Slashdot Mirror
Director Attacks MPAA Piracy Claims
dipfan writes "Alex Cox, the writer/director of cult classic Repo Man and punk movie Sid And Nancy, writes today in The Guardian's media section that the movie industry's real pirates are the Hollywood studios and the MPAA - for squeezing out independents. He rejects the widespread claim that Spider-Man suffered from widespread net piracy, and asks: "Are [the MPAA's] claims of lost billions even credible?" (In a strange coincidence, Cox has another article in the same newspaper today, where he defends using 35mm film rather than digital cameras a la George Lucas, saying digital cinema gives too much power to the distributors and studios because the technology is less portable than 35mm.)"
They think that spiderman *suffered* from internet piracy? Jeezy Creezy how many box office records did it break?
Until a "sure thing" like Spider Man or Attack of the Clones sees *wide spread* piracy on the net and then flops like a Michael Bay crapfest, they have nothing to say. Maybe then they can cry foul, I have no sympathy for a movie's suffering when it was the fastest to hit $100 million (!!!!) *ever*.
Do those DLP projectors have firewire outputs? Hmm.. Let's see, grab a couple of 100G firewire drives, a powerbook and final cut pro... Maybe I'll go get a job in a theater.. :) Heck, even S-video or composite would do.
The unsig!
But the fact that this appeared in a major British newspaper is important: it may represent the fact that public opinion is stronger than we have judged and there may be a consumer backlash against the "content moguls".
Or not...
And if you think a mogul is a thing out of Final Fantasy, you're wrong.
graspee
Bud: Intellectual Property is a sacred trust, it's what our free society is founded on. Do you think they give a damn about their Intellectual Property in Russia? I said, do you think they give a damn about their Intellectual Property in Russia?
Otto: They don't have Intellectual Property in Russia, it's all free.
Bud: All free? My ass! What are you, some kind of commie?
Otto: No, I ain't no commie.
Bud: Good. I don't want no commies in my car. No Christians either!
Freedom: "I won't!"
And like the author said: if Spider-Man is losing lots of money to piracy, the box office numbers sure aren't showing it.
How much longer will we have duped (or more to the point, paid off) Congressmen who let these big IP holders walk all over the rights of the American people to own recording hardware?
My God, if these people had been around 100 years ago, they would have made the ball point pen illegal since it can be used to copy books.
I seriously think that this issue will not be solved until there is a Constitutional Amendment that guarantees fair use rights for all media.
-- We live in a world where lemonade is artificial and soap has real lemon.
And this helps how, exactly? Given that most copyright isn't actually assigned, but licensed (in the case of books and music, at least, AIUI...)
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
What is this washout smoking? Who in their right mind considers CDs an "inferior technology" to vinyl records? I know of a few passionate nostalgics who subjectively prefer the sound of vinyl over CDs, but even they aren't stupid enough to claim that the technology is superior. You can't put data on vinyl. You can't play vinyl in your car, or while you're jogging. With this one, ridiculous comment, the author has lost all credibility with me, and has exposed himself as just another angry outsider who is upset that the Big Boys won't let him play with them.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
From the article "Most of the rights to the book - including all US rights - had long ago fallen into the public domain. Only the British rights appeared to be privately held: by a former rock musician who hoped to turn Wells' story into a travelling stage musical along the lines of Blood Brothers or Fame."
It is amazing to me that literature as old as War of the Worlds is still unavailable for the public (at least in Britain). I mean, I used to listen to the original radio broadcast on reel-to-reel when I was a kid. The amount of quality work that has been abandoned due to continuously extended copyrights has to be non-quantifiable. Tragedy, because, although he didn't get to make his picture, the large studios bought out the rock-star and are now making it with Tom Cruise. I want to cry.Put identity in the browser.
By Sunday, it's obvious that Correlli has tanked, and that Beckham is a hit. Naturally you yank Corelli from the larger cinema and put Beckham in there. The studios hate this, but can do nothing about it. However, once the new technology is installed, Corelli will be beamed direct to screen one for the duration of its scheduled run, and will play to empty houses.
Why, exactly? The argument about this that I've always heard is that it's the other way round. With a digital projector, there's no problem with running out of reels; it is technically far easier to copy bits that replicate a reel.
Of course, DRM may prevent the cinema from doing this, but surely it's acceptable for them to pay more for showing the film to more people, seeing as it's the ticket (and food) price that pays for the film in the first instance?
And if the cinema has a shortage of digital projectors then that's irrelevant; it's just the case of the new technology maturing and becoming more widespread. Preventing progress because new technology isn't deployed widely enough is no argument at all.
The MPAA is evil alright, but this is not the kind of objection against war on piracy that anyone will take seriously. You cannot expect any industrial body not to take up a fight when they are losing money just because they are already "hugely wealthy."
