"if you're downloading music without permission of the copyright holder, you're a thief."
No, you're a copyright violator. Which is still wrong and illegal, but NOT THEFT.
Here's how Dict.org defines "theft":
"1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief."
You're not stealing their music, they still have it. You're also NOT "stealing their rights", as some others have argued. They still have their rights, and you cannot lawfully claim rights to their music, therefore no rights have been displaced.
You're IGNORING their rights, certainly. This is still not THEFT!
'On March 19, 1998, Part VIII of the Copyright Act dealing with private copying came into force. Until that time, copying any sound recording for almost any purpose infringed copyright, although, in practice, the prohibition was largely unenforceable. The amendment to the Act legalized copying of sound recordings of musical works onto audio recording media for the private use of the person who makes the copy (referred to as "private copying"). In addition, the amendment made provision for the imposition of a levy on blank audio recording media to compensate authors, performers and makers who own copyright in eligible sound recordings being copied for private use. The Copyright Board's decision issued today sets a levy for this purpose.'
Note how it specifically says "the person who made the copy", and NOT "the Owner"!
Furthermore... why on earth would they create a levy to compensate authors if it was only for personal backups? That makes no sense at all. The levy is there to compensate for OTHER people making their own copies.
Yeah... Sword of Shannara is so much like LotR it reads like an homage. I mean really... two rustic lads in a rural village, suddenly a foreboding wizard-type shows up, makes them leave on an artifact quest to destroy a dark lord, while his dark minions close in... Allanon's fight and fall with the Skull Bearer is a carbon copy of Khazad-dum.. Hall of Kings is the Paths of the Dead... Skull Mountain is Mount Doom... the list just goes on and on. Check out this page.
It's still a well written novel though, I quite enjoyed it, and it really launched my interest in fantasy before I even knew about Lord of the Rings.
Dragonlance isn't the greatest thing in the world, but I still find myself coming back to it on occasion... all those great characters like Tanis, Sturm, Raistlin, Kitiara and everyone else just resonate and stay with me like old friends that I have to visit every once in a while:)
Irons would be PERFECT, good call... they'd have to make him look younger though... despite Raist's frailty and premature aged appearance, the Majere brothers are what? Late twenties or early thirties in the Chronicles?
Haven't seen The Replacements. I've wondered how Kevin Sorbo would fare as Caramon. He has the looks, build, and charisma.. not sure if he could portray the vulnerability and dependance Caramon has with Raistlin convincingly though.
I like Jason Lee a lot, but am not sure about him as Tas... he has the smart-aleck attitude down perfect, but when I picture him trying to replicate Tas's innocent and earnest side, I can't help but wince.
Somehow I see (a shrunken) Joe Pesci making a great Tas... again, if they could de-age him a fair bit though, so maybe not.
"But then, Dragonlance wasn't written with the same skill, respect and care that went in LotR."
*shrugs* What is, really? Tolkien spent most of his life crafting his languages and mythologies for Middle Earth.
NOTHING else has that incredibly detailed depth and history. The only thing I've read that approaches that same sort of feeling is Herbert's original Dune.
Robert Jordan has tried and failed with a series ten times as long to create that kind of richness.. now he's just running in circles and cannibalizing his own dangling plot threads.
Dragonlance just sets out to tell a fun and interesting story, with characters you can care about, and IMHO it succeeds at that, and I think it'd make a great fantasy flick if done right.
Dragonlance isn't a ripoff of Lord of the Rings. The main characters and storyline are incredibly different. If you're talking about the fantasy setting in general, elves and dwarves and dragons and such (which Dragonlance got from D&D, which is what it evolved from), Tolkien didn't invent that either. Now, Sword of Shannara, THAT'S a blatant ripoff of Lord of the Rings. Still a decent read though.
And I haven't a clue what your cave-elf and musical-forest-dwarf stuff is about. That's not from DL Chronicles or Legends. (Most DL books outside these two core trilogies are indeed crap, I will freely admit. What book did you read anyway?)
They WERE making a Dragonlance movie a few years back. Then, Dragonheart, that awful movie with Sean Connery as the talking dragon came out, flopped, and the executive hive-mind decided that "dragon movies don't do well", so they decided to make it into a generic D&D movie, Dungeons & Dragons, which is one of the worst movies of all time, and makes Dragonheart look like an Oscar contender. When I saw this disaster, I was relieved they decided to avoid Dragonlance... because the saga would've never been able to recover from something like that.
