Worldcon Intellectual Property (W.I.P.) is the California non-profit corporation that holds the service marks of the World Science Fiction Society (www.wsfs.org) including the mark “Hugo Award”. In the midst of social media discussions about the continued viability of these marks, W.I.P. issued the following press release on January 30.
W.I.P. takes very seriously the recent complaints about the 2023 Hugo Award process and complaints about comments made by persons holding official positions in W.I.P. In connection with these concerns, W.I.P. announces the actions listed below. There may be other actions taken or to be taken that are not in this announcement.
- Dave McCarty has resigned as a Director of W.I.P.
- Kevin Standlee has resigned as Chair of the W.I.P. Board of Directors (BoD).
W.I.P. has censured or reprimanded the following persons, listed in alphabetic order, for the reason given:
- Dave McCarty – censured for his public comments that have led to harm of the goodwill and value of our marks and for actions of the Hugo Administration Committee of the Chengdu Worldcon that he presided over.
- Chen Shi – censured for actions of the Hugo Administration Committee of the Chengdu Worldcon that he presided over.
- Kevin Standlee – reprimanded for public comments that mistakenly led people to believe that we are not servicing our marks.
- Ben Yalow – censured for actions of the Hugo Administration Committee of the Chengdu Worldcon that he presided over.
Donald Eastlake has been elected Chair of the W.I.P. BoD.
The release also asks readers to note:
Each year’s World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) is run by a separate organization which administers the Hugo Awards for that year. The Chengdu 2023 Worldcon has asked that any specific questions about the administration of the 2023 Hugo Awards be sent to [email protected]. (For media enquiries on topics related to W.I.P. other than the specifics of the 2023 Hugo Awards, you may contact [email protected].)
[Based on a press release.]
Update: 01/30/2024: The membership of the WIP Board are the members of the WSFS Mark Protection Committee. Upon Dave McCarty’s resignation, the MPC elected Bruce Farr to fill that now-empty seat (which was up for election at the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting). Bruce was currently already serving as a non-voting Treasurer of the MPC and of WIP.
The members of the WSFS Mark Protection Committee as of January 30, 2024 are: Judith Bemis (Elected until 2026); Alan Bond (Appointed by Seattle 2025 until 2027); Joni Dashoff (Elected until 2026); Linda Deneroff (Secretary, Elected until 2024); Donald E. Eastlake 3rd (Chair Elected until 2024); David Ennis (Appointed by Buffalo NASFiC 2024 until 2026); Bruce Farr (Treasurer, Appointed by Board Resolution to fill vacancy until 2024); Alissa Wales (Appointed by Glasgow 2024 until 2026); Chris Rose (Appointed by Chicon 8 until 2024); Linda Ross-Mansfield (Appointed by Pemmi-Con/2023 NASFiC until 2025); Chen Shi (Appointed by Chengdu Worldcon 2023 until 2025); Kevin Standlee (Elected until 2025); Mike Willmoth (Elected until 2026); Nicholas Whyte (Elected until 2025); and Ben Yalow (Elected until 2025).
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
@Doctor Science
I suspect some of the fan analysts are being thrown off because they are not comfortable with the idea that a bunch of the issues were probably caused by the equivalent of a couple local clerks sticking their noses in, rather than some orchestrated national plan.
Nina: That’s pretty surprising that Reactor is behind the Guardian when it comes to reporting this fiasco.
Camestros Felapton: I’ve never known Ben Yalow to want to show any of the cards in his hand, even when they’re a lot better cards than these.
This is going to sound like a silly question…
Is there anybody who is legally bound by the WSFS constitution? Does a successful Worldcon bid committee sign a contract saying they will abide by it?
I don’t see anything in WIP’s bylaws saying that WSFS rules are their rules. The membership of WIP is people elected or appointed by the authority of the WSFS Business meeting, but that’s not really the same thing.
The reason I ask is, somewhere upthread, Brad Templeton mentioned “possible legal action”. But against who?