I am all for MPAA-bashing, but I wouldn't expect anyone not already in the know to care about an article the stamps some entity as evil without provding any real arguments why this is so.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
> I would be more inclined to listen to these claims if he wasn't just some hack trying to break into a bigger arena.
Right, cause the only ones we can trust are the ones who've already attained financial success. It's a sure mark of intelligence, business accumen, ethics, and most importantly of all, righeousness and correctness.
It's pretty funny - on the one hand you have a huge monopoly that attempts to keep the lid on independant artists' noise level, and on the other hand, you have a generation thats been born and bred not to believe anything unless the production values are high. Talk about your catch-22s.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Furthermore, he gets that one pirated copy != one lost sale.
Still, I wouldn't expect Sony to allow copying anytime soon. Or even to rollback their laughingstock copy protection, for that matter. But it's nice to see somebody high profile talking sense once in a while.
I have seen Sid and Nancy also. Possibly the only kind of role where Courtney Love is well cast.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
If I produced any non-essential in such an environment, I would expect sales to be somewhat depressed. Sorry guys, Cinema isn't an essential. Produce a good movie, such as Spidey then we will probably go and see it. Unfortunate the industry distrubutes a lot of rubbish. I say distributes advisedly because some good stuff is produced (even ocassionally inside the studio system). However, it often doesn't get out unless it fits the business model of the season.
I want more creatives like this guy to stand up and say where the MPAA is getting things wrong when it tries for ever more content protection.
Some people may have heard about the much trumpeted Spidey raid in the UK. What was being (expensively) copied onto DVD? The only version I have seen listed would fit into a small part of a CD and as someone else commented who has seen it, the quality was barely worth the effort of watching. Maybe the industry itself has problems with higher quality masters escaping?
Last point in this ramble, the Gruniad article made the very good point that having a secure digital chain between distributor and projector is a great way of locking other content producers out of the theatre.
To be totally correct, it's IEE1394 but firewire trips off the tongue much easier...
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
IEEE 1394
Thank you, Alex Cox. We'll be forever in your debt for "Repo Man" but that's another story altogether. It's a shame this appeared in the Guardian rather than in the LA Times or some other place where it will do some good.
I know I have made a big deal about "Dogtown And ZBoyz" and Sony Classics' being the distributor, but damn, man...could it have only seen the light of day if one of the distributors owned by MPAA signatories had released it? I mean, probably "Revolution OS" didn't have that kind of backing, but it didn't go into fairly wide release like "Dogtown" did.
If the movie theatres are 0wned by the MPAA, then where do the truly independent filmmakers go to show their work? I am hoping that somehow or another technology will come to the rescue as it has several times in the past. The RIAA had DAT neutered and the DAT portastudio killed because it feared indie musicians with the ability to create really good sounding independent recordings. Guess what? Thanks to cheap, huge hard drives and computer technology getting cheaper and cheaper, you can go to Sam Ash and get a portastudio with a HD capable of storing hours of 16-track audio for $500 or so.
OK, so digital filmmaking on a massive, Episode 2 kind of scale is out of reach of indie filmmakers. You can still get Digital Video cameras for a grand, a Mac "Quicksilver" minitower for 2 grand and Final Cut Pro for another large bill and have the ability to make a movie, then send it to DVD-R for distribution. I still am talking Large Bucks but it's certainly not as expensive as it used to be to make movies on film. And if you opt instead for a big-ass Athlon MP system with a firewire card and a Pioneer Superdrive, Windows 2K and Sonic Foundry Vegas Video 3, you can bring the price of the computer down a fair amount and shave a few bills off the price of software. If it is not practical now to do this, it will become practical in a few years. Right now CD-RW drives and DVD-ROM drives are selling for only $10 or $20 more for the increasingly hard to find CD-ROM only units. I can see a day coming in four or five years where CD-RW and DVD-ROM will be universally replaced with DVD-R/RW (or DVD+R/RW depending on which standard wins) and you only save a pittance by going with DVD-ROM and/or CD-RW.
Of course, if the Senator From Disney, Don Valenti's Made Man himself, Sen. Hollings can get one of his horrible bills passed, this all might be moot. If all computers have to have an RIAA/MPAA-approved DRM OS running and hardware copy neutering, you won't be able to do much with that newly cheap DVD recordable drive. I kinda hope that technology will figure a way to get around it, just like the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it; and instead of DAT Tascam and Fostex used hard drives to create a digital multitrack recording device. But when computer technology itself is chained...I shudder to think of the consequences.
And actually Alex has a point...watching a movie in a theatre is way different than watching a movie on a computer monitor, on your TV, or on cable. If the MPAA has that all locked up, we are that much poorer culturally. So even if we win technologically, we lose an unique experience to the multinationals and their slaves in public office.
Millione di grazie, Don Valenti. Pardon me if I don't kiss your fsckn ring.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
In the case of Attack of the Clones, quality may not matter much since (a) almost all the shots are special effects shots done mainly by computer, and (b) the film is shite.
