There's this really funny (and tragic) article in the NY Times (free registration required, yadda yadda, blah blah blah) that proves just how rectocranially-inverted these Internet advertisers are. The article talks about how much "better" ads are since advertisers started using new, larger ads.
Ms. Lyon said the new ad sizes were instrumental in getting [five well-known] designers to agree to the effort. "Before, you couldn't do as much with this medium," she said. "It's hard to jump up and down about a banner."
...
In that ad, which was designed by the agency J. Walter Thompson, visitors to Yahoo's front page saw birds flying from the banner ad at the top to another ad on the right-hand side of the page. There, the birds started pecking at bird seed, revealing an image of a Ford Explorer. When users clicked on the Explorer, the Yahoo page shook as the sound of an engine started. The page finally faded to white, then gave way to a full-size photograph of the Explorer.
"Users liked it a lot," said Murray Gaylord, Yahoo's vice president for brand marketing, "They said 'As long as you don't do this to me every page, all day long, this was fun.'"
Is it any wonder the Internet is so ad-ridden? The ads are being placed by people who are living in their own little dream worlds--worlds where people not only like being advertised to, they crave it.
I once thought that Pohl & Kornbluth's The Man Who Sold Venus (aka The Space Merchants) was just satire. Sadly, there's more truth to it than I realized.
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If you liked Zelazny, you might like . . .
on
Lord of Light
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· Score: 2
. . . P.C. Hodgell's long-unavailable Godstalk, Dark of the Moon, and Seeker's Mask. The first two books have been recently republished in a combined volume called Dark of the Gods, and the third saw mass printing for the first time this year. They always seemed to me like a cross between Zelazny and fantasy author Robin McKinley, with a bit of Thieves' World and a tinge of the Cthulu mythoi for flavor.
If you're also into roleplaying, the game Nobilis might also interest you. It's hard to describe it in one sentence (which is why I linked to a review, instead), but it cites Zelazny, and particularly Lord of Light, as one of its influences. It's out of print and hard to find just at the moment, but an expanded second edition is coming out soon. It's a very sweet-looking game.
And as always, Alexlit's collaborative filtering recommendation system can look at the books you like and love, and suggest more you might enjoy.
IANAL, but since "Pioneer" is a common usage word, it can only be trademarked in the context of its particular company or product. As long as the two Pioneers do not compete directly in the same field (so that there is a potential for confusion), there is no problem. (As for the Pioneers that sell the same things--perhaps they're just differently-named branches of the same company?) This is how we can have Jobs's Apple Computer, and the Beatles' Apple Records, both unrelated to each other; they don't compete in the same field, so there is less possibility of confusion.
Again, like I said in another post to this discussion, the problem is not someone naming an unrelated item something similar to Illustrator; it's someone naming a very similar item something similar to Illustrator. This could cause consumer confusion, and thus weaken Adobe's brand equity.
It's been quite a long while since my Marketing class, a part of which focussed on trademarks specifically, and again, IANAL (though I am somewhat anal:) but trademarks cover a spectrum of types of words, from completely made-up words like Exxon or Kleenex, to everyday usage words, like Illustrator. The made-up ones are distinctive enough that they stand as trademarks by themselves--you can't make an Exxon brand of clothing, because Exxon is a unique word that has never been used to refer to anything but the petroleum company.
The everyday usage ones are harder to defend, and are usually limited to a specific context. For instance, the software trademark under discussion isn't just on the word "Illustrator," but specifically "Illustrator the vector graphics software." This is how we can have both an Apple Computer ("Think different") and an Apple Records ("Imagine all the people..."), both unrelated to each other. If you wanted to make an Illustrator, or Killustrator, line of clothing, or brand of beer, or perhaps even a computer role-playing game about a starving artist who goes postal ("Kill-ustrator"), Adobe would have less of a legal leg to stand on. (Though it's possibly still a bit "iffy" in the case of the computer game.) Making a vector graphics program for Linux named "Illustrator" with a "K" tacked onto the front...nuh-uh. That dog won't hunt.