Jay Blanc brings up the idea that WIP is responsible for “goodwill of those trademarks”, which includes properly administering the Hugos so that people will respect them. This seems like a stretch. WIP has no control over the Hugos or Worldcon, so it can’t be responsible for the reputation of either. It’s only responsible for “registration and protection of the marks” (1.7.1), which sounds like it’s just about preventing infringement.
(Standlee’s reprimand is on the grounds of that duty, but not the others.)
I’m not trying to rules-lawyer this. I mean, I am, but with a point: it’s not clear to me that it does take two years and two Business Meetings to change how Worldcon works. If the Glasgow committee this year said “These site selection rules are broken, we’re doing it differently right now” — who would have standing to sue?
Andrew Plotkin: To answer your specific question, no, a successful bid committee doesn’t sign a contract.
The WSFS Constitution is designed for the use of a community that wants to provide good stewardship for an annual event. It’s not designed to provide legal consequences for a group that doesn’t do the promised good job of stewardship after they win the bid. And so far as that goes, the rules essentially spin off responsibility for the con to the administering committee because (in my opinion) nobody involved with the business meeting wants any possible grounds for asserting liability against them if there’s a problem.
@Andrew Plotkin — interesting question. Bids must file, including a list of rules their committee will operate under, but I must admit I don’t know if this list starts with “the WSFS constitution.” Perhaps it should. However, there’s a decent, but not watertight argument that by submitting a bid, you are implicitly agreeing to follow the rules of what you are bidding for. It might be good to make that explicit. If a write-in bid were to win, it might argue it made no such implicit agreement.
Like much of WSFS, this could be something that works because it works. (Just as having no restriction on slate nomination worked until somebody tried to exploit it.) It’s not an organization that is at all robust against overt attack. And more to the point, in some sense it seems to not want to be, though this happens at its peril sometimes.
Who could be sued? Well, directors of organizations have fiduciary duties to them. A director of an organization dedicated to protecting trademarks could be accused of failing to follow those fiduciary duties if they took actions to harm the marks, particularly for their own benefit.
It is not clear the WSFS constitution prohibits the exclusion of Hugo nominees for additional reasons like local law. It outlines how they can be excluded for various reasons like year of first publication, but IIRC it does not say the list of reasons is comprehensive. It simply says the committee shall determine the eligibility and list the 6 eligible nominees with the most points. So not too much there. I mean it’s pretty obvious that you’re not supposed to exclude work because you didn’t like it, but it doesn’t say that. Things like inserting fake numbers, or deliberately miscalculating the numbers would have a better claim of direct malfeasance.
As I read it, it is WSFS which is the entity that awards the Hugos, not the seated Worldcon. (This is something there has been much confusion about.) The seated worldcon does the administration and logistics but on behalf of WSFS, in the name of WSFS, not in its own name. The constitution says the Worldcon does everything else in its own name, except those things reserved to WSFS, which are picking Hugo winners (ie. nomination/voting/counting) and site selection, plus associated activities. This is why the confusion of trademarks is so odd. The local committee doesn’t licence the Hugo trademark, they use it in WSFS names, as WSFS volunteers effectively. (Well, they aren’t volunteers, they are bound to do the admin work by the constitution as part of being a con.) Your employees/agents/delegates/volunteers don’t licence a trademark from you, they use it as you, on your behalf.
Read sections 1.2.1, 1.6, 1.2.5 and 2.1 of the WSFS constitution. That WSFS picks the Hugo winners is literally the first rule in the constitution.
@Mike
Most people weren’t around for Constellation. Or don’t remember it.
@Andrew Plotkin:
I’m just speculating, but if there was a likely candidate to sue, that would be a bid committee which was disadvantaged by the decision.
Andrew Plotkin: it’s not clear to me that it does take two years and two Business Meetings to change how Worldcon works. If the Glasgow committee this year said “These site selection rules are broken, we’re doing it differently right now” — who would have standing to sue?
No one would need to sue.
A huge fan-driven shitstorm (much like the current Hugo shitstorm) would descend on a concom which said Fuck You to Worldcon members in that way, and the concom would end up tucking their tail between their legs, apologizing profusely, announcing that they would be following the rules, and begging everyone to move on so they could get back to planning their convention. The heads of a Division manager or possibly even Con Chair might roll as sacrifice to calm the raging mob.
