Not My Beautiful House

Darin is up visiting his clients. We arrived at 9 this morning and Nevin unexpectedly greeted us at the airport bearing a bagel with cream cheese as a welcome gift. Darin and I drove to General Magic, where he disappeared into the building and I didn't hear from him until 6pm. He was supposed to call at 5 -- think he's busy?

Here I am at Mitch's house, which is of course our old condo. I lived here for 4 years, and every time we come back I am reminded that it's not my house any more. Mitch has put in enough touches -- such as making Darin and me sleep in the guest room -- to reinforce the New World Order.

I did not so very much today, which is bad for the new feature I've introduced at the bottom of the page.

Greg writes in and points out a fourth method of protecting one's intellectual property:

I would include one more: trade secret. If you don't intend on licensing something, in which case you'd need the patent to protect your interests, you can just keep something a secret. It will be protected by the (perhaps) more mundane statutes that protect other sorts of property. The recipe for Coca-Cola is an obvious example.

The advantage of the trade secret is that there's no time limit on it. The disadvantage is that once the secret's out you may have trouble recovering enough damages in court to cover the, well, to cover the damage to your business.

When you patent something, you have to describe it in excruciating detail for the patent application. If you keep it a trade secret, so long as you can maintain it as a secret, you don't have to tell nothing to nobody. (Yes, I know that was a triple negative. It's "colloquial.")

Speaking of Greg (were we?), the Mel Profitt episodes of Wiseguy are being rerun and I keep forgetting to watch them again! In case you're new to this journal, you should know that I have a weird Kevin Spacey fixation as the result of a dream I had about a year ago. The first time 'round, Greg taped all those episodes for me and sent them down to me in LA, either because he's a nice guy or he knows how to keep Darin free of extraneous emotional interruptions.

I have decided not to regale you all with the details of a very strange Gary Oldman dream I had. Lucky you.

See, my dreams are usually full of movie actors (primarily, with few actresses). Straight out of central casting stuff. And you wonder why I got into screenwriting? Anyhow, these strange dreams I mention from time are not always sexual -- usually they're not.

But they are remarkable enough to make me watch movies in a totally different way. And do things like watch Wiseguy over and over again.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

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