As for FreeMWare--yes, they did change their name. But they started out with a name only one phonic different from VMWare, and worked under that name for several months. They only chose the name, resurrecting and renaming a previous project, after they realized how well VMWare worked, and that there was nothing similar in the "free" software community. As for where they got their code from...think that would matter in a court of law? Think where Killustrator's code came from matters to Adobe? The name and the intended functionality are very similar. You cannot claim that the choice of name was coincidence. Almost any reasonable person, seeing the similarities in these names, would come to the same conclusion--the name is copied in a blatant attempt to demonstrate that the "open source" program is intended to do the same thing as the commercial program whose name it is copying. Thus, it has a potential for consumer confusion (what was that the fellow said in the SSH thing a while back? That he kept getting support requests for an SSH client he didn't even write?), and for dilution of the trademark. Otherwise, why choose a name so similar in the first place?
I've watched this trend of copycat naming with no small amount of distaste and trepidation. I do not fault people for trying to create similar programs--otherwise there would be only one OS in the world, and one word processor, and so on. It just burns me that they intentionally choose these similar names just so they show how clever they can be. "Heh...'Kill'-ustrator. That's sooo kewl!" "It's like VMWare, but it's free--so we'll call it 'FreeMWare'. What's a Freem? Who cares, it sounds neat!" And as sad as it is that the fellow has to pony up $2000 to greedy lawyers, I can't help but feel a bit vindicated that these cutesy names are finally becoming apparent as the liabilities (both aesthetic and legal) they really are. I hope people get the hint.
What's more, though IANAL, a trademark owner has to defend his trademark if an infringement is brought to his attention--or else someone in a court case down the road can say "You knew about infringers XYZ and you didn't do anything about them; you don't have the right to do anything about me, either."
It's definitely too bad about the lawyers demanding $2K, as well as all those other insane concessions, but that's something they're going to have to work out between themselves. The fellow simply should have known better to begin with.
This should come as a major wake-up call to all the people who make packages with functions and names similar to trademarked programs--the KIllustrators and FreeMWares of the world: Don't mess with companies who have more money and more lawyers than you. You can complain all you want about how incredibly unfair it is, and deeply wrong, and boycott and send nasty letters all you want to, but at the end of the day, they'll win. And don't look to the Electronic Frontier Foundation or the ACLU to help defend you, either--your freedom of speech does not include the freedom to transgress others' property. DeCSS is somewhat defensible due to the ambiguous nature of the DCMA versus the public's right of fair use, but this is quite a different matter--there is no DeCSS-like legal ambiguity about trading on someone else's name to try to popularize your own product.
That's going to be rather difficult,considering some of the original actors are *DEAD*.
Even the dead actors make an appearance in Richard Hatch's Galactica Second Coming trailer (which can only be seen at conventions Hatch attends in person, due to SAG restrictions and such). It contains John Colicos's last performance before he died, and also has an appearance by Lorne Greene in the form of stock footage from the original Galactica movie (with permission obtained from Greene's family). Hatch has said that there could have been more appearances by those actors, with the aid of stock footage and CGI, in the Second Coming series as he conceived it. --
Hey, don't knock it. It's not every SF actor who gets to make his own low-budget films starring big name actors.:) Hatch attended the local SF convention twice (most recently, Erin Gray from the Buck Rogers show was also there, as were a couple of the B5 crew--particularly Jason Carter), and apart from the BSG thing, he seemed pretty happy with the way his life is going. And that's the important thing, isn't it? It doesn't matter how successful you are as long as you're happy.
Worthy of mention is the non-BSG project Hatch is trying to get off the ground: The Great War of Magellan--which also stars Jason Carter. --
Though it's not specifically devoted to the new incarnation that Brian Singer is putting together, BattlestarGalactica.com has been at the center of keeping BSG fandom alive for years now, in conjunction with actor Richard Hatch (who played Apollo, not the Survivor guy).