Worldcon rules exist because Worldcon members thought they were important to have.
If you understood how much pain and aggro Business Meeting attendees go through to try to set up meaningful, workable rules and get the wording just right — it’s an arduous but important process — you would understand the massive community rage that would ensue if a Worldcon tried to just say Fuck You to its members. Witness how quickly Yalow’s name disappeared from Glasgow’s staff list.
Brad Templeton: I don’t know, did saying it in many hundreds more words improve on the point I made, or lose the thread altogether?
I think you vastly overestimate the residual goodwill that Worldcon can muster from the fanbase at large. You might have been right about this in 1994, maybe even 2004, but today? After several decades of actively alienating a good portion of potential attendees, I think a “screw the rules, we’re going to do Worldcon our own way” is going to attract a lot more positive and a lot less negative sentiment than you imagine.
The lawyers on Bluesky have mostly stopped posting in all-caps about WSFS and WIP because Standlee finally stopped posting through it. But now the accountants have had a look at WIP’s filings, and are screaming things like:
The WIP, a gift that keeps on giving.
We cool ones were… Constellation was great fun to attend, and it was my first Worldcon. Mike Walsh put on a teriffic convention.
Cally: It’s fun to watch lawyers melt down, but jeeze, with accountants it’s too easy.
@Mike I think I added a number of potential scenarios where somebody might (not assuredly, but might) make a legal claim. And I added a 2nd part about just who does the Hugos because I have seen a lot of confusion on that and legal responsibility.
In answer to the other question, I think that Glasgow could ask bidders to submit or amend their bids, to include in the section on their rules and structure, “This committee will conduct the worldcon, if awarded it, under the rules of the WSFS constitution as amended.” And it could then publish on the ballot whether a bid has made that pledge or not. Not that it’s going to matter much in a seemingly uncontested year.
Ah, yes, the “Gentleman’s Agreement” method of running a large organization and event. No actual continuity, accountability or enforcement just “Hey, these are the rules so follow the rules, because we’ll all be Big Mad if you don’t.” Followed by extreme flailing when something goes wrong, and we discover that there Wasn’t A Rule For That.
Maybe the oldschool libertarian Worldcon goers who haven’t changed their mind about How To Do Things since 1970 might throw a fit- but I think they vastly underestimate the number of fans who see real value in a re-evaluation of the structure of Worldcon and the Hugos. Fans who want Worldcon to be something enjoyable, relevant and inclusive for fandom under the age of 45, and have had enough of watching Worldcon shoot itself in the foot.
It would absolutely depend on what sort of “screw the rules” happened. It’s seemed to me that a decent chunk of of the 100-150 people who make it to the business meeting are very worried that the other 5000 attendees might be having the wrong sort of fun
Now I’m picturing a con throwing a formal AO3 “we each won 0.00000093% of a Hugo” fancy ball while Kevin Standlee desperately tries to block the door.
Actually that sounds like a great time. Need to provide proof of a published fan-fic to enter. Strict, if eclectic, dress code. Hand out prizes for best and worst Mary-sue to whoever is brave enough to accept them.
Scalzi can DJ
Brad Templeton: Sure, who wouldn’t prefer to read your made-up scenarios than a simple statement about the community culture based on real-life experience?
The talk about accountants made me think.
If 2023 ends up in the red, will the usual suspects need to bail them out?
Mike VanHelder: I think you vastly overestimate the residual goodwill that Worldcon can muster from the fanbase at large. You might have been right about this in 1994, maybe even 2004, but today? After several decades of actively alienating a good portion of potential attendees, I think a “screw the rules, we’re going to do Worldcon our own way” is going to attract a lot more positive and a lot less negative sentiment than you imagine.
And how well did that work for DisCon III in 2021?
I’m having slight trouble parsing this.
Dave Kyle said “you can’t sit here” to the people in the balcony at the Banquet (at Nycon II in 1956, which he chaired) then customary to give out the Hugos and at which GOH speeches were then given.
