266 thoughts on “Worldcon Intellectual Property Announces Censure of McCarty, Chen Shi and Yalow; McCarty Resigns; Eastlake Succeeds Standlee as Chair of B.O.D.”

1. @Ed Green

   I know stuff, but that doesn’t translate to being able to do it.

   You aren’t a lawyer. We got in this situation because non-lawyers were talking.

   Exactly. I edit a lot of electrical engineering manuscripts (including articles on microwaves, robotics, control systems, etc.) I’ve become familiar with a lot of concepts and terms. But that doesn’t mean I can build a working microwave antenna.

2. @Mike Glyer

   It’s great that you’re aware of the concept of caselaw. Then you also know that the jurisdiction in which action is brought affects the weight to be given precedent decisions.

   There is no written agreement between WSFS, WIP or any Worldcon that California will be the forum to resolve any disputes. This means that for US Worldcons not held in California you’d need to argue in court that you can remove it to California, and you’d need to show significant grounds and the court may disagree with you. For worldwide Worldcons, you’d have to navigate international jurisdictions before even having the chance to argue that only Californian law applies, and the court is very very likely to disagree with you. Even if there were a written clause requiring disputes to be handled under Californian law, that does not entirely preclude another jurisdiction’s court saying they disagree.

   Plus, for such things as interstate commerce, the FTC might opine that the Federal Courts have jurisdiction. Let’s look at how they define Franchise.

   Franchise means any continuing commercial relationship or arrangement, whatever it may be called, in which the terms of the offer or contract specify, or the franchise seller promises or represents, orally or in writing, that:

   (1) The franchisee will *obtain the right to operate a business that is identified or associated with the franchisor’s trademark*, or to offer, sell, or distribute goods, services, or commodities that are identified or associated with the franchisor’s trademark;

   (2) The franchisor will exert or has authority to exert a significant degree of control over the franchisee’s method of operation, or *provide significant assistance* in the franchisee’s method of operation; and

   (3) As a condition of obtaining or commencing operation of the franchise, the franchisee makes a required payment or *commits to make a required payment* to the franchisor or its affiliate.

   (emphasis my own)

   The implicit licence from WIP and permission to operate a Worldcon and Hugo Award constitutes part 1, the provision of funds from prior subsidies and guidelines and rules of practice in the WSFS constitution is part 2, and the commitment to return any subsidy back to WSFS as a whole is part 3.

   For the purposes of US Federal Law, in my non-lawyer opinion, the relationship between WIP/WSFS and Worldcons is between Franchiser, Affiliate and Franchisee.

3. Doctor Science: Balloon-Juice, which is also a wordpress blog, has a Pie Filter to turn the commenter of your choice into delicious pie.

   Do you have a link to a Dunning-Kruger blocker? That would be really helpful.

4. Quick vote.

   Will those of you who wish to continue penning the epic “1776” (fannish edition) please say aye.

   Will those of you who wish to continue to slice and dice the word franchise please say franchise.

5. @Ed Green

   Sorry, I’m busy rewatching Groundhog Day. I might do it again tomorrow.

6. Sorry, I’m busy rewatching Groundhog Day. I might do it again tomorrow.

   Doing something over and over?

   I’ll mark you down as “franchise”.

7. Maryland says Aye!

8. Aye! (Hi, Ed: long time not seen)

9. The implicit licence from WIP and permission to operate a Worldcon and Hugo Award constitutes part 1, the provision of funds from prior subsidies and guidelines and rules of practice in the WSFS constitution is part 2, and the commitment to return any subsidy back to WSFS as a whole is part 3.

   Except, you idiot, there is no subsidy going from the unincorporated literary society WSFS to the Worldcon in question, nor is there any payment from that Worldcon back to WSFS.

   As treasurer of Renovation (the 2011 Worldcon), I can assure you that we neither received or made any such payments.

