law

California bill threatens freelance writers 2

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged business California law writing on by

California map from EPA.gov Politicians hate the “gig economy.” The simple reason is that it’s harder to collect taxes from freelancers than from employees. The California Assembly has passed a bill that would put many freelancers out of work, including writers. It would force clients to take them on as employees. That’s very unlikely to happen for the typical writer, who would simply lose the work.

As of this writing, the bill still has to be passed by the Senate. The text of California AB-5 is on the state website.

I’m not a lawyer and (fortunately) don’t live in California, but this kind of legislation could spread to other states. If it does, it will force a lot of writing work overseas, hurting people in every state.
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A banned book you may never see 3

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged censorship law on by

“Banned Books Week” has become a joke. I call it “bland books week.” Its definition of “banned” includes being deemed inappropriate for elementary school libraries. This is at best deceptive, and it’s an excuse for not talking about books that face actual efforts to ban them. The list also includes “challenged” books; that means simply that somebody asked a library not to carry a book. Talking about real banned books would require entering real controversies.

Unless you think school libraries should carry everything down to and including hard porn, “banning” in that sense is justified in some cases. “Challenging” hardly deserves notice at all, unless it results in serious consideration of excluding a book. Whether a school library carries Captain Underpants or not isn’t an issue of freedom of the press. Whether a book can be published at all is. There are books which have actually been banned in recent US history.
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Busted for writing without a license?

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing as business and tagged law licensing on by

Opponents of the First Amendment rarely say they’re against it. They say things like “money isn’t speech,” by which they mean that your rights end when money changes hands. This would reduce freedom of speech to the freedom to stand on a soapbox and deliver an oration, provided you hadn’t paid for the soapbox.

Nonetheless, some states and localities won’t let you do any kind of business without government permission. This includes selling your writing. An article by Kylie Jane Wakefield gives some ugly details. Some governments demand money before they’ll give you permission to write for income, sometimes as much as $100 per year.
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