Not Quite Children, Not Quite Adults

Monday’s New York Times reports that individual states and the federal government are currently working on new laws to address the problem of teenage runaways.  A couple of different problems with runaways have received public attention lately, and a fair amount of attention has been focused on teenage prostitution.  According to the Times, there is evidence that increasing numbers of runaway teens are turning to prostitution as the recession makes it difficult for them to obtain other, safer forms of employment.  Kids who are caught engaging in sex trafficking are often arrested and charged, but there is no evidence that this is having any positive effects on the larger problems that left the kids homeless and engaging in prostitution in the first place. 

The new initiatives discussed in the Times article, especially some policy guidelines being drafted by the National Conference of State Legislatures, are a big step in a positive direction. 

Continue ReadingNot Quite Children, Not Quite Adults

Chamber of Commerce Challenges Oregon Workplace Captive Audience Legislation

CaptiveThis year, Oregon became the first state to enact so-called Worker Freedom legislation that prohibits employers from holding mandatory, captive audience meetings during union organizational campaigns.

The law, which went into effect Jan. 1, 2010, has now been challenged on NLRA preemption and First Amendment speech grounds by the Chamber of Commerce.  The case is Associated Oregon Industries and Chamber of Commerce of the United States v. Brad Avakian and Laborers’ International Union of North America, Local No. 296 (complaint filed by Chamber).

I have written previously on why I believe the Oregon law is lawful and not subject to either a preemption or constitutional challenge in Toward the Viability of State-Based Legislation to Address Workplace Captive Audience Meetings in the United States. 

Continue ReadingChamber of Commerce Challenges Oregon Workplace Captive Audience Legislation

What We Talk About When We Talk About Editing

Random House logoLike Mike Madison, I noticed Jonathan Galassi’s op-ed in the New York Times on Sunday. Galassi—the president of Farrar, Strauss & Giroux—argues that ebook publishers who republish print books are committing at least a moral wrong by appropriating the work of the print publisher, even if they have the permission of the copyright owner. Mike views this argument, I take it, as one more sign of the “IP apocalypse,” but I have a somewhat different take: I see in Galassi’s op-ed a fascinating old copyright chestnut that has basically (and correctly) gone against Galassi.

The argument goes like this: the naive view of authorship is that authors sit down at their typewriters and churn out complete copyrighted works. But not only is this view incomplete on the input end—as just about everyone recognizes, artists slurp inspiration from all over the place—it’s also incomplete on the output end. Once an author (or a director, or songwriter) finishes a work, all sorts of things happen to it before it reaches the public as a final product, sometimes altering the content of that work substantially. Artists often chafe under the rule of editors, always forcing them to trim out the good stuff, but you can often tell which authors have gotten powerful enough to throw off their editors’ yoke, and not usually in a good way. “Doorstopper” is the term that comes to mind.

Galassi’s argument focuses on the creative nature of all that post-author authorship. And there’s a hidden suggestion in his op-ed—shouldn’t the publisher have some sort of proprietary rights over all the stuff it adds? The ebook publishers can distribute William Styron’s unedited manuscripts if they like, but not the version Random House put out.

Continue ReadingWhat We Talk About When We Talk About Editing