Note that though the new show guys are making noises about how they're going to be faithful to the original, and feature some of the original characters, they still haven't cast any of the original actors yet . .. --
Probably because it's been tried, but DVD drives weren't quite ubiquitous enough yet to make the few software titles on which they tried it worthwhile. They were more expensive to make and burn than the same thing on CDs, and thus tended to be more expensive to consumers than the same thing on CDs, and not offer any additional content they couldn't also obtain that way. They were a big flop, and interest in DVD-ROM software faded.
Of course, now that it's a few years later, and more people have DVD-ROMs, and the discs are getting more inexpensive to make, maybe it's just about time for them to try again. --
The only substantial content this affects is the stuff ten years old or so. From back when people hadn't even heard of electronic publishing, so it wasn't included in their contracts.
Ever since that time, most of the smart publishers have already included electronic media clauses in their contracts--with the writers being justly compensated, or else going into it knowing full well that e-rights are included in their payment.
As an aspiring writer myself, I'm very concerned about writers' rights. This case was an important one, because it helps put control back in the hands of the writers, where they belong--which is something everyone seems to be (or pretends to be) so gung-ho about in the Napster arena for musicians.
Another important case to watch would be this one, as Random House sues a small e-book publisher over rights not assigned to them in their contracts.
The company maintains that an author's grant of rights to publish "in book form" includes e-books, largely because they are the "functional equivalent" of the printed text.
This is certainly news to those books' authors, who had not stipulated e-books in their contracts with Random House, and were fully behind Rosetta's e-publishing them!
As to whether articles get pulled from archives...I don't think it will happen as much as people fear. Most writers are reasonable people, and typically wouldn't insist on bank-breaking terms. As long as the publishers are willing to negotiate, and don't just want to cut off their noses to spite their faces, I think things will work out just fine.
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According to a piece in the Bits a few weeks back, DVD rentals are much more attractive to the rental chains, too, because of their more attractive pricing. There isn't a "priced for rental" DVD tier yet--instead of having to pay inflated prices per tape when they first come out, they can buy DVDs at the low retail price the same as the rest of us. More profit margin, there.
The studios are making noises about changing this and instituting a rental-pricing tier, and the rental shops are fighting it tooth and nail. It'll probably happen sooner or later, though. --
I don't see anything wrong with dropping those groups. Heck, I don't see anything wrong with dropping all binaries newsgroups. I mean, my God, do you know how much stuff flows through the Internet in binary newsgroups nowadays? Do you know how much bandwidth is consumed by these terrabytes upon terrabytes of binary files? Files that are even bigger than they should be, because uuencoding increases their file size by something like 50%? I say kill all the binary newsgroups, and let our gaming pings and web load times improve.
Binary newsgroups have had their day; they're no longer needed. They were made way back during the Dark Ages, when there was no World Wide Web, no other place where binary files could be posted. But now we've got the Web. We've got Napster (such as it is). We've got Gnutella(/Bearshare/Limewire). We've got IRC bots. We've got Mojo Nation. Soon we'll have Freenet. We've got all these other ways that files can be transferred, without using as much bandwidth or having to worry about losing chunks of the files in transit.
Let's use those methods, let binary groups fade away, and save bandwidth for more important things--like fragging.:) --
And, for that matter, Serious Sam also has the biggest levels and most wide open spaces of any first person shooter I've ever played. And for under $20, you can't go wrong. --
Except that he hates Duke Nukem with a vengeance, because he feels they ripped him off. If you do see him in person, don't ever ask him about that--you'll just set him off.
Bruce Campbell: Well, they're rip-off artists. Let them get their own damn material. It's called hiring a writer. They're blatantly ripping it off and if I was any kind of litigious guy they would've gotten a phone call by now. It's depressing and I think it's wrong. That's why Tachyon: The Fringe will kick little Duke's ass any day.