The people in the balcony, which was unoccupied, as I understand it, entered without having paid for a banquet ticket, but that sort of thing had allegedly been done in previous years without objection.
I’m not following what “tensions way back that gave rise to his famous saying” you are referring to. Tensions about Banquet tickets?
The conflation of “old school Worldcon goers” with “libertarians” is extremely weird and has relatively little basis in fact.
Speaking as someone else who was at CONSTELLATION in 1983 and vice-chaired the Worldcon four years earlier while wearing a whole bunch of different committee hats five years earlier. This year is the fiftieth anniversary of my first attended Worldcon.
“Old school Worldcon goers,” if we go way back, were far more likely to be communists (see the Futurians) than libertarians. Hell, libertarianism wasn’t even a word used in American politics outside of history and poly sci departments at universities until 1955 , decades after “old school Worldcon goers” had started old schooling. It surely did not predate Bill Buckley (who was not a libertarian, but who took to publishing some), save in the 19th century sense of “liberal,” which also meant something else back then.
Murray Rothbard didn’t start writing until the 1960s and Robert Nozick until the 1970s.
“Old school Worldcon goers” were around since 1939. There literally was no such thing as “libertarian fandom” until Samuel Edward Konkin The Thud and his ilk arrived thirty-plus years later, in the 1970s, at some sf conventions. And they were a minority so small they couldn’t fill a hotel room with a single bed. I mean, I witnessed this for myself at various East Coast conventions in the 1970s.
A lot of people who weren’t around in “the old days” surely have peculiar notions about times they didn’t actually witness.
The plurality, if not majority, of Worldcon attendees prior to this century were far more apt to be wishy-washy liberals, or mild leftists/progressives, than the smallish minority of right-wingers who didn’t start to coalesce beyond some Heinlein fans until Baen Books had been around for some time. Pick a specific year and we can discuss specifics.
But this is easily demonstrable just by looking through the fanzines and apa mailings of a given year and counting political comments/fan articles.
https://fanac.org/fanzines/
Ben Yalow does know what he’s doing. He knows the committee he led at the Chengdu Worldcon corrupted the Hugo Awards, disqualifying some nominees without explanation in violation of long-established WSFS precedent. He knows the voting data they published contains obviously manipulated numbers that cannot be trusted. He knows the damage Chengdu has done and was willingly at the center of it all.
He has offered no explanation and you think this means he deserves the benefit of the doubt?
Hell no. We deserve accountability. We deserve an apology. He deserves to never again hold a role in WSFS or a future Worldcon.
Tell all those totally-real-not-imaginary fans they can do that by spending two years drafting and passing amendments to the WSFS Constitution.
And if the Constitution doesn’t cover something, tell them if they plan a Worldcon bid, win a site selection vote, and become the leadership of that convention, they’ll have great powers over Worldcon for 12 months.
And tell them to say hi to my high school girlfriend Denise from Canada I met at summer camp, who was also non-imaginary.
Nothing says “inclusive” like yelling “get off the chair, you decrepit old spinsters”.
The reason WorldCon is a moveable feast organised by different people each year is that setting one up is a lot of very hard work, all unpaid. Several hundred people, some of whom have learned the logistics of putting up a WorldCon by helping out on five, or ten, or twenty previous ones, work very hard for up to five years, up to and including working their assess off during the convention, to make it possible. Because they cherish the community and because when the time comes when you see a huge clockwork mechanism you built start moving on its own, it’s fun and rewarding. There is institutional memory in long established cons, and there is turnover. Believe it or not there are people under 45 and even under 25, working WorldCons, including heading departments.
I have been to a new convention that was founded specifically to be inclusive, fun and relevant. It was a lot of fun indeed, although surprisingly young people can and do gatekeep with some ferocity. It lasted three years and then it dissolved because the commitee was made up of the same people who quite simply burned out.
Each WorldCon is independent and separate because typically the people who work on a bid stay burned out for years afterwards, not to evade responsibility or accountability.