But try to imagine Citizen Kane shot on digital video (in colour, naturally), or Amelie, or Moulin Rouge. If its promoters are serious about the quality of their technology, let them put it to the test against the best work of contemporary and classic cinematographers - not against the worst.
My only regret is that we don't have the medical technology to give me a womb so that I can bear this man's children. I have never read such clear, plain spoken and informed articles about the MPAA agenda in a mainstream forum before. It makes me begin - begin - to hope that it's not too late to turn the tide of distributors controlling the very copyright laws that were originally and explicitely written to limit their ability to screw both creators and consumers. Alen Cox, I salute you.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Er, I'm an idiot.
..
.. there is a grey area in which you could contend that vinyl is the superior medium
Thats what I meant to say. Sorry for the confusion.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Did any of you happen to catch the History Channel special on the Kennedys Sunday night? One of the interviews was with the special assistant to LBJ at the time of the Kennedy assasination - a man named Jack Valenti who coincidentally looks _exactly_ like the evil Jack Valenti. I wonder if this man who once had the highest security clearance in the US government still has any friends/connections in government. Not that it would explain anything...
MaxiVision48 can switch on the fly between 24 and 48 frames-per-sec and uses a new film advance mechanism to eliminate jitter. The result is a super clear rock-solid picture. I wonder what became of it.
I used to know such a person and among the ideas he had picked up from Hi-Fi mags were that it mattered which way up the mains lead went into his amp and that placing small pieces of paper (just a cornder torn off a single sheet of normal paper) under each corner of his amp would inprove the quality of the sound.
Naturally enough, it worked for him and no one else; hearing is easily swayed by what the listener expects to hear.
My brother has a large collection of vinyl LP's and singles and it takes about 10 minutes to realise that the format is inferior in almost every aspect to CDs; that's the ten minutes of listening to the care they need to be treated in just to minimise the damage caused to them by actually using them!
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
If copyrights cannot be transferred, they remain with the artist or author, and have to be licensed from them by the publishers. Currently it is the other way around: artists often have to sign over the rights to their own work lock stock and barrel, to the publishers. Already, record companies have succesfully prevented artists from distributing their own work through alternative channels such as the Internet.
If publishers have to license rights from the authors and artists, the creative rights remain where they belong, with the creative people.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
IIRC, and I may be wrong (so prove it) there was a cult screening on a weeknight on UK terrestrial TV (Channel 4 I think) which was presented by Alex Cox
Almost - it was on BBC2, and was on Saturday nights from 1989 to 1994. He didn't chose the films either (but kudos to whoever did). He left, finally, because of an apparent BBC policy not to show subtitled films.
It was revived in 1997 with another presenter, but the film selection was not quite as good (still better than most).
Details here
More realistically, I expect movies to be downloaded from dvd/cable/satellite and cached on some uber server installed at the cinema. This server can then be programmed to dump out the movie to one or more projectors at the appropriate times through a local network.
With so many 10+ screen cinemas cropping up, this sort of arrangement is inevitable, even though digital projection still sucks. Give it a few more years and hopefully the resolution will be enough that it will become acceptable.
It was on BBC2 on a Sunday night
The guy taught me cinema through tv and I'll be always greatful.
We do have independent cinemas in the UK though.
My local one is The Broadway
You can get world cinema films on DVD and VHS for sale / rent here
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
FYI: in Austria, there is nothing like copyright, but instead something called "Urheberrecht" (roughly translated creator's right). The creator of a work owns all rights, until 70 years after his death (then it falls into public domain), and can't be given to anyone else. You can make contracts about allowing usage of the creator's work, but you can't give away your creator's right.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
Read. Become less ignorant.
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
Staggered releases around the globe are simply, in this day and age, stupid. There is no reason not to release everywhere at once now. If the studios can't handle it, tough shit! The market (legal or illegal) will make up for their errors.
sulli
RTFJ.
Alan Cox = Linux Kernel Hacker
Alex Cox = Independant Film Director and subject of this article
What Cox is effectively saying - but he doesn't use this terminology because his background is film not computers - is that 35mm is an open standard whilst digital shows all the signs of becoming a proprietary one controlled by a Hollywood cartel (a la DVD).
Think Microsoft's domination of the desktop applied to cinema projection.
Whilst one reason Cox is against digital projection is because he doesn't think it's currently as good aesthetically. The reason he's expounding here is Open Standards versus Proprietary ones - something I would have thought most Slashdotters could understand and agree with.
Ah, children these days, they don't remember the computer magazines of the 1980s that had computer games on free flexidiscs. This was a bit before CDs became popular.
is it just me who read this wrong the first time ???
A) Digital is what they have been for a long time, simpler, faster, etc. Far faster and easier to edit. Even if someone were to use analog, it would probably be converted to digital for editing.