Well, the writers of the movie indicated that they'd never seen Nadia, but they did homage some elements from Miyazaki. I see no reason not to take them at their word. I mean, you have to admit that Nadia has been a fairly obscure series, as anime goes, up to now. It had a crappy Streamline dub that's long been out of print, then in the last year or so a limited edition VHS sub, and the DVDs are only starting to come out now. I've been an anime fan since 1991, and I've never seen Nadia--nor have I had a chance to. Why should they have? --
Actually, if I recall correctly, the story treatment for Nadia was done well before Laputa. It just happens that the treatment was done by the fellow who would later make Laputa--that being Hayao Miyazaki himself. (More details can be found in the FAQs on Nausicaa.net about such things.)
I haven't seen Nadia yet, though I do intend to start getting the DVDs, since the first one was just released. But in my opinion the whole "they ripped off Nadia!" deal is the work of a few sad sacks who simply don't like Disney and will look for whatever reasons they can find to bash it. Either the resemblances come from plot points commonly used by a lot of other stories, or else they're sheerly superficial.
Look at common plot points. If the movie "ripped off" anything, it would be Stargate, Laputa, Titan A.E., 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, a bit of Castle of Cagliostro, some Raiders of the Lost Ark, and a few other things. If I wanted to get really anal, I could go into all the old-timey radio shows that featured wisecracking switchboard operators like the one seen here. But really, what's the point?
The thing is, there are a lot of commonly-used ideas in here. Submarines, giant sea monsters, ancient relics that could do incredible damage in the wrong hands, greedy fortune-seekers wanting to put their wrong hands around those relics, giant monsters attacking ships, and so on. As Shakespeare said, there really is nothing new under the sun. It's all been done before, in some form or other--and the most successful tropes tend to get used over and over again, just because they are so successful.
And as for superficial coincidence . . . consider the case of Nancy Stauffer, author of some rather obscure childrens' books back in the early 1980s, and her claims of infringement by J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books. There are an awful lot of coincidences there--use of some similar names, such as a character named "Larry Potter" who wears glasses and has a cousin named "Lilly"; use of the term "muggles," which Rowling says she came up with on her own--but most of the "coincidences" she cites are just plain silly--such as the fact that both books have castles by lakes in them! The books weren't even widely known--the most they ever got was small-press publication, in America--whereas J.K. Rowling was writing her stories ten years later in England. It's unlikely in the extreme she could possibly have seen Stauffer's books--but she wrote what she wrote anyway, and golly gee, there are all these coincidences--but most of them, such as castles and lakes, are found in a lot of fantasy novels, not just the two of theirs, so it's not surprising that two unrelated fantasy novels would both have them.
As I've said, I haven't yet seen Nadia, but I really believe that most of the similarities between them are just that sort of coincidence. Either they're trappings common to many of those stories (just as fantasy stories or Westerns often have similarities), or they're outright coincidence. --
I've never read Slate, only read an article or two from Suck that were linked on Slashdot, but regularly read Salon--not for the politics, but for the tech coverage first, then books and movies. That's more or less it. I actually rather like Salon's in-depth technical articles, though most of the rest of it I could do without.
I think other people in this discussion have hit the nail on the head when they said it's not about content or dissenting opinions, it's about ad revenue dwindling and vanishing. Look at Keenspot and Sluggy Freelance, both of which have instituted "if you pay us, you'll be supporting our site(s) and you won't have to see banner ads" programs. Look at Themestream, which went belly-up, and TheVines, which looks like it's also headed for extinction. Look at all the free ISPs that have either vanished or consolidated and cut way back on the services they offer. Banner ads just don't work.
There definitely does need to be a new model for websites to earn revenue. The problem is, nobody's really sure just what it is yet. Tipping might work, but only if the tipper is willing to subscribe to the payment service used by the tippee. Micropayments sound good, but there are a whole bunch of hurdles in the way, and there's no more venture capital to develop such a system.