For Ghu’s sake, Gary. Reading the whole three paragraphs in context makes it clear that the word does not refer to a larger-L, political libertarianism, but is supposed to mean (perhaps unfortunately chosen, I can concede that) “ultra-liberal, free-for-all, with lack of formal written and consistently endorsed rules, just an unwritten social contract constantly implicitly renegotiated only from a vague general principle”.
Good point. e.g. in this quote from George Orwell from 1948 he most definitely doesn’t mean Ayn Rand fans
“The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.” https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Quotes
@Andrew Plotkin:
Let me put this as simply as possible. And, to be clear, this is my assessment of the situation, not advice for anyone on what to do about it (beyond getting good counsel). I’m basing this more on public reports than public remarks at this point:
For various reasons, a decision was made to address some of the (mostly non-American) issues created by having an unincorporated literary society own trademarks by having ownership transferred to a 501(c)(3). This was almost certainly a good-faith decision intended to address one real, but relatively minor, issue. Which it did.
But doing that literally involved transferring both the marks and the goodwill to the 501(c)(3). Says so right on the paperwork filed with the trademark office. And that created other legal obligations that the MPC may or may not have been aware of, some of which involve doing things that may or may not be beyond the MPC’s authority. Which is a substantial issue.
To put it another way – they saw a beaver gnawing at the supports for their bridge, realized that this was a problem, and addressed the problem. By shooting the beaver with a howitzer. Credit where due, that beaver is definitely gone. But…
I get the impression there’s some confusion about what the issue is with the Hugo trademark and Kevin Standlee. I’m not a lawyer, but I did sit through all of Mike Dunford’s hour-long stream about the trademark issue and I think I got the gist of it.
The connection to the Chengdu Worldcon is only that the events there focused a lot of attention on what kind of quality control, if any, there was on the Hugo awards. A US trademark, unlike a copyright, is intended to protect the consumer from being duped into buying counterfeit goods believing them to be the genuine item. It is meant to be a kind of guarantee of quality, or at least of source. Canned soda with the Coca-Cola trademark on it can be expected to contain genuine Coca-Cola, not Pepsi or Tab or RC cola or root beer. But in order for the trademark to have legal meaning, the holder of it must defend its use, which means they have a responsibility to shut down anyone who is using their trademark without guaranteeing official quality.
The issue with Kevin Standlee arose because he began interacting on Bluesky with some lawyers who were inquiring about what action might be taken by the Hugo trademark holders against the Hugo award presenters in Chengdu, on the grounds that the Hugo awards they had given out did not meet with the quality standards implied by the trademark, due to the unexplained serious irregularities with the nominee list and the final voting counts. Kevin made a couple of public statements to the effect that the WIP did not have the ability to take action against the Chengdu Hugo presenters and invalidate the awards.This is a legally very risky statement to make, as you are essentially saying that you have no way of enforcing the quality guarantee that your trademark is supposed to carry. And a trademark that can’t or won’t be enforced does not actually count as a trademark in the legal sense. It would be akin to Coca-Cola discovering that someone is selling Tab in Coca-Cola cans, and instead of unleashing the wrath of Coke on the fraudsters, the Coca-Cola company just shrugs and says there is nothing they can or will do about the situation. Under those circumstances they have admitted that they have either no ability, or no willingness, or both, to keep somebody from defrauding consumers by employing Coca-Cola’s trademark on non-Coca-Cola products. As such, it is legally no longer considered to be a trademark.
So, Kevin admitting in a quite public forum that the WIP had no way of retracting permission to use the Hugo trademark on the grounds that the process of choosing the award winners was tampered with could be taken as an open admission that the Hugo trademark is worthless and therefore is no longer legally a trademark.
I find it mildly ironic that this issue came to light with regard to the Chengdu Hugos, because setting aside the very disturbing irregularities in the voting, I have not heard anyone suggest that the award winners at Chengdu were in any way unworthy. This is in contrast to the last big Hugo kerfuffle, where the Puppies followed the voting rules, but used slating to push some truly execrable works onto the Hugo shortlist.