B) Even if it were to be analog, it would probably not be saved direct to a record, it would not be recorded directly to a record. so you will have to convert it to a record, and then press the vinyl.
C) Mathematical chunks are you a bloody fool? They are called numbers. Also if you were to look at wave in the hearable frequency (or even a good bit beyond it) you would see a very smooth curve (assuming a steady single freq tone) In other words a sine wave will look like a sine wave if you plot the numbers.
D) What would happen if you spent 10k+ on a cd player, and speakers? heh if you were bored you could get SACD or DVDAudio and really blow your argument away
I'd do something interesting, but my server can't handle a slashdotting.
Cox isn't saying the MPAA is evil, he never uses the word.
He's merely putting the claims of lost millions in perspective.
His argument in a nutshell
- the studios are crying wolf over money lost to piracy
- they already make millions whilst independent film-makers struggle to get finances to get movies made
- the measures they want to put in place to counter piracy will hurt the independents even more. In effect they'll be barriers to entry in the market.
I thought it was a well-written thoughtful article.
Everyone calls it firewire, because its bloody easier.
'fy-er-why-er' is a lot easier to say than 'eye-ee-ee-ee-thirt-teen-nine-te-for' or just 'thirt-teen-nine-te-for', both sylable wise & grammatically
Subtitling takes time.
(Not everyone in the world speaks English...)
Cheers -
Jim
-- My Weblog.
Boy.. I think he has some issues with distribution. Perhaps if his stuff was more readily picked up by studios and given more mainstream viewings, perhaps he wouldn't be singing the same tune.
Most people here feel that piracy *helped* spread the word on various companies products. MS windows would be nowhere as popular as it is if it hadn't been for rampant piracy. Someone further down pointed out that Sony admitted that piracy helped the PlayStation1 to become as hugely popular as it is. Most people point out that Napster gave them the opportunity to hear songs of CD's that they later bought, as opposed to Napster today that simply has no market left. I for one saw a pirated release of the Matrix at the company where I was working at the time the day after it was released in the States, but that (I should say "of course" but some people don't see the point) didn't stop me from seeing it in the cinema. I could go on.
Society is very much obediant to the physical rule that for every force there is a reaction or counterforce. You can try this out by standing in a doorway and pressing hard against the frame - it presses back. The same is true for increasingly repressive large corporations trying to avoid the obvious changes that technologies are forcing on them. Society is reacting like that dorr frame - it is pressing back. If the large greed corporations are violent enough to repress society enough that that hypothetical doorframe breaks, they are left with no door so to speak. There will simply be no market for their products and we will be left with a kind of neo-fascist society a la Orwell's 1984, where it will be illegal to even complain about the repression that said corporations are forcing upon us.
This is not to say that the tendancy to produce ever more expensive movies with ever more technical effects, or operating systems with ever more gimmicks, or ever more technically polished albums will stop. The problem with these things is that they are like heroin. Society builds up a tolerance level to them. More is NOT better. This is why a cheap film like the Blair Witch Project succedes but it's commercialised sequels do not. A huge technical effort and restrictive laws do NOT encourage creativity. They kill it fairly effectively. Is anyone else out there thankful that there never was a sequel to Blade Runner?
If they carry on the way they are, they will lose, even if we do nothing. The way I see it is that their only chance of survival is to "go with the flow". I for one, naive or not, am going to mail the RIAA, the MPAA and point out these things to them. Will you?
Pissed in your _own_ cornflakes this morning?
Reread the article. Read a few others. The MPAA is agressively attempting to control the upcoming technology in such a way that without the backing of a major studio, a filmmaker won't be able to make films. They're also trying to control all forms of playback technology, so that ultimately no one will be able to watch a movie without the knowledge and consent of their organisation.
Alex Cox is capable of making movies that sell well enough and have enough of a following to support him, and allow him to make more movies. If the MPAA has their way, this won't be possible.
That's what is being objected to here. If that's a "Euro-Leftist" attitude, then the US is a pretty damned socialist country.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
It does however have very much to do creativity and desireability getting lost in the grips of large companies. Hollywood is successful *because* of their size, which allow them to reach far more people than any independant ever could, and to market any article to death with a budget that would feed a country like Madagascar for a year or, closer to home, give an unemployed techie from the dotcom bust a job.
It also has nothing to do with Europe as there are very many independants in the States as well who would appreciate the chance to get some more exposure. Projecting your hatred and fear on someone because his views do not coincide with yours does not give you any more credibility.
Your argument about "hollywood" vs "independent" filmmaker doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and sounds a bit elitist to me.
Most people define "independent" to mean "not being funded by hollywood film studios." By that definition, George Lucas is an independent filmmaker (a claim he repeatedly makes).
So your post raises a few questions in my mind:
do you really think independent film makers = quality? I have seen some truly terrible independent films.
do you not agree that a whole lot of people seem to like over-the-top special effects, poor plot lines and predictable endings? if that's the case, why shouldn't they succeed? Apparently, you feel they shouldn't succeed because you don't like them.