It's my hope that someone will come along and make the Dragonlance Chronicles with the same skill, respect, and care that went into Lord of the Rings.
I've always thought Robert Redford would make an amazing Tanis, but he might be getting a bit old now. I think Michael Biehn would make an excellent Sturm. Laurana and Goldmoon should be pretty easy to cast. The real trick would be finding a compelling Raistlin who looked like a scrawny version of whoever they get for Caramon.
Star Trek's format has always been very episodic.. The Original Series, Next Generation, and the earlier years of Deep Space 9.. were all characterized by NOTHING ACTUALLY CHANGING. At the end of every episode (or perhaps multi-parter), things are invariably the same as when they started.
Like think about TNG... at the end of the series, what has changed since the first episode? I mean REAL widespread changes? A few minor crew position changes.. Picard has his Borg memories to drag up every once in a while... Data has a centuries old head.. oooOOOOooo... but REALLY... it's still the exact same show. You could take virtually any episode plot from any season, and plop it into any other season, and few if any changes would have to be made.
Babylon 5 shattered all this. A 5 year storyline was planned out from the beginning, including an outline for every single episode. Furthermore, JM Straczynski wrote somewhere in the vicinity of 80% of the episodes entirely himself... the depth, scope, complexity, and CONSISTENCY is simply breathtaking in the later seasons. Star Trek, and nearly all television shows, are essentially anthologies with the same characters and setting. Babylon 5 is a full-blown novel, with each season representing Introduction, Rising Action, Complications, Climax, and Denouement.
Anyway, in the later seasons, DS9 started trying to tell a more continuous story, with the prophecies, wormhole and war against the Dominion and such. It did add more weight to the series' conclusion, but was a pale shadow of B5's galaxy spanning saga, IMHO.
Babylon 5 was the first TV show to make extensive, regular use of CGI. It was mostly geeks in garages/basements fooling around with Lightwave, too.;)
In addition to all the space sequences, a great number of interior sets were also virtual, such as docking bays, the observation dome, and the main station length "outdoors" expanse. (Let's not talk about the transport shuttle tracks)
Around this time, Star Trek was saying they'd never use CGI and would stick with their models. Now look at Voyager and Enterprise...;) DS9 also tried to start copying B5's "epic continuous story arc" format in the later seasons. (Backoff, I said "tried to")
You said that with ALL lightweight flying devices, you really CAN'T use them outside.
That's pretty inclusive and negative.:) I submit that there already ARE lightweight flying "devices" in abundance... just not mechanical ones.:)
Perhaps I am being generous in my treatment of the word "device".. but aren't organisms essentially devices, "designed" by evolution? Or God, depending on your beliefs:)
"A big problem with all of the tiny flying devices is that you really can't use them outside. The problem is the wind."
Well, I must respectfully disagree; I don't think it's "near impossible", merely an unsolved problem at this point. Trillions of lightweight insects seem to make do pretty well, so there should be no fundamental obstacle from a basic physics standpoint.
I can however, assert a very strong probability that some races will get off their planet before they destroy it.
After all, we have... not sustainably of course, but there's no reason to think a self-sustaining extraterrestrial colony is impossible before the homeworld is wiped out by virus|nuclear winter|Dubya's general stupidity|asteroid|zombies|other.
Bombadil was left out of the movie in part because the Ring does not affect him. (Personally I think the omission of that longish segment was a good move.) Jackson is really trying to hammer home The-Ring-Is-Ultimate-All-Consuming-Evil in these films.. witness Gandalf's reaction to the briefest touch of the ring, where in the book, he tosses it into the fire by hand to no ill effect.
The only change that's REALY irked me so far (although this C. Lee news is not great) has been Faramir dragging Frodo back to Osgiliath. (Again, the ring's evil is amplified) That strikes me as a fundamental shift in his nature. Apparently they did that to give Faramir's character more of a "journey". (They seem to want that for all the characters.. which perhaps helps explain early Aragorn's "thug" behaviour as you describe)
They are really going for satisfying cinematic experience, not perfect novel plot accuracy... although no expense has been spared at making all the details of Middle Earth authentic. Personally I've been more than thrilled with the job they've done so far, and have tremendous faith that I will love their treatment of RotK. It's a pity about Mr. Lee though, he's obviously quite upset about it, and I don't blame him. You'd think they could find a few minutes for the palantir encounter.
