Conspiracy Theories Run Amok Over Copyright Office Executive Changes; Techdirt, 11/2/16

Mike Masnick, Techdirt; Conspiracy Theories Run Amok Over Copyright Office Executive Changes:

"...[S]ome folks who support ever more draconian copyright immediately jumped on all sorts of conspiracy theories about how this was really Google somehow firing Pallante, including one site that directly had that as a headline.

To anyone who actually had knowledge of what was going on, this made no sense. Hayden is not connected to Google in any way. This is just out and out tinfoil hat conspiracy theory territory from people who see "Google" behind any policy they dislike. It seemed rather obvious that, like just about any new CEO of an organization, Hayden was clearing out some senior staff for a variety of reasons. And there was a pretty obvious big reason why Hayden would like to reassign Pallante: she has been directly and publicly advocating for Congress to move the Copyright Office outside of the Library of Congress. If you came in to run an organization and one of your direct reports was going over your head to try to transfer an entire division somewhere else, it's likely you'd fire that person too. It's kind of a management 101 thing.

Over the past week, in talking to a few people at the Library of Congress, or close to it, this is the basic story that came out. Hayden didn't feel comfortable with Pallante publicly advocating against the Library of Congress, and used her role as the boss to remove her from that position. Others seem to be discovering the same thing. A report at Publisher's Weekly notes that the conspiracy theories are bunk:"