I'm not sure i'd agree that Hollywood has a monopoly. First of all, "Hollywood" is not a company. "Hollywood" is a collection of large studios who are all in competition against each other. One thing that does exist, though, is a long-lived, entrenched process to getting a film made and distributed. You have to know the right people, you have to have the right connections, you have to be noticed by the right people. You can't just create a film on your Mac and give it to the night manager at the Cinemark Theater and ask him to show it.
The problem with 'on-line piracy' isn't that people are stealing money away from studios, the problem is that it will force the MPAA to use a more ethical business model.
Think about it, you pay for the movie BEFORE you are satisfied with it, and you really don't have a whole lot of choice if the movie sucks. (Yeah, you could get your money back, but how often does that happen?) Just about any other business gives you a 'satisfaction guaranteed' policy. Don't like your video card? Take it back within 30 days. Was your burger at McDonald's cold? They give you a card for a new sandwhich at a later time. Don't like a movie you bought on DVD or saw in the theater? Tough shit. You already had your service provided.
The 'on-line piracy' that the MPAA is worried about gives people the chance to discover if the movie sucks or not, and decide not to go see it. I mean, think about it: There is no possible way that you can recreate going to the theater in your own home. I don't know many people who could fit a movie screen that large. And I don't know about you, but I like seeing a movie with an audience, particularly if it's a comedy. There is always value in seeing the movie in the theater.
If the movie's good, people will go see it even if they have seen a VCD version of it. The theater is a far superior version of it. On top of that, you may want to drag your friends to see it! Frankly, I think the piracy mentioned in this article is likely to make the good movies get more money, and the bad movies make less. This means that Hollywood will have to seriously raise the quality of what they are creating. Heh, you'd think with the >$100,000,000 budget of a lot of movies that quality would be of the utmost concern.
In short, what I'm saying is that the MPAA will be forced to use a 'Best Buy' style business model in order to maintain customer satisfaction. Until they do that, they will just have to learn to live with people wanting gratis advance copies of movies. Pity though, I'd be willing to pay half the cost of a movie ticket to see a 320 by 240 version of a movie off the net, particularly if I'm cautious about whether I'll like it or not.
"Derp de derp."
35 mm is prohibitively expensive to shoot on without major $$$ because of development costs. The MPAA doesn't have a monopoly on anything-people just don't look at the alternatives enough. This is a war of ideas that can be won.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Nyquist's theorem reproduces a complete signal. You know, F(t)? Where did you get that it only "measures" frequencies? Phase is implicit if the function F(t) is known.
I was in Cannes on Friday, at a panel session organised by Wired mag, on the effects of broadband on the entertainment industry. Wim Wenders made the same points (more thorough writeup at www.59tv.com). Directors who are not slaves to the machine are starting to point out the obvious - that the status quo doesn't necessarily suit everyone, especially when the MPAA and other organisations like it are using their power and position to artificially maintain the status quo. Digital Cinema, in particular, offers a way to break these bonds and open up distribution - if cinemas can be brave enough to install digital screens, and accept for viewing tapes from people off the street.
Here's a fact. Studios want to make money.
I think it's time for a new rule. Any argument that defends a business practice by citing the "fact" the business wants to make money should immediately give the argument to the other side.
This "businesses want to make money, and so they are fully justified in doing/not doing _________" line is getting so fatiguing.
While we're at it, let's throw in "plunk down/fork over/shell out"
Think about it, you pay for the movie BEFORE you are satisfied with it, and you really don't have a whole lot of choice if the movie sucks. (Yeah, you could get your money back, but how often does that happen?) [...] Don't like a movie you bought on DVD or saw in the theater? Tough shit. You already had your service provided.
I have gotten free passes for seeing a movie with sound problems that didn't even bother me--because other people complained, and they gave them to everyone as we left after the show. I have gotten free soda and popcorn from the concession because the film broke and the audience had to wait an hour to see the rest of the film. (and anyone who chose to leave got their money back)
I have never, ever gotten the "tough shit" reaction when there was something wrong at a theater.
--
Benjamin Coates
At least if you're going to knock CDs do some research first. Lookup quantization errors. Also lookup dust and scratches because vinyl doesn't have much of a chance at accurately and consistently reproducing a signal like a CD can.
If you read and understood that paper (which you obviously didn't) you'd realize why 96khz sampling doesn't make a difference and probably uses more bits per sample thereby decreasing the quantization error and making the sampling window problem even worse.
It's really quite funny how you twits feel the need to come to the defense of CDs. Digital will always remain an approximation, with some error potential. This will not change no matter how much you might like to whine. Examples abound of digital media that are acceptable to some people and not others. Humans aren't quite as uniform as many digital encoding schemes would like to assume.
