Y Combinator, the startup seed funder based in Mountain View, California and Cambridge, Massachusetts, has posted a list of the sorts of ideas Y Combinator would like to see startups tackle. It’s an eclectic list, ranging from web office applications to a better dating site, and sure to spark discussion and thought.

Funny they should mention simplified browsing - i.e., a web browser for little kids and grandparents - as I was just thinking about how it’s about time for my daughter (age three and a half) to start imitating Mom and Dad with a real computer rather than her pretend one, and how we might make that work. Get to it, brilliant developers!

The Chronicle of Higher Education delves into a dispute between two economists who released a study in 2004 that showed file sharing had no impact on CD sales, and another economist who believes that study was flawed. Part of the argument is a bit of inside baseball regarding potential conflicts of interest in the process of approving “comments” on (i.e. criticism of) research papers. Get past that, however, and there is some interesting debate over the methodology and data used in the study.

I would like to see a study that tracks the impact of file sharing based not solely on CD sales, but on artist income more generally. That is, what effect does file sharing have on an artist’s overall financial success?

Mark Hurst, author Bit Literacy (which I hadn’t heard of but am now very interested in), discusses various aspects of the book publishing world that he was surprised to discover as he was seeking publishers for the book. Discouraged by the situation, he went the self-publishing route instead. It’s a worst-case-scenario take on the industry, but not entirely inaccurate. I would of course highlight this particular bit:

If you do find an interested publisher, they’ll hand you a contract. Read every word of the publisher’s contract, and get your lawyer to do the same. Many things in the contract are negotiable, though the publisher won’t tell you that upfront. But you’d be a sucker to sign the first draft of the contract.

Can’t argue with that. And I also concur with the one commentor who said “You could replace the word ‘publishing’ with ‘music industry’/'film industry’ and ‘book’ with ‘album’/'movie’, and you’d have two more essays on the same essential idea…”

But as other commentors, including Paul Mikos of Cumberland Publishing, pointed out, Hurst may be overstating the “in it for the cash” mentality of the average publisher, and understating the risk publishers take on even smaller titles. At the end of the day, however, books are a business, and all parties involved, author and publisher alike, should treat it that way - just not to the exclusion of considerations of art and love.

Last month, a federal judge ruled that fashion designer Joseph Abboud could no longer use his own name to promote his wares, thanks to a provision in the contract he entered into when he sold the company to JA Apparel Corp. (for $65+ million, mind you). Readers of our former blog, Legal Fixation, may recall that this has happened before to yet another iconic name in the world of fashion, Paul Frank. Vanity Fair has the details of that sad story. Yet another cautionary tale for those who would consider using their name as a trademark.