10. My high school music teacher decided to do a school production of 1776 in 1976.

    It never happened, because he couldn’t find enough guys to fill in the roles. At least back then, there were a lot more theater girls than theater guys. A couple of years earlier, Civic Theater (the community theater) had had a similar problem; they wound up casting a high-school girl (in drag) to sing “Momma, Look Sharp”.

11. I keep trying to make sense of this conversation but can’t.

12. @John Lorentz

    Except, you idiot, there is no subsidy going from the unincorporated literary society WSFS to the Worldcon in question, nor is there any payment from that Worldcon back to WSFS.

    As treasurer of Renovation (the 2011 Worldcon), I can assure you that we neither received or made any such payments.

    sigh Thank you for your polite and authoritative response. However, I have some notes in regards to payments received and payments mad per WSFS Section 2.7 and 2.9.3 after looking at your financial report.

    You received $34,560 in voting fees from the WSFS.
    You received $67,377 in pass-along from prior Worldcons.
    You paid $1,980 in “MPC Dues”.
    You returned an approximated $27,000 in Site Selection Vote Fees.
    You returned $53,000 in immediate surplus to WSFS affiliates Chicon 7 and Lone Star Con 3.
    You returned $5,500 in residual surplus to the WSFS affiliates WIP and LonCon 3.

    Are you absolutely sure you can assure me that no such payments to or receipts from WSFS affiliates exist?

13. Is there any way in WordPress to implement a kill filter, like we used to use for Usenet?

    The Stylish extension for Chrome can be used with this script on UserStyles to hide comments by specific users here. It is implemented as a CSS stylesheet.

    https://userstyles.org/styles/118122/aan-s-plonk-file-script

14. Jay Blanc: Sure, Federal law, and Federal Trade Commission regulations. You should be ashamed for quoting bits of regulations and leaving out the part that cuts the floor from under you.

    Here’s your Part 3:

    (3) As a condition of obtaining or commencing operation of the franchise, the franchisee makes a required payment or commits to make a required payment to the franchisor or its affiliate.

    It comes from a set of Federal regulations that devotes a lot of discussion to what constitutes a “required payment” — and it includes several exemptions that cause a business arrangement to be completely kicked out from being governed by these regulations.

    § 436.8 Exemptions.
    (a) The provisions of part 436 shall
    not apply if the franchisor can establish any of the following:
    (1) The total of the required payments, or commitments to make a required payment, to the franchisor or an
    affiliate that are made any time from before to within six months after commencing operation of the franchisee’s
    business is less than $615.

    Individual Worldcons are not required to make payments to WSFS or WIP in the first six months after commencing operations. Zero is less than $615.

    In short, it is bogus to try and graft your argument about returning money back to WSFS at the end onto these regulations, because the regulations can’t apply to the arrangement. There is no up front payment required.

    I have better things to do with my time than point out the defects in your bad faith arguments. Congratulations on your retirement from the practice of law here at File 770.

15. New York abstains, courteously.

    Back in the mists of time, at the Millennium Philcon business meeting, there was a motion for “someone open up a window.” The room had no windows.

16. Mr. President, have you ever been present at a meeting of the New York legislature?

    They speak very fast and very loud, and nobody listens to anybody else, with the result that nothing ever gets done.

17. I find it interesting that the method to collect money for someone (who in this case is not know in the time of collection) is something to call a paying for a francise. It seems to me a pretty normal think (minus that the vote to whom it should go is after the collecting).
    Also the passing fees is done between worldcons so in the anathology from one McDonalds to another. (This is the most famous francise)
    Which leaves

    You paid $1,980 in “MPC Dues”

    . This I can’t argue about, because I don’t know enough.

    I am sorry that I can’t give Mike Dunford a response because I am not an expert enough on the constitution.

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19. It bears note here that franchises are not the whole of IP licensing. Elsewhere I’m following discussion that includes relationships between Hasbro and various business that do various things with D&D IP, and none of their deals appease to be most usefully described as franchising. There’s a whole universe of terminology for the field that I don’t begin to grok in fullness, but I can tell it’s much more an ecosystem than a single species.