Honestly, I always thought Obi Wan vs Vader was pretty weak.. instead of two legendary masters, it looked like two seniors trying to remember how to have sex or something. I wouldn't mind if they made it a bit more kinetic... just as long as they keep it elegant and don't overdo it. I don't want to see Obi Wan turned into a wall-bouncing muppet;)
"I don't really believe that the incompetents we see in the original trilogy can be the same as the competent stormtroopers in the new trilogy."
I always laugh in the original trilogy, when Luke and Obi Wan find the destroyed sandcrawler, and Obi Wan says he knows it's the work of the Imperials, because "Only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise!", and then throughout the rest of the trilogy they continually prove they couldn't hit a Tatooine sand dune if they were buried in one.:)
Yes.. there was an elaborate, choreographed fight sequence with Indy and his whip versus the swordsmaster, but Ford was suffering from dysentery (sp?) so he suggested just shooting the guy... and thus a classic movie gem was born:)
I think it's pretty dismissive calling Lucas the "main creative force" behind Indy. Maybe the ORIGINAL creative force, but certainly not main.
Yes, he came up with the character (of course, by "came up with" I mean blatantly lifted from pulp adventure stories such as Allan Quartermain, but all art is derivative anyway)
Yes, he came up with the story. But he didn't write the screenplays, and he didn't direct the movies. He provided funding, and was the initial "idea man", but I think the brilliance of say, Raiders, is due largely to Spielberg and Lawrence Kasdan (who also wrote Empire and Jedi)
And yeah.. as another poster asked... why on earth does it "pain you" to admit Spielberg is a better director? Lucas has proved time and time again (in the last 20 years, anyway) that he is an awful director. Ep 1 & 2 are badly written, badly acted toy commercials.
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30-45 minutes is nothing. Start it before dinner, watch it after.
Or how about streaming? If it takes less time to download it than it does to watch it, in theory you can start watching it instantly.
No, you're a copyright violator. Which is still wrong and illegal, but NOT THEFT.
Here's how Dict.org defines "theft":
You're not stealing their music, they still have it. You're also NOT "stealing their rights", as some others have argued. They still have their rights, and you cannot lawfully claim rights to their music, therefore no rights have been displaced.
You're IGNORING their rights, certainly. This is still not THEFT!
Why is this so hard for people to understand?
And booze. Don't forget the booze. We need to send as much Canadian beer into America as possible, on general humanitarian principles.
Why won't SOMEONE think of the Yankee beer drinkers??? Poor souls.
Quote (emphasis mine):
Note how it specifically says "the person who made the copy", and NOT "the Owner"!
Furthermore... why on earth would they create a levy to compensate authors if it was only for personal backups? That makes no sense at all. The levy is there to compensate for OTHER people making their own copies.
Yeah... Sword of Shannara is so much like LotR it reads like an homage. I mean really... two rustic lads in a rural village, suddenly a foreboding wizard-type shows up, makes them leave on an artifact quest to destroy a dark lord, while his dark minions close in... Allanon's fight and fall with the Skull Bearer is a carbon copy of Khazad-dum.. Hall of Kings is the Paths of the Dead... Skull Mountain is Mount Doom... the list just goes on and on. Check out this page.
:)
It's still a well written novel though, I quite enjoyed it, and it really launched my interest in fantasy before I even knew about Lord of the Rings.
Dragonlance isn't the greatest thing in the world, but I still find myself coming back to it on occasion... all those great characters like Tanis, Sturm, Raistlin, Kitiara and everyone else just resonate and stay with me like old friends that I have to visit every once in a while
Irons would be PERFECT, good call... they'd have to make him look younger though... despite Raist's frailty and premature aged appearance, the Majere brothers are what? Late twenties or early thirties in the Chronicles?
Haven't seen The Replacements. I've wondered how Kevin Sorbo would fare as Caramon. He has the looks, build, and charisma.. not sure if he could portray the vulnerability and dependance Caramon has with Raistlin convincingly though.
I like Jason Lee a lot, but am not sure about him as Tas... he has the smart-aleck attitude down perfect, but when I picture him trying to replicate Tas's innocent and earnest side, I can't help but wince.