Whatever happens, it seems like ad banners are rapidly becoming so ineffective now that having them at all is tantamount to a superstitious gesture, like crossing your fingers or putting a horseshoe up over the door--it makes you feel better, but doesn't actually do anything. --
Have fun with your boycott. The MPAA won't notice you--or, for that matter, any of Slashdot's tiny but vocal "boycott the MPAA" crowd.
I've said it before--I'll say it again. A boycott is going to have no other effect than to gratify your ego at the cost of missing out on all the movies the rest of geekdom are enjoying. The MPAA and movie studios aren't missing your money. They're not going to go bankrupt because you aren't buying anything from them. You would need to get a heck of a lot more people to join you in your boycott even to be noticeable over all the people who haven't yet gotten around to getting DVD, but plan to sooner or later. And in a world where only twenty people show up to a much-publicized anti-DMCA protest in Washington, and where DVDs and players are being bought so fast they've become one of the fastest-growing consumer technologies ever--I just don't see that happening.
If you want to make a difference, then do something active. Donate to the EFF, write letters, tell people about the evils of region-locking and CSS (if you can explain it in terms that keep them from staring glassy-eyed at you--it's harder than it sounds). And by all means, boycott, if you don't want your money going to the MPAA. It's your money, do what you want with it. But don't you even try to present that as the overall solution. Boycotts rarely work; boycotts of popular products by a handful of people don't do very much. (I'm "boycotting" Pearl Harbor--not out of moral principles or anything, but because it looks like a really bad movie. Somehow, I don't think that's doing very much good.)
If region-encoding is going to fall, it's going to fall not because of an American geek boycott, it's going to happen because of the efforts of governments and commissions in places like Britain and Australia that are starting to get fed up by being ghettoized by the trade-restraining system imposed on them by the corporations. In the stories/.'s run over the last week or so, I can see that starting to happen. The boulder is wobbling on its perch, and sooner or later it will start rolling downhill. --
It might have cost fifty cents or so to press the disc--but what about paying to produce the disc (telecine transfers are expensive, and anamorphic ones more so--which is why it's so rare for trailers or deleted scenes to be anamorphic even when the movie itself is), paying the salaries of all the people who made it, paying for the right to press the movie in the first place, and incidental costs like storage, transportation, quality control, advertising, and--last but not least--the shareholders?
People keep whining, "Oh, but it only cost pennies to make it!" as if they feel they should only be paying a few more pennies to buy it. Pressing a disk is not all that's involved in making it. There are more costs, and plenty of them. And even with those, studios have done a bang-up job keeping DVD prices low. It's purely amazing how many DVDs you can buy for under $15 these days, and just look at all the extra stuff you get when you buy a $25 DVD instead of a $25 VHS, even not counting picture quality.
And yes, it's true that you can get Hong Kong DVDs from the source for much cheaper than American movies--only $5 a disc plus shipping in many cases--but the economic environment is different over there, the incidental costs are often lower, and the $5 discs are usually second or third releases of titles that were more expensive originally.
I'm not arguing that prices couldn't be cheaper--they could always be at least a little cheaper. But to expect to be able to get a newly-released DVD for less than $15-20 is a pipe dream. --
Slashdot Mirror
I once thought that Pohl & Kornbluth's The Man Who Sold Venus (aka The Space Merchants) was just satire. Sadly, there's more truth to it than I realized.
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If you're also into roleplaying, the game Nobilis might also interest you. It's hard to describe it in one sentence (which is why I linked to a review, instead), but it cites Zelazny, and particularly Lord of Light, as one of its influences. It's out of print and hard to find just at the moment, but an expanded second edition is coming out soon. It's a very sweet-looking game.
And as always, Alexlit's collaborative filtering recommendation system can look at the books you like and love, and suggest more you might enjoy.
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Again, like I said in another post to this discussion, the problem is not someone naming an unrelated item something similar to Illustrator; it's someone naming a very similar item something similar to Illustrator. This could cause consumer confusion, and thus weaken Adobe's brand equity.
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I think you've been watching too much Fight Club.