20. The WSFS Constitution is not a legal contract with anyone or any entity, and shouldn’t be confused with a legal contract.

21. @Camestros: IANAL, but I was a huge fan of the original Perry Mason television series starring Raymond Burr, so I’m fully qualified to weigh in.

    Bear with me, this will get complicated: there will be briefs, boxers, torts, tortes (chocolate and Linzer), appeals to reason, common sense, and Ghu, objections (overturned, sustained, and just sort of hummed in the background), motions to dismiss, motions to adjourn, and motions to Wave Your Hands in the Air Like You Just Don’t Care, and finally and irrevocably, invocation of the Law of the Sea, aka Release of the Kraken.

22. By the way, am I the only one here who read the (most recent of) https://www.wsfs.org/committees/mark-protection-committee/mpc-minutes/ ?
    Some bits seem to have some relevance to this discussion, and some I don’t understand. (What is “Lonestar search”, for example?)

23. By the way, am I the only one here who has read the (most recent of) the MPC/WIP Minutes? (For some ironic reason, the spamfilter won’t let me link the WSFS website.)
    Some bits seem to cast some light on this discussion, and some I don’t understand. (What is “Lonestar search”, for example?)

24. Jan Vanek jr: What is “Lonestar search”, for example?

    That’s a typo. They have obtained Tradmark registration for the first time for the Lodestar Award, and they had to do marks searches first to find what any prior claims might be.

25. Two versions of this posted a total of five times.

26. My apologies. feel free to delete the latter.

27. I keep trying to make sense of this conversation but can’t.

    Forget it, Cam. It’s Hugotown.

28. Someone Comes To Hugotown, Someone Leaves Hugotown

29. EPHscape from HugoTown!

30. @Bruce Baugh
    I believe the discussion has focused on franchises because the various IP lawyers gawking at this see that as the best possible outcome for the WSFS. There isn’t an unlimited number of business relationships the law recognizes, and it’s not necessarily choose your own. The feeling seems to be that if this ever ends up in court WSFS better hope the court decides this looks sufficiently like a franchise because the other options have far fewer routes to happy outcomes.

    Some of the other choices are the sorts of extremely strict and clearly laid out licensing that people like Hasbro and Disney employ when third parties want to use their IP. The sort of strict licensing with overseeing authority that WSFS famously doesn’t employ. From some of the discussion threads I gather that if the court decides that’s the form that WSFS is doing badly things will turn out worse than if they treat WSFS as an incompetent franchiser.

31. Marshall Ryan Maresca said:

    Forget it, Cam. It’s Hugotown.

    It’s my IP!
    slap
    It’s my franchise!
    slap
    It’s my IP!
    SLAP
    It’s my franchise and my IP!

32. Are you absolutely sure you can assure me that no such payments to or receipts from WSFS affiliates exist?

    There is no such thing as a WSFS “affiliate”. Each Worldcon is a separate legal entity.

    The site selection fees paid in 2009 was part of the site selection were taken by Anticipation in the name of the 69th Worldcon (i.e. Renovation) and passed on to us (Renovation)–not WSFS. It’s the same for the site selection fees we took in as part of the 2013 site selection–they were passed directily on to LoneStarCOn 3, not WSFS.

    The passlong funds we received from prior Worldcons, were donations from them, just as the passalong funds we sent to Chicon, LoneStarCon and LonCon were donations from Renovations surplus.

    The “MPC Dues” were a donation to the Mark Protection Committee and not a requirement of any agreement. (We also made donations to libraries, science fiction groups and other entities from our surplus. We had no contractual obligation to “WSFS”.)

    Twist the words all you want–it doesn’t mean that you’re stating any actual facts.

33. Way Down Hugotown

34. @PhilRM

    You forgot tree law. From what I understand, tree law is the most arcane utterances a lawyer has ever heard of. Even grizzled lawyers shake at the invocation of tree law.

35. @JJ:

    Do you have a link to a Dunning-Kruger blocker?