@Maytree
” It would be akin to Coca-Cola discovering that someone is selling Tab in Coca-Cola cans, and instead of unleashing the wrath of Coke on the fraudsters, the Coca-Cola company just shrugs and says there is nothing they can or will do about the situation.”
China needs to be in the analogy equation. China is a leading exporter of counterfeit goods, and its markets are absolutely flooded with fakes. Western brands can do very little about it, and many don’t try. But their marks are not in question, because it’s understood that China is an intellectual property bad actor. If a Chinese vendor is taking Tab and putting it in Coca-Cola cans somewhere in China, I doubt Coca-Cola will spend much time worrying about it.
So long as WIP has acted to protect the mark in most other cases (which Standlee says they have done), their acknowledging a practical inability to deal with one case in China doesn’t strike me as grounds to consider the mark abandoned except, maybe possibly, in China.
The best explanation I can think of for Goodwill is the following:
One of the most well protected and established trademarks is the Big Mac.
You almost certainly not only know what a Big Mac is, there’s a significant chance you have the song describing it embedded into your memory. “Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, and a sesame seed bun.” Some of you are right now cussing me out for ear worming you with that song.
The trademark is the phrase “Big Mac”. The goodwill of that trademark is that description everyone knows of what a Big Mac is.
Now imagine one day you go into a McDonalds franchise, and order a Big Mac. They hand you a whole rotisserie chicken. “This isn’t what I ordered!” you say, and they reply “Oh, we’re a special franchise, we can do what we want. So our Big Mac is a whole rotisserie chicken.” So you write to the McDonalds corporation complaining about this Rogue Rotisserie Chicken Franchise.
At this point McDonalds can do one of two things…
1) They come down on that franchise owner with a hoard of valkyries and smite them from the face of the earth as they deserve.
2) Nothing, and just hope for some good outcome from not being in control of their franchisees.
If they pick option 2, then something magical happens. Picking 2 is saying “Well, we know about these guys, and yes they are under our authority as franchisers of our brands, but we’re just not going to do anything about it.”
Which means that the phrase Big Mac suddenly includes “Rotisserie chickens or what ever the hell they decide to serve you”. But worse, because MacDonalds corporate say they have no control over what a Big Mac means, the “good will” of the thing that used to be a Big Mac gets severed off from the Trademark.
You may then wonder, what happened to the Trademark? It becomes what’s called a “Bare Trademark”, a Trademark that is not associated with any defined service or product.
And here something magical happens. Because if at any point the law examines a “Bare Trademark”, it vanishes. Like someone opening the curtains in Dracula’s castle, the law says “The trademark only exists to protect the good will, with the good will abandoned, the trademark doesn’t exist any more.”
Now, how does this apply to what Standlee kept saying…
Well, what he was saying was that all Worldcons are independent entities to whom they just franchised the trademarks.
And that as independent entities, they could do what ever they want with the Hugo Awards.
Presumably, including turning them into Rotisserie Chickens.
I believe you are deeply over reacting.
@Maytree
I avoided mentioning most of it in my coverage, but I suggest you avoid looking at Bilibli, Douban, WeChat, etc posts/videos about The Space/Time Painter.
Western authors getting aggrieved at being review-bombed on Goodreads don’t know how lucky they are 🙁
[This statement is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect the official position of any entity of which I am or ever have been a member, officer, or employee.]
It appears to me that way too many people seem to think that I am the President of WSFS and King of All Worldcons, and thus every word I ever say is Holy Writ. While this is one of the reasons I resigned as Chair of WIP/MPC, it appears to me that there are still people convinced that I’m the Last Word About WSFS. Consequently, I am now very concerned about saying anything about anything having to do with WSFS, in case there are still people who choose to take my words as an Official Statement of Policy from WSFS Inc. or something like that. And I really would like not to have to hedge everything I ever say with the statements that are bracketing this post, because it’s a hassle for me and an annoyance to those having to wade through it.
[This statement was my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect the official position of any entity of which I am or ever have been a member, officer, or employee.]
Pingback: Binary System Podcast #396 – Lore Olympus episode 262 and 263, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3, and The Oscar Nominations | Pixelated Geek
A problem happens with the Hugos.