Somehow I see (a shrunken) Joe Pesci making a great Tas... again, if they could de-age him a fair bit though, so maybe not.
"But then, Dragonlance wasn't written with the same skill, respect and care that went in LotR."
*shrugs* What is, really? Tolkien spent most of his life crafting his languages and mythologies for Middle Earth.
NOTHING else has that incredibly detailed depth and history. The only thing I've read that approaches that same sort of feeling is Herbert's original Dune.
Robert Jordan has tried and failed with a series ten times as long to create that kind of richness.. now he's just running in circles and cannibalizing his own dangling plot threads.
Dragonlance just sets out to tell a fun and interesting story, with characters you can care about, and IMHO it succeeds at that, and I think it'd make a great fantasy flick if done right.
Dragonlance isn't a ripoff of Lord of the Rings. The main characters and storyline are incredibly different. If you're talking about the fantasy setting in general, elves and dwarves and dragons and such (which Dragonlance got from D&D, which is what it evolved from), Tolkien didn't invent that either. Now, Sword of Shannara, THAT'S a blatant ripoff of Lord of the Rings. Still a decent read though.
And I haven't a clue what your cave-elf and musical-forest-dwarf stuff is about. That's not from DL Chronicles or Legends. (Most DL books outside these two core trilogies are indeed crap, I will freely admit. What book did you read anyway?)
They WERE making a Dragonlance movie a few years back. Then, Dragonheart , that awful movie with Sean Connery as the talking dragon came out, flopped, and the executive hive-mind decided that "dragon movies don't do well", so they decided to make it into a generic D&D movie, Dungeons & Dragons , which is one of the worst movies of all time, and makes Dragonheart look like an Oscar contender. When I saw this disaster, I was relieved they decided to avoid Dragonlance... because the saga would've never been able to recover from something like that.
It's my hope that someone will come along and make the Dragonlance Chronicles with the same skill, respect, and care that went into Lord of the Rings.
I've always thought Robert Redford would make an amazing Tanis, but he might be getting a bit old now. I think Michael Biehn would make an excellent Sturm. Laurana and Goldmoon should be pretty easy to cast. The real trick would be finding a compelling Raistlin who looked like a scrawny version of whoever they get for Caramon.
Star Trek's format has always been very episodic.. The Original Series, Next Generation, and the earlier years of Deep Space 9.. were all characterized by NOTHING ACTUALLY CHANGING. At the end of every episode (or perhaps multi-parter), things are invariably the same as when they started.
Like think about TNG... at the end of the series, what has changed since the first episode? I mean REAL widespread changes? A few minor crew position changes.. Picard has his Borg memories to drag up every once in a while... Data has a centuries old head.. oooOOOOooo... but REALLY... it's still the exact same show. You could take virtually any episode plot from any season, and plop it into any other season, and few if any changes would have to be made.
Babylon 5 shattered all this. A 5 year storyline was planned out from the beginning, including an outline for every single episode. Furthermore, JM Straczynski wrote somewhere in the vicinity of 80% of the episodes entirely himself... the depth, scope, complexity, and CONSISTENCY is simply breathtaking in the later seasons. Star Trek, and nearly all television shows, are essentially anthologies with the same characters and setting. Babylon 5 is a full-blown novel, with each season representing Introduction, Rising Action, Complications, Climax, and Denouement.
Anyway, in the later seasons, DS9 started trying to tell a more continuous story, with the prophecies, wormhole and war against the Dominion and such. It did add more weight to the series' conclusion, but was a pale shadow of B5's galaxy spanning saga, IMHO.
Babylon 5 was the first TV show to make extensive, regular use of CGI. It was mostly geeks in garages/basements fooling around with Lightwave, too. ;)
;) DS9 also tried to start copying B5's "epic continuous story arc" format in the later seasons. (Backoff, I said "tried to")
In addition to all the space sequences, a great number of interior sets were also virtual, such as docking bays, the observation dome, and the main station length "outdoors" expanse. (Let's not talk about the transport shuttle tracks)
Around this time, Star Trek was saying they'd never use CGI and would stick with their models. Now look at Voyager and Enterprise...
