Slashdot Mirror

is available here .

The upcoming Sin City (based on Frank Miller's graphic novel series, and it's directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller) uses a similar filmmaking technique as "Sky Captain," although not to the same degree. An FAQ is here.

Compare the behind-the-scenes footage to the trailer that was shown at this summer's San Diego Comic-Con (they had originally posted a 640x480 version but it's been replaced by a 480x272 version).

Check it out (there's a brief topless scene, so it's not SFW), if only for the shots of Jessica Alba dancing around seductively in leather chaps. :)

You can still download it from here. I personally thought it was an awesome teaser. Too bad 9/11 had to happen. :(

There's another scream when the fat olophant driver falls to his death.

It's in the trailer for Teaching Mrs Tingle too.

Quicktime Link from Movie-List.com

You can always go here to see the trailers.

You can always go here to see the trailers.

You can always go here to see the trailers.

Realplayer has certainly tried to beat them in the realm of streaming content, but due to such little things as shit for quality and lack of content, they didn't do so well.

For the longest time "shit for quality" made me hate RealPlayer...but have you seen the newest ones? Awesome quality...heck, it was even good enough to be included in a doom9 codec comparison. So "lack of content" might be because people won't use might be because they remember the "shit for quality" days or because of the competition from media player, I don't know, personally I think media player's codec (wmv) isn't all that big myself, but I guess popularity is increasing.

Quicktime...while it has done fairly well, never really got quite big

Hold on a second...what media content sites do you browse? Almost every online clip is in quicktime...movie trailers, fan movies...you get your eventual real video clips now and then (most of them old ones from the crap quality days) and if you visit a microsoft site, you get some wmv, but that's still the least common.

Microsoft hasn't been offering much competition in the codec department (although it's been pushing the new windows media 9 a lot, to the point where T2 Extreme Edition comes with the entire movie encoded in that format). Now...using the player...it's compatible with divx, mpeg, wmv, and a whole bunch of other formats except for quicktime and real video, and it comes installed with your OS, so people don't bother looking at the other players to play the formats media player can handle, and I guess that's the "unfair competition".

Anyone else think that the Hulk looks like Shrek?

Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, director of The Cup (cf www.movie-list.com/c/cup.shtml), said a few years ago he was planning to do a movie of Tintin in Tibet, one of Herge's sunniest books. Anyone know what the status of this is?

It's about time Australia got its own Bermuda triangle!

Or the people from redhat.au should go pig-hunting with him (At least they should have given him a copy of the movie Dirty Deeds before he came down [review, trailer)

Looks like Slashdot isn't the only one covering this, so here's some mirrors in case anyone's interested:

Movie-List
Comingsoon.net
FilmHobbit.com
ZDNet
Movies.com

... at http://www.movie-list.com/s/starwars2.shtml, in case anyone is having any problems (or wants it in mpeg ;-)

http://www.movie-list.com/l/lordoftheringstrilogy. shtml

Here's the original short story that inspired the movie, by Jonathan Nolan. It's very different from the movie and in some ways it's better. Read it if you get the chance - it gives away nothing about the movie that you couldn't deduce from the Memento trailer.

The second time I saw Memento, I brought a pad of paper and took copious notes. Here are the results: a chronological list of Memento scenes. Warning: SPOILERS there.

-Josh

http://www.movie-list.com/a/ai.shtml :)

The trailer can also be downloaded from this site: movie-list. To winnow out stupid people, I have not linked directly to the trailer but rather to the front page of the site. If you can't find it from there... you probably don't deserve to. MUAHAHAHAHAHA!

Good news, the guys at movie-list.com have a good download link.
Now, let's everybody rush there all at once so we can /. the poor place :-)

Imagine that Wired magazine (for example) has a great article about Linux in its latest print issue, and I want readers of my web site to know about it. Obviously, I couldn't post a verbatim copy of the article on my site -- that would be copyright infringement. But I would be able to write, "There's a great article about Linux on page 50 of Wired." Should Wired be able to sue me because people wouldn't read the ads on pages 1-49? Of course not.

First, the Universal site doesn't have banner ads. I think the confusion is coming from the Wired article about the case, which refers to a case where Ticketmaster sued Microsoft, and one of the complaints was that Microsoft was allowing people to dodge Ticketmaster's banners. (At the same time, I think Universal's position is a bit unclear; they sound like they don't want you to link to anything on their site at all without their permission, when I think all they want to do is stop Movie-List from poaching their trailers.)

Second, your magazine analogy is a bit flawed. A better example would be you scissoring the article out of Wired and pasting it into your magazine around your ads. Movie-List, as far as I can tell, is not saying "view the trailer at the Universal Pictures site"; it's making it look like the trailer is part of the Movie-List site.

I'm not a lawyer, but as I said elsewhere my gut feeling is that Universal is in the right.

Jay (=

First off, where did this term "deep linking" come from? I wouldn't be surprised to find some lawyer somewhere coined the term. Links are just links; they're what make the World Wide Web work.

Sure, most sites just use links as navigation controls ("Next Page", "Top", "Home", or even "click here"), but good sites also use them to direct a user to more information on a topic within the context of the page itself.

Where I think the problem arises is not "how do I ensure that my valuable ad banners get seen?" (Jakob Neilsen wrote in 1997 that advertising doesn't work on the web and in another article about research on web users' behavior that while ad banners are the most-used form of advertising on the web, it is the least successful.) but "how do I protect my intellectual property on the Web?"

In this case, I went to Movie-List to check it out, and it is a banner-driven (hence, I assume, ad-supported) site that is, essentially, a "link farm". He takes the trailers for movies and wraps his own HTML around them (complete with banner ad), and doesn't even acknowledge the movie studios the trailers are coming from. If I see a trailer from Universal's web site, I should have the option of hitting a link to their site to look around; Movie-List traps you there so you can look at his banner ads.

I would think that this is a violation of fair use (which is going to have to be redefined somewhat, if it hasn't already, to handle the Web) made worse by the fact that he's not incurring any bandwidth penalty himself; he's using their servers to host the information he's supposedly getting ad money off of, the trailers. My gut feeling is that Universal is in the right on this one.

Obviously, the concept of "fair use" on the Web is going to need to protect both the rights of the person who makes their intellectual property available on the web and the right of the person who wants to provide a link to it.

I would think that a good "fair use" policy for the Web should have the following requirements:

1) People should be allowed to point to copyrighted material on another site without obtaining explicit permission if they acknowledge the copyright holder of the material (either by providing the link in the context of their site, as my Alertbox examples do, or in the case of an image or movie, providing a link to the source of the copyrighted material). If search engines were to use the "copyright" LINK attribute (if properly set) on a page, I'd think that covers their backsides neatly.

2) People should only be able to place a page from another site within their own frame if the owner of the content of that site gives their permission (as I did when I set up my home page at XOOM) or for educational or informative purposes (a site that teaches good/bad web design, or a live "portfolio" of a webmaster's work). In the latter case, the frame should not have any ads on it.

3) A subscription-based site shouldn't include any copyrighted material from another source without that source's permission, period. Just live a print magazine.

This is just off of the top of my head; what else should go into a decent "Fair Web Use" policy?

Jay (=