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The everyday usage ones are harder to defend, and are usually limited to a specific context. For instance, the software trademark under discussion isn't just on the word "Illustrator," but specifically "Illustrator the vector graphics software." This is how we can have both an Apple Computer ("Think different") and an Apple Records ("Imagine all the people..."), both unrelated to each other. If you wanted to make an Illustrator, or Killustrator, line of clothing, or brand of beer, or perhaps even a computer role-playing game about a starving artist who goes postal ("Kill-ustrator"), Adobe would have less of a legal leg to stand on. (Though it's possibly still a bit "iffy" in the case of the computer game.) Making a vector graphics program for Linux named "Illustrator" with a "K" tacked onto the front...nuh-uh. That dog won't hunt.
As for FreeMWare--yes, they did change their name. But they started out with a name only one phonic different from VMWare, and worked under that name for several months. They only chose the name, resurrecting and renaming a previous project, after they realized how well VMWare worked, and that there was nothing similar in the "free" software community. As for where they got their code from...think that would matter in a court of law? Think where Killustrator's code came from matters to Adobe? The name and the intended functionality are very similar. You cannot claim that the choice of name was coincidence. Almost any reasonable person, seeing the similarities in these names, would come to the same conclusion--the name is copied in a blatant attempt to demonstrate that the "open source" program is intended to do the same thing as the commercial program whose name it is copying. Thus, it has a potential for consumer confusion (what was that the fellow said in the SSH thing a while back? That he kept getting support requests for an SSH client he didn't even write?), and for dilution of the trademark. Otherwise, why choose a name so similar in the first place?
I've watched this trend of copycat naming with no small amount of distaste and trepidation. I do not fault people for trying to create similar programs--otherwise there would be only one OS in the world, and one word processor, and so on. It just burns me that they intentionally choose these similar names just so they show how clever they can be. "Heh...'Kill'-ustrator. That's sooo kewl!" "It's like VMWare, but it's free--so we'll call it 'FreeMWare'. What's a Freem? Who cares, it sounds neat!" And as sad as it is that the fellow has to pony up $2000 to greedy lawyers, I can't help but feel a bit vindicated that these cutesy names are finally becoming apparent as the liabilities (both aesthetic and legal) they really are. I hope people get the hint.
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Oh, yes, revolution works sooooo well these days. Why, just look how well it worked for Tim McVeigh!
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It's definitely too bad about the lawyers demanding $2K, as well as all those other insane concessions, but that's something they're going to have to work out between themselves. The fellow simply should have known better to begin with.
This should come as a major wake-up call to all the people who make packages with functions and names similar to trademarked programs--the KIllustrators and FreeMWares of the world: Don't mess with companies who have more money and more lawyers than you. You can complain all you want about how incredibly unfair it is, and deeply wrong, and boycott and send nasty letters all you want to, but at the end of the day, they'll win. And don't look to the Electronic Frontier Foundation or the ACLU to help defend you, either--your freedom of speech does not include the freedom to transgress others' property. DeCSS is somewhat defensible due to the ambiguous nature of the DCMA versus the public's right of fair use, but this is quite a different matter--there is no DeCSS-like legal ambiguity about trading on someone else's name to try to popularize your own product.
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Worthy of mention is the non-BSG project Hatch is trying to get off the ground: The Great War of Magellan--which also stars Jason Carter.
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Note that though the new show guys are making noises about how they're going to be faithful to the original, and feature some of the original characters, they still haven't cast any of the original actors yet . . .
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Of course, now that it's a few years later, and more people have DVD-ROMs, and the discs are getting more inexpensive to make, maybe it's just about time for them to try again.
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The only substantial content this affects is the stuff ten years old or so. From back when people hadn't even heard of electronic publishing, so it wasn't included in their contracts.
Ever since that time, most of the smart publishers have already included electronic media clauses in their contracts--with the writers being justly compensated, or else going into it knowing full well that e-rights are included in their payment.