    Are you serious? There’d hardly be any Internet left.

36. There has been a lot of discussion about how it would take multiple WSFS business meetings to change things, and if you look at the minutes of the Mark Protection Committee they talk about how they can’t do anything but ask for donations from the conventions for funding…

    And as near as I can tell, exactly none of that is true.

    The service marks to the Hugo Awards (and related service marks) are held by Worldcon Intellectual Property. Worldcon Intellectual Property could do lots of things (including demanding licensing fees for the right to issue the Hugos in the first place, demanding the right to audit all ballots before certification, and pulling the license if standards were not met).

    Ahh, you say knowingly, but Worldcon Intellectual Property is controlled by the WSFS, so it can’t do any of that without the business meeting blessing it. And anyway, the actual conventions are the entities that handle all that.

    And, sort of. The WIP bylaws declare that the Directors are the members of the Mark Protection Committee of the WSFS (plus up to one appointed Director if no one on the MPC lives in California).

    Of course, the WIP bylaws also state that they can be amended or replaced by a 2/3 vote of the Directors (and as long as the text of the proposal is included with the declaration of a special meeting, that is still the standard even outside the annual meeting).

    So, the WIP could unilaterally make changes. And if they were worried about being overruled at the business meeting, well, all it takes is 2/3 of the MPC to literally seize control of the Hugo awards (and all related marks).

37. “Welcome back my fen,
    To the slog that never ends.
    We’re so sad that you attend,
    Pick a side, pick a side.”

    With apologies to EPH: Emerson, Palmer, and Hugo

38. It’s like Whack-An-Amateur-Hugo-Lawyer-Mole around here. You get rid of one, and another one pops up. <sigh>

39. Brad Templeton, Joshua K and Zimozi Natsuco

    cc Lurkertype

    @JoshuaK the most obvious metric around is the Reporters sans frontières World Press Freedom Index.

    Yes, there are a number of freedom and democracy indices.

    wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices

    Some have recommended their incorporation into the WSFS rules to avoid repressive countries like China and homophobic nations like Uganda host the Worldcon

    concatenation.org/news/news9~22.html#uganda

    Here is a list of seated Worldcons and their respective LGBTQAI+ freedom percentages (Equaldex.com)

    concatenation.org/news/news9~23.html#worldcon-bids

    Looks like anything above 70% should be acceptable to most though, given recent current
    events Tel Aviv in 2027 will be problematic?

40. Andrew Plotkin

    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?

    Not as far as I can see. Even Glasgow 2024 is deliberately (two of us have separately contacted them) ignoring the rules as noted in our recent seasonal page editorial.

    And this despite 1.8.1: The Mark Protection Committee shall consist of:
    (1) One (1) member appointed to serve at the pleasure of each future selected Worldcon Committee and each of the two (2) immediately preceding Worldcon Committees

    Glasgow’s Alissa Wales being by Glasgow 2024.

    Looks like the WSFS constitution (such as 1.5.2) and Business Meeting’s clarifications such as Helsinki, Finland, can be safely ignored.

    Some might consider this specific example trivial. However, if you cannot even get the little things right, then what chance getting the big things right?

41. “Welcome back my Fen,
    To the slog that never ends.
    We’re so sad that you attend,
    Pick a side, pick a side.”

    With apologies to EPH: Emerson, Palmer and Hugo.

42. though, given recent current
    events Tel Aviv in 2027 will be problematic?

    I think everybody would breathe a huge sigh of relief if the 2027 Tel Aviv bid was quietly shelved before it plunges all of fandom in the Mother of All Fandom Wars. Maybe awaiting a time when the prospect for the future of the region looks a bit rosier? I for one would be thrilled to support a bid in the People’s Federal Republic of Israel/Palestine.

43. Sarcasm is all well and good, but please, enlighten me.

    What mechanism have I missed that protects against the WIP taking absolute authority over the Hugo Awards and their administration other than the goodwill of the Directors?

