-context statements of their positions, and
(2) stop asserting that SFWA has a single opinion on anything, including its continued existence?

I'm not at all sorry if this sounds condescending. Maybe that will get your attention before you tar me with the brush that I believe exactly as does Jerry Pournelle (on practically anything), since I'm also a SFWA member. So, too, is John Scalzi. If it doesn't, at least I've tried.

Sigh. I'm a member of SFWA's copyright committees, but I had nothing to do with SFWA's scribd.com situation. That said:

Would everyone involved in this debate please stop assuming that an organization that holds a single position on copyright with which you disagree automatically means both:
* That the organization holds the most-extreme version of that position, and
* That the organization therefore holds every other extreme position with which you disagree?

At the moment, I'm going to pick on post 162, which reads in part:
SFWA has been positioning itself as the organization that Fights! Pirates! and believes in trillion-year copyrights and charging full price for every glass of lemonade.
which grievously misrepresents SFWA's positions. SFWA support the CTEA (at a time I was not a member) solely for harmonization; there is actually a consensus within the committee that life+70 is too long, but there's not a lot that can be done... and trying to cut back is worse. I'm not entirely certain what the "full price for every glass of lemonade" is referring to, but SFWA has been working for quite some time to convince publishers that they're overpricing their stuff — especially e-books.

Keep in mind that SFWA's position on the "orphan copyrights" debate was probably the most reasonable of any of the parties who actually sat down at the roundtables, and was one of only four (out of hundreds) that explicitly tried to strike a balance between copyright holders and those who wish to reuse material. Try reading SFWA's position papers and seeing if it's fair to claim SFWA's position advocates trillion-year copyrights.* Hey, sometimes I even agree with EFF and Cory, or think they don't go far enough!

In short, please stick to criticizing someone for what they said, not what you think they said because you despise some aspect or implication of what you (quite probably) misheard.

* OK, admittedly, I wrote a good portion of SFWA's position papers, and I participated in one roundtable session on SFWA's behalf (Michael Capobianco did, too).

128 You've just made my point, because that's almost exactly what we were accused of doing... and it's not at all what we did, nor what we intended to accomplish. The biggest problem with the more-radical fringe of IWTBF is that it's not nuanced enough to understand the difference between "information" and "expression."

And I'm not saying you're a maroon, or agreeing with every aspect of any of the opinions in Ellison v Robertson; I'm pointing out that the assumption "Ellison wants to shut down Usenet!" is both common and wrong.

92 Greg, it's the French's fault because of terms they insisted on inserting into the Treaty of Rome... and into Germany's post-WW2 copyright law that they hadn't yet inserted into their own. (Actually, it's always the French's fault... but that might just be some Prussian ancestry speaking. ;-) )

93 Adam, I realize you were just shorthanding, but I sort of resent the overstatement. There's a specific reason I said "legal consequences." I get enough misguided attacks made on me as a result of people listening to what some of the more-radical IWTBF maroons said we were trying to do in Ellison v. Robertson, so I'd really appreciate it if people would attack me for what I said if they disagree.

The irony that this kind of shorthanding is part of what gets Cory in trouble in his screed should not go unmentioned, either. If y'all don't know the legal technicalities, limit yer comments to policy, ok? Please, in the name of not turning ML into a law review with duelling footnotes?

96 John, I should have been clearer. There were no treaty obligations at the time Bono first introduced such legislation (1994, IIRC), true; but there were by the time the SBCTEA was passed, including both bilateral treaties with several South American countries, technical amendments to NAFTA, and the 1996 WIPO treaty-monster (which, technically, is either four, five, or seven different treaties — even parts of WIPO's own website aren't consistent!).

In any event, I was attempting to provide enough context for someone to remember why the DMCA ain't Sonny's fault.

100 Kendra, SFWA has a similar affiliate-membership class, from which I believe MWA derived its own comparable, but slightly different, criteria.

