Teh Internets Are For Ground-Up Links

Late sausages...

• For a change, instead of business rescuing the arts, artists could save business? Umm, right. As usual, the problem is def(success)... and that's where the law gets in the way. As long as the law requires — as part of a disturbing, despicable, inadequate, and yet utterly necessary prophylactic against certain varieties of securities fraud — quarterly reports and year-over-year comparisons, the arts culture and business culture won't even be speaking the same language. The ultimate problem will be convincing not just given segments, but the entire American polity, that there's a significant difference between "necessary" and "sufficient." "Man does not live by bread alone" seems to have been forgotten by just about everyone... even to the point of knowing neither its origin nor its meaning... and why that meaning matters even more to those of us who are not religious.
• On the piracy front, one of the "better" actors has now signed an agreement with some of the "bad" actors: the publishers. Query: Exactly what measures are the publishers taking to ensure that they even have the rights they're granting? I mean, aside from their collective arrogant assumption that they "own" the damned books? Bluntly, most trade publishing contracts don't give publishers this right.
• Predictable side effect(s) of the Google Book Search system and the relentless quest to ensure that every aspect of a business has an easily definable, quantizable return on "equity". The sarcastic might enjoy contrasting the legal and financial definitions of the term "equity." Or, of course, you could consider Jay Lake's dislike of the settlement and note that, but for never naming it, his discussion is entirely about the nonstatutory fifth fair use factor: administrative convenience.
• Football season starts tonight. Real football, where one puts one's foot to the ball, without resorting to a tea break every ten seconds and ten kilos of protective gear just to avoid meeting Mr Goalpost.