In the absence of a cite to REAL evidence to support all of your whining, your position (however sound it may be in terms of mathematical theory or physics) is no more valid that someone that gets a "warm fuzzy" from a vinyl recording.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I agree that the sound quality difference is either imaginary or negligible. However, I still prefer vinyl. I talked about this at great and tedious length in another post, so I won't rehash that, but suffice it to say that there are purely aesthetic reasons that make listening to vinyl records a more pleasurable experience. Some people, however, are more practical and prefer CDs. That's fine, but remember that you're paying a premium for CDs, which are extremely overpriced. All in all, I'm pretty happy in a world where I can buy either vinyl or CD, depending on my particular needs.
Um, you had a good point until your last line, in which you tell everyone to justify the paranoia of the industry. Perhaps you should re-think your motivations and your intentions and your logic. But that's just me.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Let's talk about "THE BIG LIE". The big lie is a lie so big that gets repeated so often that people start to believe it. If you're talking about how piracy won't be stopped by these laws or how the movie companies are making lots of money despite the piracy, you've bought into the big lie.
:)
The truth: It isn't about piracy. It's about competition.
These giant companies have had a long run of huge profits because it is so expensive to make a movie or a record. Technology can change that.
Cheap high-quality digital recording equipment can eventually be made, and massive bandwidth will mean that those things that are recorded can be sent all over at very little cost. It can happen.
However, if this happens, the movie studios and record companies can lose out, because people might be willing to pay less for good indie things. It could end up like the open-source movement where eventually an entire industry of hobbyists starts making extremely high quality movies and songs. (Although it would also create al ot of crap...also like the OS movement.)
Therefore, they have to stop the introduction of high-quality recording and editing and distribution equipment (unless it's under their control).
Fortunately, The same equipment you can use to copy the content of the current regime is the equipment you will eventually be able to use to make cheap high-quality alternatives to the products the current companies.
That means they can attack their real enemy: "competition" by setting up a straw man: "piracy".
You might be wondering why they don't just go after the "competition" angle directly and state that they're scared of the possiblity of people making high-quality movies and distributing them without the blessing of the big studios. They're scared that there might be too many choices out there that are good enough that people aren't willing to give money to the mega companies anymore.
To understand this, you have to ask yourself a question:
If we eventully live in a world where it is possible for creative people to make and distribute high-quality movies and record cheaply, this technology (hinder/not affect/promote) the progress of the useful arts?
Pick one of those three. I say it will promote the arts. I admit, although the vast majority of things that get created will be crap, there will be more gems than there would be if the reation and distribution channels were still tightly controlled by the studios and record companies. So, I say
allowing technologies to come into existence that let people create and distribute high-quality art cheaply will promote the progress of the useful arts.
That may be an odd way to look at things, but it's actually the only way that counts. You see, there is no moral right of authors or companies to benefit from their works. Copyright only exists to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts."
That means taht you can't use copyright to hinder the progress of the useful arts.
Therefore, you can't use copyright to prevent new technologies that will promote the arts from coming into existence.
But, as I said before, fortunately for the big media companies, the technology that you could use to make illegal copies of their content is the same technology that could be used to promote the progess of the useful arts by giving cheap easy access to creation tools to more people.
So, that is the problem: The thing they fear is something that they can't attack directly. They cannot use copyright to hinder the progress of the arts. But, fortunately for them, they can attack the technology for being used to pirate their works and get the same effect without going against the Constitution and the only reason that copyright even exists.
So, please in your discussions of the various laws and **AA's don't mention piracy anymore and how these laws won't stop it. If you do that, you got suckered into believing THE BIG LIE and you're fighting on their turf.
Instead focus on the loss of creativity and expression that will occur if they don't allow the technology to exist. The key is to expose the big lie for what it is and repeat the truth enough times so that other people can see through the big lie.
PS: All they care about is money, so please stop going to the movies/renting/buying movies and CDs and tapes. If you're giving them your money, you're helping them.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
"The half dozon hosts with Spiderman up for download in 800mb halfbakedTM quality clips have set a new internet speed record for transfering billions of $ of pirated copies in 2 weeks. 31331hax0r of Cult Of The Dead Movie says "yeah, we managed to upload the 160,000,000 gigabytes required to cost them a billion $ of ticket $ales, I even had to overclock my Pentium 266 and remove the 28k cap on my cable modem to do it". The MPAA reports empty moneybins and empty theatres all over the USA, "this is a serious trend for national security" reports Big Boss. New laws alowing the NSA to hack into piracy-terrorists are expected to be passed by congress today. "I'm afraid for the future of my children when multinational corporations can't make billions of dollars out of making overhyped movies" says a mother from Astroturf, California. "
I don't care if I get modded down for defending this post. This post was modded down as Troll, but I don't see why. It was satirical and it was funny! This is the line that cracked me up the most:
"yeah, we managed to upload the 160,000,000 gigabytes required to cost them a billion $ of ticket $ales..."