People say the King of WSFS should fix this problem.
Kevin says there is no King of WSFS.
People say WSFS is shockingly unorganized, they have it on authority of the King of WSFS himself.
I swear to God it is like watching someone repeatedly stick their tongue in an electrical outlet, look very confused why they are being electrocuted, and then immediately stick their tongue in an electrical outlet again.
Kevin, you should be very concerned about saying anything about anything having to do with WSFS. As in, you should not be doing it. At all.
Whether or not you have resigned as chair of the Mark Protection Committee, you are still a director of the board of Worldcon Intellectual Property. You are a director of the board of a nonprofit entity, who is making multiple admissions against the interest of the nonprofit entity, based on his personal knowledge, information, and belief. You cannot disclaim away the exposure this creates for WIP. It does not matter if you are making an “Official Statement of Policy” or not. The fact you are a director of the nonprofit entity, have the knowledge of the operations of the nonprofit entity, and are speaking about the operations of the nonprofit entity makes those statements admissible whether or not you say any specific magic words and a disclaimer does not change this fact.
Stop. Talking. About. WSFS. Or don’t! I’m not the boss of you! But there’s only so much people can do to keep you from getting electrocuted when you’re the one who keeps waving your tongue at every outlet you pass!
(Just as a minor point, the tag wranglers and coders and translators and artists and collection makers and bookmarkers and kudos lurkers and commenters and podfic recorders and writers and volunteer coordinators are all equal participants to AO3. No proof of fanfic required.)
(Also, whatever one thinks of the communications immediately adjacent to AO3s win, IMO Kevin Standlee has overall been very supportive of transformative works fandom getting a seat at the Worldcon party.)
rahaeli said:
This is beginning to sound like the “Sit down, John” refrain from
We don’t talk about WSFS, no, no
I’m reminded of https://imgur.com/a/JVekunI
@Elio M. García, Jr.: -________-”
@Elio M Garcia
I gather you don’t ever go shopping. For anything.
It is not at all clear to me that the Worldcon is a “franchisee” of WSFS who licences its marks, like a Coca Cola bottler. WSFS constitution 1.2.1, the very first rule, says that picking the winners of the Hugos is done by WSFS (and 1.2.5 says associated activities are also the province of WSFS.) Section 1.6 says the seated worldcon acts as its own entity, except in those things reserved to WSFS (ie. the Hugos which are reserved to WSFS in 1.2.) Section 2.1 requires the convention to administer the Hugos, but as I see it, that means that Hugos come from WSFS, not the worldcon, and the worldcon acts as WSFS’ agent or delegate, handling the logistics of them.
I presume WSFS has an agreement with WIP which gives it the right to use the marks it formerly owned, like Hugo Award. WSFS gives out the hugos, not the individual conventions. When you delegate a task to an agent/employee/volunteer, they don’t need or get a licence to use your trademarks, they use them as you, in your name.
WSFS picked Chengdu to run the convention, and said, “OK Chengdu, now run a con and manage our Hugo awards for us.”
It’s different for the Worldcon mark, possibly. The constitution says the local convention acts as its own entity in all the matters not reserved to WSFS. (The matters reserved to WSFS are Hugos, site selection, and being the membership of the convention.) So when it has panels and opening ceremonies it is acting as its own independent entity.
So when you delegate a task to somebody, and they fuck it up and damage your trademarks you can’t sue them for TM infringement. You can fire them or sue them or do the other things you can do to delegates/volunteers/employees. Issue is, WSFS can’t really fire a worldcon concom after appointing them, they serve their one year term and are replaced (which has already happened.) It’s more like a politician, whom the electorate can’t recall, so they can only just fail to re-elect them, except the term is just one year. WSFS is not a corporation, it’s a society of people, and it is the membership of the worldcon it selected, so it has the powers of that membership, but those are also meagre.
WSFS can act against its own appointees (such as Mark Protection Committee) if they were among the volunteers who, in volunteering for the Worldcon committee, acted against the rules of WSFS. Though it’s not known to me if it can actually fire them. It can not re-elect them.
