Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Mods, Books, Checkmate
Quick, Danny, write faster! Danny Yee has written additional reviews of Jessica Litman's Digital Copyright , Naomi Klein's No Logo , and John Sundman's Acts of the Apostles . (You might want to flashback to earlier reviews of these by Michael Sims and Jon Katz, Warren A. Layton, and Hemos.)
From the Persian for "King" Frederic Friedel of Chessbase contributed some links which are especially interesting in light of the recently announced match between Deep Fritz and Vladimir Kramnik. He points to this link and this other link, saying "The latter has some nice quotes from Kramnik."
In addition, Frederic has links with more on Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, and Fritz in Space.
But the name is already perfect for a MAD parody ... RFINN writes: "If you haven't heard by now, Lucasfilm announced the name of Episode II. It's going to be called 'Attack of the Clones.' If you're like me, this stirs up pictures of Jedi running from giant red tomatoes and such. Do your civic duty and help change the name that has become the laughing stock of the sci-fi movie going community (and some of the actors themselves) by signing a petition to be sent to George Lucas."
Sold! to the man with the large contingent of lawyers!
ncmusic writes "For all of you readers that have been following Bid For Power the DragonballZ Q3 mod. Funimation has issued a cease and desist order to the group. Funimation has excluse rights to DBZ in the US (and EU I think) and has sold exclusive video game rights to Infograms. Below is the announcement made on the site about the order. My question to the slashdot community is do you think this is fair? BFP is a FREE mod to an already existing game. Have their been any other precedence set for making mods based on characters from copyrighted work? And what advice do you have for the Bid For Power group?
'As many of you know Funimation owns the copyrights to Dragonball Z in the USA and has sold the exclusive rights to publish video games to Infogrames. On December 1st, 2000, the Bid For Power team received a cease and desist order from Funimation.
However, they seemed receptive to the notion of allowing Bid For Power to be released so long as certain conditions were met. We were put in touch with Infogrames who asked us, among other things, to recreate Bid For Power on Wild Tangent, a java-based engine, which would then be posted on the Dragonball Z website for people to play. This engine is incapable of running something as detailed as Bid For Power and we would have had to start work from scratch. Most of the team rejected the idea and talks went downhill from there. Without contact with Infogrames or Funimation the progress of Bid For Power slowed down even though we were sitting on a finished product and had been for some time.
We began dealing with Funimation directly in April when they asked us to send videos of gameplay to them so that they could have TOEI Japan review it. We sent the videos and heard nothing until we emailed them in July asking that we be allowed to release in August, since no objections had be made from TOEI Japan that we knew of. We were then sent another Cease and Desist order by way of Funimation.'"
So the confirmed-as-rumor rumor has become real? This is the sort of thing that would be best kept in the realm of rumor.
Funimation/infocomm has the rights to DBZ video games. TOEI (sp) does not, they've aleady sold them and could care less.
However, if the game qualifies as a parody then most of the copyrights are extremely difficult to maintain. Having had some exposure to DBZ, i'm sure that it won't be that hard to get from serious DBZ to a Parody of DBZ.
You're going to sign a petition to make him change the name from "Attack of the Clones"? Really, is that any worse than "The Empire Strikes Back"?
I swear, Lucas can do nothing right anymore.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
WildTanget ( http://www.wildtangent.com ) Is not a necesarrily a Java engine. It is a graphics module useable in just about any programming language, this includes C++ and Visual Basic. The team wouldn't have to start from scratch, they'd just have to clone the Q3A engine. The WT object is very flexible and could very well make a game like Quake3. It just wouldn't be as fast. Don't diss the WildTangent =P
Hey, d'you know how highly customised these processors are for chess? And how highly optimised the code is to do the solving? Trying to split it over multiple processors with different architectures and serious latencies between them is a losing bet, at least for a real-time solution.
I believe their main concern is getting it done in real time. Like weather forecasting or 3-D graphics, the techniques for solving the problem have been identified many years ago - the only problem is seeing how much processing power (and algorithm optimisation) you can put in to reach a certain level of "good".