It was satire, not an attempt to 'Troll'. I really wish that some moderators would read these posts a little more carefully. This is an honest constructive criticism, not a flame. I too have made mistakes reading posts and blown up at people I shouldn't have simply because I skimmed the post too quickly.
"Derp de derp."
That's very interesting. What does this have to do with phase or your original post?
Let me remind you of what you said:
"The Nyquist Theorem says that the frequencies can be accurately measured by sampling at twice the highest frequency in the signal, but it doesn't say anything about the phase differences."
What exactly did you mean when you said Nyquist's Theorem doesn't say anything about the phase differences? Be very specific so I don't misunderstand. Nyquist is for band limited signals digitally sampled. Since you said that Nyquist "measures" frequencies does that mean you have no information about amplitude? You have amplitude, you have frequencies, and you have the time at which samples were taken. How does that imply you don't know about phase? Again you have F(t) which is the complete signal! First make sure you're clear on how Nyquist's Theorem works, in theory, and then after you understand that we'll try to work on your understanding of it in the real world.
I still want to know what you think "phase differences" means? Be very specific so I don't misunderstand. Did you mean time base jitter? If so remember that turntables use motors that cause the exact same problem as digital time base jitter. Even if it were audible on normal turntables or cd players (and it is not...) higher quality turntables or cd players will correct this to levels far below audible relevance. So again, what was phase referring to?
"The most important result of this is that the discretization of samples appears as a phase shift."
This is the most curious part of your posts. Is this a result of Nyquist's theorem or of the sampling function? What happens with delta function samples? Are you talking about quantization error? Be very specific so I don't misunderstand. Again, first make sure you're clear on how Nyquist's Theorem works, in theory, and then after you understand that we'll try to work on your understanding of it in the real world.
About your square wave, if can be reproduced with an infinite sampling rate. Obviously not realizable but make sure you are accurate about things like this. Also do you understand that every single components in your audio system is a low-pass filter. From your needle on the record to the amplifier, to the crossovers to the speakers. Getting anything resembling a square wave out of your tweeters or even head phones is laughable.
It sounded like an interesting idea that would have been fun to go to, but my friend couldn't make it. Still, it was an intriguing way out of the problem you're describing.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I think the Rocky Horror Picture Show is perhaps the last refuge for the idea that a movie can be a social event now. That and first-day showings of movies like Star Wars.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Most disinterested experts agree that digital projection sucks compared to film.
I even read that one reviewer slammed a movie for being really terribly shot, it turned out he just had the misfortune of seeing that movie in a digital projection theatre and had to apologize to the filmmakers.
You go on autopilot flaming some imaginary "socialists" without even trying to understand what the issue is.
"This model in action is called a Market, and I suspect this is what Cox most despises. "
Actually if you payed any attention you might find out that this "market" you talk about is what the studios despise the most.
Had they made these demands 100 years ago, they would have been in imminent physical danger. Gun owning citizens 100 year ago were far more militant about protecting their civil rights than they are now.
Vinyl is largely harmonic distortions, CD is largely inharmonic distortions. The latter are damaging at far lower levels than harmonic distortions, and have different effects on the sound. If you fry out a recording with a bunch of inharmonic distortion (example: realaudio) it doesn't matter if it can pass a 0hz-20K test tone, the fact is if you play a voice through it you'll lose everything in the way of emotive overtones and subtle sonic cues. The problem is more in the domain of resolution than frequency response.
Are you implying that the difference between a piano and an organ comes from frequencies above 20khz? Remember that 20khz is the aproximate limit of human hearing.
If any analog equipment could perfectly reproduce sound well above 20khz (or 25khz for the women and children) why would it matter if nobody but my dog could hear it?
Digital will always remain an approximation, with some error potential.
;-)
Hey, I'm cool with people who love their vinyl and spurn CD's. That's their right, and to boot they get to have a groovy music collection in huge cardboard sleeves with lots of room for decent jacket art.
But vinyl is also an "approximation", analog or no. The only limits on its ability to faithfully replay recorded sounds are the precision with which it was manufactured, and the sonic limits of the recording and playback apparatus. But I posit to you that digital technology can and ultimately will pass vinyl in terms of how closely it replicates the original sound. I suspect this has already happened, but if not, think of this. At some point, the sampling rate of digital recordings will surpass the ability to economically cut a modulated groove in a plastic disc. At that point, the digital recording will be unquestionably superior.
In the meantime, this CD-defending twit is going for a jog, and taking his music with him
Freedom: "I won't!"
Pretty soon, the eternal corporate entities who want to own all copyrights to everything will strangle the artists. (A remake is much cheaper to make than something risky and original. [A rerun is cheaper still.)
Soon the only recourse for an artist will be to copyleft their work and to create their own distribution channels. (FTP with a commercial protocol sending an email to the artist about the copy just transmitted.)