Perhaps this is’t the best choice of structure. But I don’t think it’s a franchising/licencing structure. So theories about naked licencing don’t really apply in that case.
@Brad Templeton
It is a literal franchise. The operator of each Worldcon is an independent company that is explicitly not under direct control of the WSFS as a direct employee or contractor. They are not appointees of WSFS, they are a company (formally incorporated or not) that won a bid to operate a Worldcon.
And no, referral to “What the WSFS constitution says” does not trump what regulators, the courts and law says. It doesn’t matter that you think this is a “unique situation”, it’s facially a franchise.
The arguments that they’re not franchises, and that they are literal employees or appointed entities within WSFS… Well, that opens up a whole lot of problems, and even worse implications as to how WIP would be treated and further accounting and tax headaches.
Brad Templeton
[The opinions, and bad joke, are my personal commentary, and have nothing to do with reality and are not the opinions of anyone else in this thread. I also certify that there are no electrical outlets within 200 feet]
I think we can all agree that the horse has left this plane of existence and the percussive experiment can be concluded.
[What I said up there]
This only works if you pronounce it “Wisfuss,” but…
We don’t talk about WSFS, no no no
We don’t talk about WSFS
But!
It was Hugo nom day
(It was Hugo nom day)
We were running numbers
and there wasn’t much good to be found
Standlee stops by with a glint in his eye
(Trademark!)
You filking this thing or am I?
(Sorry, sorry, please go on)
Standlee says, “we can’t enforce…”
(Why did he say it?)
The lawyers are aghast, of course
(That’s not how you play it)
And MPC did not endorse
(Had to resign but nevermind…)
We don’t talk about WSFS, no no no
We don’t talk about WSFS
Hey, grew to live in fear of what the lawyers might find next
Feeling like the whole organization’s been hexed
I associate it with the sight of scathing posts
(Tsk tsk tsk)
It’s a heavy job sieving through this murk
Implicit contract no longer seems to work
Can’t rely on the Old SMOFs Network
Who’s gonna do the work?
M-P-C, taken aback
People still mad about the AO3 attack
How can you enforce this implicit contract?
Yeah, the lawyers scream and break into teams
(Hey)
We don’t talk about WSFS, no no no
We don’t talk about WSFS
We never should have asked about WSFS, no no no
Why did we talk about WSFS?
(I put that song in my head for the next year doing this, so if you’re going to complain, believe me, I have already been punished.)
Standing-O!
Bravo!
@Jay, earlier comments suggest there is no contract between WSFS and the committee it selects to operate the Worldcon, so it’s not clear that it is so formally a franchise. The closest thing to the terms of the deal is laid out in the constitution, which tells the worldcon how to do a number of the things it does. And it says, quite explicitly, that the worldcon acts as an independent entity (and perhaps thus a franchisee) except in the areas reserved to WSFS, which are spelled out in 1.2.
If there were ever a lawsuit over it, perhaps people would argue whether the constitution sets out the terms of the arrangement or not — certainly it always has up to now, and fairly precisely. Even for Chengdu. I am not sure you, or I, or anybody can firmly predict the results of such a suit. I am just describing the way the constitution outlines it.
I also think — but would be curious for evidence to the contrary — that if you were to ask all players in this space, do you think WSFS awards the Hugos, holding a convention to administer them, or do you think each individual convention awards the Hugos under licence from WSFS, I get a stronger sense for the former. Did people win a WSFS Hugo (at Chengdu) or did they win a Chengu Hugo, name of award under licence from WSFS? The constitution says the former, though I am sure there are people who have treated it both ways.
The hypothetical under discussion here is some party might get sued for infringement of the Hugo mark by WIP, and their defence would be, “You abandoned this mark by naked licencing to all those worldcons.” I don’t think that would be a good strategy as they would need both a ruling that the cons aren’t acting in the name of WSFS when they use the mark, and a ruling that WSFS abandoned its duties to monitor and control use of the mark, even though they have a committee whose only job is to do that, and it attends every convention. I would not want to risk such a strategy.