Friday With Technical Difficulties

• This reveals so much about H'wood executives: Male fruit flies rejected by females go for booze. Since most H'wood executives have the sophistication and mental capacity of a fruit fly (as do, for that matter, their rented congresscritters), that perhaps explains too much...
• Professor Pasquale offers some thought-provoking questions for Silicon Valley from the Goldman Sachs resignation letter, which are being asked far, far too quietly and far, far too late.
• Writer Beware offers another example of deceptive contracting practices in publishing. What's really disturbing is what's going to happen next time... when Dodgy Publisher is, perhaps, fiddling with the numbers in a way that an audit would catch if requested, but since the author is expecting a shortfall...
• In the Department of IP Nerddom, there have been several significant court decisions at the edge of various doctrines that illuminate some not-quite-at-the-edge questions relevant to authors. OK, the illumination might well be that from a black-light lava lamp, but still...

  This blawg's only feline friend the IPKat discusses the difference between a dentist's office and a hotel (one of them constitutes a "public performance" for purposes of music licensing... and one of them does not), and the limitations of TRIPS on compulsory licensing (which also concerns authors because, due to bad drafting, the TRIPS compulsory licensing system is not limited to patents).

  The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed an ill-considered panel decision regarding the complex interplay among licenses, intervening rights, and the reexamination process that also has some implications for copyrighted works. Remember, copyright extends not literally to a work, but to the original expression in the work. At present, there's no equivalent of a "reexamination process" for copyrights... except pending court matters. That said, this has some fascinating implications for publishers of collections and anthologies of previously published works, and for publishers of scientific papers. I'm not easily fascinated, but I am an IP nerd...