As an aspiring writer myself, I'm very concerned about writers' rights. This case was an important one, because it helps put control back in the hands of the writers, where they belong--which is something everyone seems to be (or pretends to be) so gung-ho about in the Napster arena for musicians.
Another important case to watch would be this one, as Random House sues a small e-book publisher over rights not assigned to them in their contracts.
This is certainly news to those books' authors, who had not stipulated e-books in their contracts with Random House, and were fully behind Rosetta's e-publishing them!As to whether articles get pulled from archives...I don't think it will happen as much as people fear. Most writers are reasonable people, and typically wouldn't insist on bank-breaking terms. As long as the publishers are willing to negotiate, and don't just want to cut off their noses to spite their faces, I think things will work out just fine.
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The studios are making noises about changing this and instituting a rental-pricing tier, and the rental shops are fighting it tooth and nail. It'll probably happen sooner or later, though.
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Binary newsgroups have had their day; they're no longer needed. They were made way back during the Dark Ages, when there was no World Wide Web, no other place where binary files could be posted. But now we've got the Web. We've got Napster (such as it is). We've got Gnutella(/Bearshare/Limewire). We've got IRC bots. We've got Mojo Nation. Soon we'll have Freenet. We've got all these other ways that files can be transferred, without using as much bandwidth or having to worry about losing chunks of the files in transit.
Let's use those methods, let binary groups fade away, and save bandwidth for more important things--like fragging. :)
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You can find them a lot cheaper than $40 at buy.com.
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And, for that matter, Serious Sam also has the biggest levels and most wide open spaces of any first person shooter I've ever played. And for under $20, you can't go wrong.
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You might enjoy Serious Sam. It's got a bit of that good ol' Duke Nukem one-liner style.
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From an IGN interview:
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Well, the writers of the movie indicated that they'd never seen Nadia, but they did homage some elements from Miyazaki. I see no reason not to take them at their word. I mean, you have to admit that Nadia has been a fairly obscure series, as anime goes, up to now. It had a crappy Streamline dub that's long been out of print, then in the last year or so a limited edition VHS sub, and the DVDs are only starting to come out now. I've been an anime fan since 1991, and I've never seen Nadia--nor have I had a chance to. Why should they have?
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I haven't seen Nadia yet, though I do intend to start getting the DVDs, since the first one was just released. But in my opinion the whole "they ripped off Nadia!" deal is the work of a few sad sacks who simply don't like Disney and will look for whatever reasons they can find to bash it. Either the resemblances come from plot points commonly used by a lot of other stories, or else they're sheerly superficial.
Look at common plot points. If the movie "ripped off" anything, it would be Stargate, Laputa, Titan A.E., 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, a bit of Castle of Cagliostro, some Raiders of the Lost Ark, and a few other things. If I wanted to get really anal, I could go into all the old-timey radio shows that featured wisecracking switchboard operators like the one seen here. But really, what's the point?
The thing is, there are a lot of commonly-used ideas in here. Submarines, giant sea monsters, ancient relics that could do incredible damage in the wrong hands, greedy fortune-seekers wanting to put their wrong hands around those relics, giant monsters attacking ships, and so on. As Shakespeare said, there really is nothing new under the sun. It's all been done before, in some form or other--and the most successful tropes tend to get used over and over again, just because they are so successful.
And as for superficial coincidence . . . consider the case of Nancy Stauffer, author of some rather obscure childrens' books back in the early 1980s, and her claims of infringement by J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books. There are an awful lot of coincidences there--use of some similar names, such as a character named "Larry Potter" who wears glasses and has a cousin named "Lilly"; use of the term "muggles," which Rowling says she came up with on her own--but most of the "coincidences" she cites are just plain silly--such as the fact that both books have castles by lakes in them! The books weren't even widely known--the most they ever got was small-press publication, in America--whereas J.K. Rowling was writing her stories ten years later in England. It's unlikely in the extreme she could possibly have seen Stauffer's books--but she wrote what she wrote anyway, and golly gee, there are all these coincidences--but most of them, such as castles and lakes, are found in a lot of fantasy novels, not just the two of theirs, so it's not surprising that two unrelated fantasy novels would both have them.