53 Paula, you're mixing up two different amendments to the Copyright Act passed in 1998. Sonny Bono was responsible for the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998; that was a technical correction to the Copyright Act (we had signed a treaty, remember?) to change the baseline term from life plus 50 to life plus 70. Actually, you can blame the French for that... but that's a long story itself.

The DMCA is an entirely separate piece of legislation, in response to a different treaty obligation — the 1996 WIPO treaty. It includes two distinct amendments to the Copyright Act: Chapter 12, the evil and inexcusable "no DRM workarounds allowed" material (which probably violates the Constitution, but that's a complicated argument for another time), and — 512, the limitation-on-liability-for-ISPs material, which has some of the worst writing and thinking behind it in the entire Copyright Act (against some pretty stiff competition), even if its intent — to facilitate open exchange of information on the Internet while providing a way for copyright holders to notify ISPs of infringements — is a reasonable attempt to balance a whole bunch of competing interests.

General comment on Cory's comments at BoingBoing: Cory is not a lawyer. Much of what he says or implies about potential legal consequences is wrong, and IMNSHO constitutes indefensible rumormongering and attempts to refight long-ago-lost policy battles... but does not create a cause of action for anyone. I am explicitly not making any comments concerning anything other than legal consequences. I am representing other persons (note the plural) regarding scribd.com, and for that reason I won't be posting at boingboing.

And none of the above is legal advice for any particular situation. I do not represent SFWA, scribd.com, or Cory Doctorow.

The biggest problem I had with seasons 2 and 3 was misuse of the surrounding characters. In season 1, Veronica has to ask for help when she is out of her depth, and can't depend on getting it; later, she just blithely assumes that she'll get Mac to go along with her schemes. (Maybe she should have been tranced and tagged by nerd hunters...)

Basically, Veronica never learned how to be a very good friend. That's sort of a direct subtext in season 1, but it's still sitting there in seasons 2 and 3 with nowhere to go.

I don't see the later problems as plot problems as much as character development problems.

419 But don't tell the aircraft maintenance community that! It worships Bernoulli as the Source of All That Is Right and Good About Aerodynamics.

I distinctly remember getting yelled at by the PhD who was guest-lecturing on fabrication and repair of lifting-surface parts when I pointed out that his calculations for upper surface planform rigidity — in other words, determining what materials might be acceptable for repairing battle damage to an F–15/F–16's hybrid composite/metal wing — wouldn't work in the transsonic region because they neglected to correct for nonuniform air density. I think he was pissed off primarily because lieutenants who didn't have a degree in aeronautical engineering (or, in fact, any engineering at all) weren't supposed to understand about "boundary conditions" of what is, after all, some pretty basic physics. If he had asked, he would have found out that my undergraduate degree was in biochemistry... which, almost by definition, is about (or, at least, in the 1970s and early 1980s was about) boundary conditions and behavior near them. It's shocking just how close to "impossible except under very rigid conditions" a lot of critical biological chemical pathways really are.

299 There's no such agency as issued my NDA. I'd say that "overreaching" is its middle name, but the initials don't match up.

And a caution about excessive ibids.: This caution does not apply to scholarship on law; in fact, rather the opposite. Legal scholarship encourages a gross excess of pinpoint citations to particular pages for particular statements. The stated reason is to ensure that one has an accurate record of who said what, when, and exactly where. The sarcastic response is that it's merely a demonstration that legal scholarship is meaningless unless one can prove that someone said the exact same thing before.

And, of course, in legal scholarship we say "id.," not "ibid.," just to be different.

My point is that a "scholarly" work on legal issues — regardless of their origin — that does not contain several passages with consecutive "id." citations is unlikely to contain worthwhile analysis. This may seem counterintuitive, but there it is; it's one of the ways that one can tell that recent editions of Nimmer on Copyright do not do a very good job on legal-historical scholarship...

