Drive-by Link Sausage Shooting

Life has again intervened, and these link sausages seem to be firing blanks during their drive-by shootings...

• GBS Update: The Authors' Guild filed a fourth amended complaint (PDF) last Friday that utterly fails to repair most of the problems with the existing complaint... and adds a few more of its own. Most notably, the AG has not changed its fundamentally flawed analysis of the copyright issues; has not added sufficient representation for adult trade fiction, and more particularly for commercial-category fiction; etc., etc., etc. It appears that the AG and its lawyers feel constrained by previous strategy and stated theories.

  Of more amusing interest, the complaint has now explicitly removed foreign authors and continues with its restriction to registered works, without explicitly disavowing purported representation of orphan works. So I guess they really were constrained by previous (mis)analysis...

• I'll have more on the HathiTrust matter in the next few days, after I work my way out from a pile of Stuff and deal with remora Stuff later this week.
• Meanwhile, one must laugh and groan simultaneously at the latest administrative glitch for the National Book Awards. This isn't the first time this has happened; it won't be the last; and, as in academia, the politics are so vicious primarily because the stakes are so low.
• Yet another missive from the Department of Mistaking the Artist for the Work: A misguided op-ed in the NYT claims that the latest H'wood conspiracy-theory film about Shakespeare somehow harms the plays and sonnets themselves. I'd say "hogwash," but that insults the process of cleaning pigs. Sure, if Anonymous somehow changes perceptions of the auctorial intent in Shakespeare's plays and poems, the beginning point for facile ninth-grade analyses of the lesser plays found in the high-school curriculum might move a few inches closer to Oxford than to Stratford. The play's the thing in which to find the conscience of the reader/audience — and although not all roses smell as sweet as any other, that beginning point matters far less than where we end up, as Mary Ann Evans and Eric Blair could tell us.