Grab.
It wouldn't work for a real chess game, the latency between the "nodes" is too large for a realtime chess game. I wrote a parallel chess implementation (parallelised the AB game tree search) on a Beowulf and that was pushing the latency requirements (I got down to 50msec). :)
What Dnet would be good for is move searches and end game tables, tables that specifiy a board position and the final outcome of that game
I refer them to this handy guide: Bob The Angry Flower's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots
Hopefully that'll clear things right up.
---
My first response when seeing the petition to change the god awful name of Episode II was happiness at being able to voice my mind and support an effort to improve a series I care about.
On consideration however, I think that signing that thing ignores the real problem -- quality of content. It is my expectation that Ep II will suffer a weak storyline, lame characters, jackass explanations (i.e., the Force comes from bugs in your cells or whatever the hell that was) just as Ep I did. Given this near certainty, I think the title is great. Let shit be called shit and we can save ourselves some grief.
There are better things to petition than the name of the next star wars. Sorry, but they screwed you on the last one -- now is the time to give in.
What might be better? Well, for one:
Anti-DMCA Petition:
http://www.dibona.com/dmca/
Programmers speak in Code.
http://www.anti-dmca.org
You really need to start acting or there won't be any net...
Stupid people get no sympathy here.
(Karma, goodbye...)
---
Book(n): Utensil used to pass time while waiting for the TV repairman
The Phantom Menace refers to the underlying theme of the SW films: evil lies within. It showed its characters embracing violence (Amidala), deceit (Qui-Gon) and anger (Obi-Wan) in order to do what they considered to be the right thing. Intelligent film-watchers who have seen ROTJ should be aware of this. It is only when Luke renounces violence at the end of ROTJ that the tables turn and the "good" side wins. Coincidence???
Consider the end of TPM. All three contingents are effectively "disarmed" (sometimes forcibly) before they achieve victory. And the moment they give up their weaponry -- they win.
But what does this all have to do with clones? Thematically, TPM is full of "doubled images" (handmaidens, Sidious/Palpatine, droids) which are associated with order falling apart. Even the planet Naboo is split into two halves (the ego and the id - diplomats and warriors), etc. And so if you actually bother to reflect on it, the new title makes perfect sense. These bad decisions our "protagonists" will make (out of - no doubt - a desire to do good) will begin to backfire on them badly.
As much as people may dislike Jar Jar (I found his presence objectionable myself), doing idiotic things like signing this petition is just foolish.
Can my character have DBZ hair? Can my character have DBZ clothing? Can my character shoot big fireballs? Can my character have DBZ naming?
You draw that line in the sand and I'll find some way to split it in half. Copyright laws were designed to focus on intent, not specifics.
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Not so fast...I think this is not as simple as you make it sound.
I think there is a case to be made that this mod would fall under the category of parody. This means that it is protected from claims of copyright infringement under the first ammendment.
Besides, if you want to take such an exclusive view...where do you draw the line? Can I use a DBZ skin for my player? Can I use a DBZ character name for my player?
IMHO, if there is no profit involved then the courts, society, and all of us should be giving people wide latitude when it comes to these kinds of creative endevours.
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
I'm sorry but did you see that last movie. Giant Red Tomatoes would be a huge improvement. I think the petetion should be to replace Jar Jar with a Giant Red Tomato.
Umm am i missing the point here ? maybe cause as far as i can see Lucasarts can name the movie anything the like - they own the property after all, they appeal of phantom menace i think has shown that they no longer rely on the fanboi element for survival and they could really call it Star Wars Three - Obi One sucks Yoda's cock and they would all still go and see it.
Dont you think its a bit childish to have petitions to change the name of a movie that a company has decided on ? What about world hunger? civil rights ? rape? Nope were gonna protest about a movie
I give it approx 10 minutes befors some ethical person posts email addresses for lucas arts staff or george lucas himself - that wayy all of you can mailbomb them to death in the reponsible adult way you all practice
Whatever your opinion on whether it was right or wrong, I don't think it's outrageous for Infogrames or Funimation to think it might cause competition to them; I mean, you're basically creating a game based on a story you don't own. And anyone who doesn't consider a mod a real game must not have hit the computer game store lately. Look how many mods have hit the shelves as retail games (and are presumably making money). Personally I think Infogrames was acting pretty cool in offering the developers a chance to get involved in legit, paid work.