If you're artist, its better to get $1/copy from potentially a lot of people than to sell your rights away for this month's rent and to get squat else FOR EVER.
Once the media outlets own the work, that's it. They live forever so their copyright never expires, unlike a real human being who eventually dies.
Even at that, reselling, rerunning and re-issueing is a lot more profitable than supporting creative artists so look for acquisitions to wind down.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
The monopoly of people who are members of the MPAA, which controls what movies get made, where & when they get shown, and when, if, and how you can watch movies at home after you legally pay for them. That monopoly.
"Independent artist" means an artist who didn't sell out to the MPAA, the people who are trying to take away your right to own a PC that isn't controlled by the MPAA.
My solution is simple: education and double-blind tests. That way we can resolve the debate about CDs and vinyl.
For you is this a debate of what is accurate or what sounds lifelike? If you want lifelike, I'll give you an equalizer or a DSP and make it sound however you want.
Unless you and any audiophiles out there tell us what exactly is better about vinyl and can quantify it, we have no chance of ever making CDs improve. Right now we can't even determine if vinyl is in fact better than CDs.
In the absence of a cite to REAL evidence to support all of your whining, your position (however sound it may be in terms of mathematical theory or physics)
I don't know how things work on your planet, spaceman, but down here on terra, we consider "physics" to be pretty much synonymous with "REAL evidence."
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
It's partially that, but also partially in what you happen to think is good sound. John Dunlavy (founder of DAL) has written some articles on the topic and I think he's spot on. Basically what he claims is that what people take to be "good" in sound does not always or perhaps even often translate into accurate sound. Now his speakers are all engineered from the accuracy standpoint, and do a great job (I can't think of many other speakers that can make acoustic square waves). That's why many audiophiles like things like tube amplifiers, records, and so on. It's not ebcause they are more accurate representations of sound, but because it gives a sound they are accoustomed to and find pleaseing. For example tube amps are often characterized as having a "warm" sound. What this translates to in real terms is a certian kind of distortion to midrange sounds. It sound great on certian instruments (electric guitar) and some people like the sound overall. However, it is not accurate.
Now this is fine, as Ellington used to say "If it sounds good, it IS good." If you like the sound given by a certian kind of equipment, by all means listen on it. However the problem comes in that many audiophiles begin to believe that subjective good sound is equivelant to objective accurate sound, which just isn't the case.
Personally, since I do studio type work accuracy is key for me. While your ears can tell you something about that in informal, non-blind listening test, you can only really get the facts from proper objective measurements and from good double blind tests.
The fact that AOTC is digital means that it is easier for the studios to distribute the film in a more timely manner doesn't it? I thought that was one of the attractions of digital media for the studios. As well as getting the product out there faster (and therefore getting money in sooner) they get the added promotional advantages from close releases (eg news of record breaking box office takings in America hitting us in Australia close to when the film is actually released here).
Of course, this is another reason why region encoding on DVD's should die. When movies start being released to cinemas simultaneously around the world there should be no reason to region encode DVDs in an effort to "protect" markets that are months behind.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
One: a Talking Heads compilation.
Don't even get me started on how easy it is for the shiny coating layer on the back to flake off.
I'm a Blue Oyster Cult fan and when the CDs started to be issued I bought a few just after CBS was bought over by Sony. Two of the disks had Tip-Ex (corrector fluid) on the boxes and the back of the discs themselves, while Fire of Unknown Origin had little strips of black sticky tape in the same places.
Being a naturally curious sort of person I scraped the Tip-Ex off to see what it was covering, which turned out to be the old "copyright CBS" text. The disc, of course, would not play after that as the simple act of scraping off some crap on the back of the disc had worn a hole through the back plastic and the "tinfoil" underneath. I returned the discs to the shop and professed ignorance of how it had happened.
I often wonder how much it cost Sony to have all those little bits of Tip-Ex and sticky tape applied to CBS' stock when they took them over, and how long it took to do it.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Are you sure about that? IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that isn't part of copyright law - rather it's something that's fairly standard in employment contracts.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
W00t! Thanks for the link, man. Both the Landmark and Laemmle chains are still indie. This means that there are literally DOZENS of indie theatres in Los Angeles to patronize.
You'd think that in LA there would be a nice, big film festival to go to each year. Hey, this is where the Industry is, right? Wrong. We haven't had a big festival since Filmex folded its tent. Thanks a whole freakin' lot. I bet the MPAA has something to do with this...sort of like how the Illuminati have something to do with just about everything in Robert Anton Wilson's immortal trilogy.
Thanks!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Well I suppose you could do that, but he'd ask you to leave. I guess my point is, the fact that you CAN'T do that doesn't make it a monopoly.
I have one of these. Essentially what it is is a blank cd with a tiny little brush connected to one part of CD. As the CD spins, the light brush does contact the lens.