LOL.. what, do you go around looking for "You must be new here" comments to pounce on? ;) Welcome to Slashdot, in any case. :)
You need to do this with Scientology tapes, then they actually give you their money willingly. ;)
You must be new here ;)
You said that with ALL lightweight flying devices, you really CAN'T use them outside.
:) I submit that there already ARE lightweight flying "devices" in abundance... just not mechanical ones. :)
:)
That's pretty inclusive and negative.
Perhaps I am being generous in my treatment of the word "device".. but aren't organisms essentially devices, "designed" by evolution? Or God, depending on your beliefs
"A big problem with all of the tiny flying devices is that you really can't use them outside. The problem is the wind."
Well, I must respectfully disagree; I don't think it's "near impossible", merely an unsolved problem at this point. Trillions of lightweight insects seem to make do pretty well, so there should be no fundamental obstacle from a basic physics standpoint.
I can however, assert a very strong probability that some races will get off their planet before they destroy it.
After all, we have... not sustainably of course, but there's no reason to think a self-sustaining extraterrestrial colony is impossible before the homeworld is wiped out by virus|nuclear winter|Dubya's general stupidity|asteroid|zombies|other.
"What makes viruses controversial is that they cannot reproduce by themselves; they need to infect another cell."
:)
Hmm, I shall have to double check when I get off work, but I'm fairly certain that: I cannot reproduce by myself; I need to infect another human.
Oh sure, the FIRST Helm's Deep battle, maybe. But what about the SECOND?? I guess you skipped that chapter. ;)
Bombadil was left out of the movie in part because the Ring does not affect him. (Personally I think the omission of that longish segment was a good move.) Jackson is really trying to hammer home The-Ring-Is-Ultimate-All-Consuming-Evil in these films.. witness Gandalf's reaction to the briefest touch of the ring, where in the book, he tosses it into the fire by hand to no ill effect.
The only change that's REALY irked me so far (although this C. Lee news is not great) has been Faramir dragging Frodo back to Osgiliath. (Again, the ring's evil is amplified) That strikes me as a fundamental shift in his nature. Apparently they did that to give Faramir's character more of a "journey". (They seem to want that for all the characters.. which perhaps helps explain early Aragorn's "thug" behaviour as you describe)
They are really going for satisfying cinematic experience, not perfect novel plot accuracy... although no expense has been spared at making all the details of Middle Earth authentic. Personally I've been more than thrilled with the job they've done so far, and have tremendous faith that I will love their treatment of RotK. It's a pity about Mr. Lee though, he's obviously quite upset about it, and I don't blame him. You'd think they could find a few minutes for the palantir encounter.
and of course it will offer you a way to purchase it through MSN :)
Honestly, I always thought Obi Wan vs Vader was pretty weak.. instead of two legendary masters, it looked like two seniors trying to remember how to have sex or something. I wouldn't mind if they made it a bit more kinetic... just as long as they keep it elegant and don't overdo it. I don't want to see Obi Wan turned into a wall-bouncing muppet ;)
"I don't really believe that the incompetents we see in the original trilogy can be the same as the competent stormtroopers in the new trilogy."
:)
I always laugh in the original trilogy, when Luke and Obi Wan find the destroyed sandcrawler, and Obi Wan says he knows it's the work of the Imperials, because "Only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise!", and then throughout the rest of the trilogy they continually prove they couldn't hit a Tatooine sand dune if they were buried in one.
Yes.. there was an elaborate, choreographed fight sequence with Indy and his whip versus the swordsmaster, but Ford was suffering from dysentery (sp?) so he suggested just shooting the guy... and thus a classic movie gem was born :)
I think it's pretty dismissive calling Lucas the "main creative force" behind Indy. Maybe the ORIGINAL creative force, but certainly not main.
Yes, he came up with the character (of course, by "came up with" I mean blatantly lifted from pulp adventure stories such as Allan Quartermain, but all art is derivative anyway)
Yes, he came up with the story. But he didn't write the screenplays, and he didn't direct the movies. He provided funding, and was the initial "idea man", but I think the brilliance of say, Raiders, is due largely to Spielberg and Lawrence Kasdan (who also wrote Empire and Jedi)
And yeah.. as another poster asked... why on earth does it "pain you" to admit Spielberg is a better director? Lucas has proved time and time again (in the last 20 years, anyway) that he is an awful director. Ep 1 & 2 are badly written, badly acted toy commercials.