223 What we have here... is failure to communicate.
* First of all, legal historians — particularly those of us based in the common-law tradition — have a very different conception of what constitutes a "primary source." For example, despite their general treatment as such by other historians, neither Coke nor Blackstone is a primary source, or even a secondary source. The Stuart Constitution barely qualifies as a primary source, despite its usefulness, only because it includes the actual text of many of the statutes being debated.
* Law-trained legal historians generally distinguish between "constitutional" and "legal" history; unfortunately, political scientists and humanities-based historians don't. What you described is not constitutional history, but the broader sense of legal history, in which all bets are generally off anyway. Law-trained legal historians generally limit "constitutional history" to the level of fundamental limiting and enabling principles of government power, usually stated in a set of documents with official imprimatur distinct from routine government business (whether called "statutes," "decrees," "regulations," "codae," or whatever) and to which routine government business defers as authoritative. In short, we're not talking about the same thing at all.

What I was trying to get at is the distressing tendency of non-lawyer constitutional historians to treat what is properly commentary as authoritative. Current debates on the US Second Amendment are an excellent example (and Levy is one of the prime culprits): They treat post hoc rationalizations by some actors in the debate (while ignoring others) as definitive indications of intent, and then treat intent as the definitive indicator as meaning, without going back and reading the different versions of the text as text before jumping to their preconceived notions of "meaning." And this is just one particularly obvious example.

284 Not when the writer was also working through his bitterness at losing office during the first post-war elections; not when the writer was ordinarily three sheets to the wind while writing several years later, and at least a jib to the wind during many of the critical "meetings" recounted; not when the writer worshipped at the feet of the biggest idiot to make Field Marshall in the history of the British Empire (and that's up against some pretty stiff competition, including Haig). Bluntly, Churchill's history is very much a self-serving diatribe that he was able to get away with primarily because of the Official Secrets Act, not in spite of it; some of the alleged "conversations" he recalls, particularly in the first two volumes and the last volume, appear to have been made up from whole cloth.

This is my polite, unclassified take on it. Unfortunately, my NDA prohibits me from going into detail on some of the specific objections (such as his complete whitewash of exactly why Tobruk fell, and on the naval disaster at Singapore, which avoid placing any blame on several relatives).

31 Churchill is not useful as a primary source, as he was operating under the Official Secrets Act... and virtually everything for which one might refer to that six-volume series as a primary source was affected by that (e.g., Ultra).

The West Point Atlas series is notoriously polemical, because the post-Civil War material has/had a different set of editors than did the earlier material. Both the descriptions and the maps are at minimum questionable, particularly when there has been motion to the battle (that is, it's not a set-piece action) or significant logistics issues. The revisions during the 1950s and 1960s were, if anything, worse, because the prevailing wisdom of the time was that Real Soldiers Use Tanks... forgetting that every single extended conflict in the gunpowder era has been won by the side with the longer logistical tail.

44 I'm afraid that's classified. ;-)

98, 99 I'm afraid we'll have to agree to disagree, except when what we're dealing with is true primary sources (e.g., Kenyon's The Stuart Constitution) or is from a non-common-law jurisdiction (e.g., the non-English-speaking world).

New This will probably get lots of rotten produce thrown at me, because it's beloved of too damned many gurus on fiction:

Anything by Joseph Campbell putting forth the so-called "hero's journey" as a universal foundation for storytelling. It's bad anthropology, bad literary scholarship, and bad advice to writers.

Drabble, Margaret, ed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature (any edition) for anything after the death of Queen Vic. Some of it's ok, some of it's not, and only a specialist can really tell the difference.

Arguments about the exact progress of post-Civil War engagements involving the US military that rely upon the West Point Military Atlas series.

Churchill, Winston S. The Second World War.

Virtually any "constitutional history," particularly those by or citing Levy, that is not written by someone with a JD or LLB. Sorry, historians and political scientists, but procedural posture really does make a difference in understanding both constitutional texts and interpretation of constitutional texts, and y'all just don't have the background to understand it.

And here's one that I'll probably get in trouble for: any portion of Nimmer on Copyright that concerns itself with historical development. It's not a mark of shame, unfortunately — but it is unreliable for historical analysis (and even facts, but that's another issue entirely).

Comment statistics for C.E. Petit on the Making Light blog

Total: 63 comments. View all these comments on a single page.