Monday, September 15, 2025

‘Foundation’ Creator David S. Goyer on Those Season 3 Finale Twists and Why He’s Leaving the Show; The Wrap, September 12, 2025

, The Wrap ; ‘Foundation’ Creator David S. Goyer on Those Season 3 Finale Twists and Why He’s Leaving the Show

"Note: The following contains spoilers from the “Foundation” Season 3 finale...


"Then you have Dusk – or Darkness – who is behaving entirely out of spite.

I don’t think he has any clue or even interest in solving the problem or being a good steward of the galaxy. I think it’s truly a guy who, the center obviously cannot hold and he knows he can’t fix things, but he can burn everything down. And I would argue that there are people like that operating in power on Earth today that have personality disorders, and Dusk clearly has a personality disorder – it’s all personal for him. A switch has been flipped, and that’s a bad person to have in charge of a weapon like that.


So heading into Season 4 he’s all alone with what little power Empire has left.


He doesn’t have a Day or a Dawn or a Demerzel to counsel him. He just has yes men and yes women who are all terrified of him, and no one to give him any sort of counterbalancing advice.


I’m sure that’ll end well.


Even as I say that I’m like, “Huh, is there anyone else like that right now in today’s society that’s operating like that?”"

Sunday, September 14, 2025

Archiving projects protect the future by preserving the past; Library Journal, September 2, 2025

Lisa Peet, Library Journal; Archiving projects protect the future by preserving the past

"The practice of saving and safekeeping documents is nearly as old the written word. But lately archiving—choosing what to save, preserving it, and making it sustainably findable and accessible—has also become an act of responsive resistance in a world that may use erasure as a weapon.  

Safeguarding endangered material is a widespread concern—but the definition of “endangered” can be a broad one. The Data Rescue Project (DRP) has been in the news this year as it works to collect data sets from government websites before they can be taken down. The DRP has deeper roots, however, such as the Internet Archive (IA), End of Term Web Archive, EDGI (Environmental Data & Governance Initiative), and SUCHO: Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online, which has digitized and preserved Ukrainian cultural heritage sites since 2022. These groups are the Monuments Men of the internet age. 

Yet culture and history are threatened by more than war and federal orders. The call to preserve starts with the awareness that memory is fragile, and that forgetting—and the subsequent erasure of stories, languages, culture, and information—can be institutionally driven as often as it is inadvertent.

With the future of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, and other mainstays of support for preservation uncertain, the question remains: where will the resources and leadership—and the body of knowledge that stems from years of grant-making and collecting—come from? In the absence of concrete answers, a range of initiatives offer inspiration and hope."

Protecting Your Intellectual Property: What You Need to Know About Copyright; Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA), September 11, 2025

 Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware®, Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) ; Protecting Your Intellectual Property: What You Need to Know About Copyright

"Copyright is a complex subject about which there are many misconceptions.

I was reminded of that this week, thanks to an email from an author who discovered that several of their books were included in one of the databases of pirated works used by the AI company Anthropic for AI training. The author wanted to know whether they were eligible to be part of the gigantic $1.5 billion settlement Anthropic has agreed to pay to compensate writers for its misuse of their intellectual property. (You can read more about the lawsuit, and the settlement, here.)

One of the criteria for eligibility, set by the court, is that copyrights to the pirated works must have been properly registered with the US Copyright Office before Anthropic downloaded the databases. And indeed, the author’s books were all registered in a timely manner…but not with the Copyright Office. Instead, the author used a website called Copyrighted.com, which offers a kind of faux registration using timestamps and its own certificates.

I had to tell the author that no, they weren’t eligible for compensation for their pirated books. In the United States, there’s no equivalent or substitute for the US Copyright Office’s official registration process. The author couldn’t even use the materials they’d gotten from Coprighted.com as prima facie evidence of copyright ownership. Again, only official registration provides that.

In this article, I’m going to cover the basics of copyright, offer some warnings, and dispel some myths. I know that much of what follows will be familiar to a lot of readers—but as the example above shows, knowledge gaps not only exist, but can be damaging…and as always in the writing biz, knowledge is your greatest ally and your best defense. I hope even the most copyright-savvy readers will find something useful here."