As I've said, I haven't yet seen Nadia, but I really believe that most of the similarities between them are just that sort of coincidence. Either they're trappings common to many of those stories (just as fantasy stories or Westerns often have similarities), or they're outright coincidence.
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I think other people in this discussion have hit the nail on the head when they said it's not about content or dissenting opinions, it's about ad revenue dwindling and vanishing. Look at Keenspot and Sluggy Freelance, both of which have instituted "if you pay us, you'll be supporting our site(s) and you won't have to see banner ads" programs. Look at Themestream, which went belly-up, and TheVines, which looks like it's also headed for extinction. Look at all the free ISPs that have either vanished or consolidated and cut way back on the services they offer. Banner ads just don't work.
There definitely does need to be a new model for websites to earn revenue. The problem is, nobody's really sure just what it is yet. Tipping might work, but only if the tipper is willing to subscribe to the payment service used by the tippee. Micropayments sound good, but there are a whole bunch of hurdles in the way, and there's no more venture capital to develop such a system.
Whatever happens, it seems like ad banners are rapidly becoming so ineffective now that having them at all is tantamount to a superstitious gesture, like crossing your fingers or putting a horseshoe up over the door--it makes you feel better, but doesn't actually do anything.
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Wasn't "Connexion" one of the sites you could download Netscape (or was it Internet Explorer?) from?
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I've said it before--I'll say it again. A boycott is going to have no other effect than to gratify your ego at the cost of missing out on all the movies the rest of geekdom are enjoying. The MPAA and movie studios aren't missing your money. They're not going to go bankrupt because you aren't buying anything from them. You would need to get a heck of a lot more people to join you in your boycott even to be noticeable over all the people who haven't yet gotten around to getting DVD, but plan to sooner or later. And in a world where only twenty people show up to a much-publicized anti-DMCA protest in Washington, and where DVDs and players are being bought so fast they've become one of the fastest-growing consumer technologies ever--I just don't see that happening.
If you want to make a difference, then do something active. Donate to the EFF, write letters, tell people about the evils of region-locking and CSS (if you can explain it in terms that keep them from staring glassy-eyed at you--it's harder than it sounds). And by all means, boycott, if you don't want your money going to the MPAA. It's your money, do what you want with it. But don't you even try to present that as the overall solution. Boycotts rarely work; boycotts of popular products by a handful of people don't do very much. (I'm "boycotting" Pearl Harbor--not out of moral principles or anything, but because it looks like a really bad movie. Somehow, I don't think that's doing very much good.)
If region-encoding is going to fall, it's going to fall not because of an American geek boycott, it's going to happen because of the efforts of governments and commissions in places like Britain and Australia that are starting to get fed up by being ghettoized by the trade-restraining system imposed on them by the corporations. In the stories /.'s run over the last week or so, I can see that starting to happen. The boulder is wobbling on its perch, and sooner or later it will start rolling downhill.
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People keep whining, "Oh, but it only cost pennies to make it!" as if they feel they should only be paying a few more pennies to buy it. Pressing a disk is not all that's involved in making it. There are more costs, and plenty of them. And even with those, studios have done a bang-up job keeping DVD prices low. It's purely amazing how many DVDs you can buy for under $15 these days, and just look at all the extra stuff you get when you buy a $25 DVD instead of a $25 VHS, even not counting picture quality.
And yes, it's true that you can get Hong Kong DVDs from the source for much cheaper than American movies--only $5 a disc plus shipping in many cases--but the economic environment is different over there, the incidental costs are often lower, and the $5 discs are usually second or third releases of titles that were more expensive originally.
I'm not arguing that prices couldn't be cheaper--they could always be at least a little cheaper. But to expect to be able to get a newly-released DVD for less than $15-20 is a pipe dream.
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Heck, even if he's only got a megaplex and a Blockbuster in his area, there are still DVD rental by mail places.
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