This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.
The Mark Protection Committee is the most public-facing of the WSFS standing committees. It was also the only body so far to officially censure Dave McCarty, Ben Yalow and Raistlin Chen for their involvement with the 2023 Hugos debacle. It has a responsibility to protect the marks of the Hugos, Worldcon, etc. In normal times this should be pleasantly technical and unexciting, but unfortunately times have not been normal of late. You will find its report on pages 56-61 of the 2025 Business Meeting agenda.
I have been a member of the Mark Protection Committee for the last three years, elected by the Business Meeting in Chicago in 2022. The election system is peculiar, but nonetheless I would like to put myself forward again this year, and I hope that people will vote for me.
The MPC has collectively got three resolutions on the Agenda this year, all of them carried over from last year as they are constitutional amendments passed by Glasgow and requiring ratification in Seattle.
The first, E3 (on page 26), requires Worldcon bids to agree to the most recent WSFS Mark Licensing Agreement (which itself is still being drafted). I obviously supported this when it was first proposed by the committee, of which I was a member, and I support it now; it will give clarity about the extent to which a Worldcon can and cannot play around with WSFS intellectual property.
The second, E4 (on page 27), brings the rules about the running of the MPC into alignment with actual practice. It also allows the MPC to remove its own members by a two-thirds vote – to our surprise when the 2023 controversy broke, we discovered that we did not have the power to do more than censure members other than going through the lengthy trial procedure in Roberts’ Rules of Order. I support this one too.
I am less sure about the third, E5 (on pages 27 and 28) on including representatives of the Business Meeting on Hugo and site selection committees, who would then report back to the Business Meeting on the propriety of the conduct of the Hugo and site selection votes. I supported it last year before the Hugo Administration Process Committee was set up, but it now seems to me that that committee is providing a more holistic view and set of solutions. On Site Selection, I am no longer convinced that this problem (if it is a problem) is the one that most urgently needs to be solved.
I do like the first paragraph of E5, which ends the fiction that a Worldcon Committee could theoretically decide to administer the Hugos themselves rather than appoint a subcommittee to do it, and at present my feeling is that I’d like to split E5 and pass the first paragraph but not the rest. However if it cannot be split, I’d vote against it as a whole.
2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22