Did anyone even bother to listen to the little bit of history the original movie presented itself with? do you guys even *remenber*? (the ones always bitching about E1 being crap ;)
;)
;)
If they are making the movie after the Clone Wars, the title is perfect..perhaps it is 50-60ish, but so what, it's better then watching the Trade Federation and the annoying droids do all the fighting
Then again, i'm use to reading the Star Wars books, which are as we all know, books are always twice as good as movies
Well, movies frequently have fake names while they are still in production. ROTJ was once called "Revenge of the Jedi" while it was still in production. In any case, Lucas should have embellished the title a little more to "Attack of the Killer Clones from Outer Space", though hopefully it won't be quite that hokey (cross fingers).
it's incredible how people are always bitching about StarWars! First you complain about The Phantom Menace title, next about JarJar, next about Attack of the clones. Since the SW prequels resurfaced, the only thing people are doing is critisizing George on every thing he does. You really think The Empire Stikes Back was such a great title?? Come on! If I was George Lucas I would stop right after Attack of the clones and NEVER make the 3rd one. How cruel would that be?
They have four options:
1) Change the game to a Dragonball Z like mod. All they would have to do is change the faces of the characters. Just so they are not immediately recognizable. They would also have to change a few maps (like Kami's house).
2) Ask for donations. Check out the forums over there (links at the top of their page) and if everyone only sent $5 dollars they'd probably have enough for legal defense. Some lawyers might take it pro bono for publicity.
3) Get whichever company makes Quake (don't own it so I don't know) to help them. This is a mod for an existing game, so Funimations licensing may not cover it.
4) "Sneak" a copy or several hundred thousand out to the general public. Once it's out (and I've heard copies are already floating around) what is Funimation going to do? I envision an ICQ/ email/ etc distribution campaign. This is what I would do.
No sig for you.
IMHO, if there is no profit involved then the courts, society, and all of us should be giving people wide latitude when it comes to these kinds of creative endevours.
So if I take something of yours and give it away, but I don't charge for it, that's ok, right? Because there's no profit involved, right?
Something tells me this viewpoint is just a little bit simplistic.
Dude's got to lay off the crack.
Trolls throughout history:
Jonathan Swift
There are an astronomical number of possible board configurations in chess, but they are finite. A distributed system could play every possible chess game, attempting every possible move and every possible countermove, and find out what lines result in white win, black win, or draw. By building that sort of database, a computer would be able to play by rote memory to the best possible outcome.
Once that was done, chess would be as "boring" to computers as tic-tac-toe is to adults, and for the same reasons.
--The basis of all love is respect
This is the RC3, so it says on the page where I found it
two links!
BOSTON SUCKS!
Maybe technically finite, but astronomical doesn't give justice to the number. My quick estimate is that even if you could somehow store one game per atom, the entire earth doesn't have enough atoms to save all of the permutations.
He did it with Jedi
Imagine the t-shirt presses of Shenzen are whirrin up right now with "Attack of the Clones".
Be a bit of a blow to them if he changed the name a month before it opened.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
Shakes the Clone
Planet of the Clones
Home A-Clone
Clone with the Wind
Jurassic Clone
The Lion Clone
Beverly Hills Clone
The Clonefather
Honey, I Shrunk the Clones
Dances with Clones
101 Clones
Snow White and the Seven Clones
The Rocky Horror Picture Clone
An Officer and a Clone
The Nutty Clone
The Hunt for Clone October
The Clonefather II
Remember the Clones
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Clone
Interview with the Clone
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Clone
Star Wars VI: Return of the Clone
How the Clone Stole Christmas
Raiders of the Lost Clone
Saving Private Clone
The Perfect Clone
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!