44. Dave Weinstein: W.I.P. now holds and controls the service marks that have been transferred to it. Before it existed, people asked, “What keeps a group from packing the Business Meeting two years in a row and voting for X to be done with the Hugo Awards.” And “What happens when a Worldcon goes broke, can creditors come after the WSFS marks?” Whether W.I.P. is an effective legal strategy against the latter two problems, those are some of the questions people were thinking about when the marks were transferred to W.I.P. To answer your question, I don’t think there is a “mechanism” here to stop the bad result you posed, instead, what protects against that happening is that the Business Meeting elects the MPC who are the directors of W.I.P. Those people are elected based on their perceived experience and trustworthiness. If individuals fail their responsibility in some way, it is expected the majority will correct their actions. That’s the first level of protection.

    Of course, you have to consider that even if there was a rules-based “mechanism” that provided recourse if the W.I.P. fails its trust, that would also be administered by human beings and would also be imperfect.

45. Right, the combination of the Business Meeting and the selected Worldcon committees select the MPC members.

    (Obviously, this is not entirely perfect, or we wouldn’t have this thread in the first place)

    But the “Board of Directors of the WIP are made up of the members of the MPC” is only a rule because the Board of the WIP says it is. The board (or rather, a 2/3 majority of the board) could change that at any time.

    My point here is that at the end of the day, the actual owners and the people with full control are the members of the WIP Board. The deferral to the Business Meeting and the notion that you have to wait for multiple Business Meetings to make Hugo related changes, or that you can’t pull the marks from a convention if you don’t like what they are doing, that is all because the current WIP Board doesn’t choose to exercise that power.

    To put it another way, if someone tried to take over the Hugos by stacking the WIP Board rather than by stacking the ballots, they would win.

46. @Dave Weinstein: Stacking the WIP board would be a long-term project. If you just control the committees for all the Worldcon and NASFiC conventions for several years in a row, then you would get the appointed directors. You should also have your hundreds of minions pack the Business Meeting for several years in a row, so you get the elected directors. I think you should go for it! But first, you need to stop posting about it here. A long-term takeover like this requires secrecy.

47. Dave Weinstein: The rules still allow Worldcon members to attend Business Meetings and vote. Do you think that needs to be stopped? What’s your replacement plan?

48. Mike Glyer: Just pointing out that at the end of the day, the Business Meeting only has any say in the Hugos because the WIP has decided to let it. The damage, such as it is, is already done.

    But that also means that things could be fixed in faster than two years, if the WIP wanted to address them, and then if they didn’t change the bylaws, the Business Meeting could override them by voting in new Directors over time.

49. All this talk of law and franchises and contracts and who can legally do what are missing the entire point of why Worldcon exists.

    Worldcon does not exist to give out Hugos. Hugos weren’t invented until the Philcon II, 11th Worldcon in 1953 and made permanent in 1955, after skipping a year.

    Worldcon was first held in 1939, following plans made at more local sf cons going back to 1937.

    The point was and has always been to provide a place for people active in fandom to convene and party and see each other and enjoy each others’ company.

    Everything else is secondary.

    And if Worldcon simply becomes a matter of “franchises” and contracts and legal obligations, beyond the obvious extent to which it is already bound by law, it will have lost its point and no longer be Worldcon.

    That this might actually happen does not make this untrue.

    I have no doubt that the traditional view of fans of Worldcon as “a gathering of the tribes”/”meeting of the family made by shared interests and activities” will be sneered at by some as unrealistic, old-fashioned, and even irrelevant.

    But if looking at Worldcon as a place for active fans to convene and provide a place for new fans to learn about fandom and science fiction and the sf community becomes irrelevant, what would we be left with beyond a bunch of lawyers arguing with each other and Worldcon turning into little more than an ensmalled DragonCon? (Which, I know, some folks would be perfectly happy with.)

50. @Gary Farber
    This, so much. One of the reasons I enjoyed going to cons was seeing people, meeting new ones, and enjoying being with other fans.

    Without that, it’s just a business conference held on a long weekend.

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