I'm this close to disabling Jon Katz articles in my profile...if it weren't that he has that train-wreck sort of "stop and gawk at all the carnage" appeal, I probably would.
Jon, where are these lawyers you refer to in your first paragraph? As far as I know, Metallica hasn't yet named any of the 335K users as codefendants in any of the 10 "John Doe" slots they've got listed. All they've done was had a private agency look at Napster and compile a list of all the names showing up as having Metallica stuff. Hell, you or I could do exactly the same thing just by doing a search on "Metallica" and taking a screenshot of all the names that came up.
They haven't threatened to sue any of them; it would take much more time and effort than it would be worth. They've just asked Napster to carry through on the promise it's been hiding behind. "We'll block any user who you can show us is trading illegal MP3s," they say to Metallica & Dr. Dre. So Metallica's ponying up a list of names, and what Napster does in response could have a lot of power to help or hurt them--if they meekly remove those users, they could take a lot of the wind out of Metallica's legal sails.
This reminds me of a poem I once came across...
Tobacco is a dirty weed. I like it.
It satisfies no normal need. I like it. It makes you thin, it makes you lean, It takes the hair right off your bean. It's the worst darn stuff I've ever seen. I like it. --Graham Lee Hemminger, Penn State Froth "Tobacco"
Nobody can honestly say that rampant MP3 trading of stuff you didn't buy is not illegal. No one. People can, and do, try to justify why they do it (myself included)...but in the end, their arguments come down to knowing it's a bad thing, but, like the verse says, "I like it."
While Metallica may be making a rampant P.R. blunder, and their "art vs. commodity" quote belongs right up there with some of Danny Quayle's famed utterances, I can find no legal fault in what they're doing. They're perfectly within their rights. I'm an amateur writer, and if I ever write something worth getting paid for, I'll be very annoyed if someone rips it off without paying me.
As for Jon's much-vaunted "chilling effect"--well, maybe people need to be chilled. Hello, MP3-traders of the world, this is your wakeup call! Stuff you do on the Internet is traceable! It always has been, and unless you take extreme precautions, it always will be. If you make information publically available, as your userID on Napster when you put a song up for download, it's not an "invasion of privacy" to collect and collate that information.
This is why we say never to post stuff to the Internet (when the saying originated, it was "to USENET," because that was the only publically-postable area of the Internet back then) that you wouldn't want your parents, kids, future employers and employees, etc. to see. We cheer and hoot and holler when this is used to track down spammers--but oh how conveniently we forget that it's a double-edged sword. If you do something that's illegal, why yes, you can be tracked down and held accountable. Surprise!
Wake up, grow up, and get real. "Because I want to!" is not sufficient legal justification to be able to do something. --
Um...I hate to break it to you, but Gnutella tells you the IP of where something's hosted, too. Presumably someone who wanted to could write a Gnutella search script that returns the IPs along with the search results, or even looks up the IPs. Granted, there's no central music server registry they could force to eject the user, but they could still contact the user's ISP to find out just who's using that IP address at the time, and then have the ISP eject the user. Or they could even take legal action against the user based on that evidence.
I hate to say it, but I agree with the emusic CEO who was interviewed by Wired News a couple weeks back who predicted it. Doesn't anyone remember the rampant lawsuits against warez sites of a decade or so ago? Anyone remember Kevin Mitnick? Whether you think you're not doing anything wrong to download the stuff is irrelevant--the law says you are. --
Odds are, if you check the back of those classical music CDs you'll find they were performed by a Slavic or Other Eastern European orchestra--that is, an orchestra in a poor country where money is scarce and they'll play for what Western orchestras would consider to be peanuts. Hence, lower costs, and more room for profit.
Further, if you check these CDs, you will more than likely find them not to be put out by any major record label (though there are always exceptions), and hence, they're sold at "generic goods" prices instead of "name brand" prices, and there's no co-op advertising restriction on these CDs (especially since they aren't the sort to be advertised anyway). Which means the stores could well be selling them at below wholesale just as a loss leader to get people into their stores.
What's more, if you look for the "famous name" performers of classical music, like Pavarotti, etc., you'll usually find their prices to be more in line with normal CD prices than the discount classicals.
I'm not debating that record labels may be monopolistic in regard to their signing policies. But...consider that Metallica owns all their own music--not the label. Do they sell their CDs at substantially lower prices than all the other acts? --
Yeah, the local library is a great source of CDs...
...to rip to my hard drive and keep forever after.
(It's also a great source of e-books and e-texts, via EBSCOhost, that I can download to my Visor and read, or my hard drive and keep, without having to pay a penny because my local tax dollar support it.)
Y'know...it's really a good thing that libraries are grandfathered into existence. If they wanted to invent libraries today, you just know all the copyright issues would sink them. And that's kind of sad, really. --
The problem with the column isn't so much that he leaves the "My" off of MP3.com as that Jon generalizes from the My MP3.com case to the Napster lawsuits and Gnutella/Freenet/other file-sharing system controversy. Now, while Jon could have gotten away with going from the specific to the general insofar as talking about how controversial the mp3 format is, it's considered bad form to go from the specific to the only vaguely tangentially-related other specific--you'll end up confusing the issue. In fact, almost every print journalism source in which I've read about the My MP3.com decision has gone to great pains to stick in a paragraph noting that this case was entirely unrelated to the Napster/Gnutella controversy. Jon Katz, on the other hand, joined them at the hip. That's shoddy journalism.
Leaving aside the dead horse of "It's piracy!" "No, it's not! Information wants to be free!" "Tell me that when they start pirating your books." which has been so ably flogged elsewhere in this discussion, let's look at the issue of another straw man Jon's set up and whacked on a little in the article, which I haven't seen addressed as much.
So CDs only cost fifty cents to make and are sold at $15. So what? Despite the implication here that the record labels are uniquely evil for overcharging so, this is hardly a one-of-a-kind case. I would wager that many or even most of the things we pay $10 to $20 for are knocked off at, at most, $2 to $3 of actual manufacturing cost. Take a class in basic Economics, Jon. Better yet, take two, one each of Macro and Micro. I'm sure a college in your area offers them as night courses.
As someone who has had them, and had a surprising number of misconceptions cleared up by them...Jon, that $14.50 is not pure profit--at least, not for the record companies. There's the $5 markup by the record store middleman, the fixed setup costs not represented in the 50 cents figure, the factory overhead...and, yes, the profit. Companies do have to make a profit, you know. That's how they stay in business, satisfy their shareholders, and continue to produce the products that we want.
Despite what many of the "free as in beer" crowd would have you believe, profit is not an evil or bad thing. You're making a profit yourself when you get your paycheck--getting paid at least as much as and probably more than you think your labor is worth--or else you'd go work somewhere else where you were. --
Well, that's it. Clearly, the money they're making hand over (Andover?) fist has affected the posters' memories to the point where they can't remember what's already been posted and what hasn't. I think Slashdot's usefulness as a "news" site is on the wane, and it may not be long until every new/. story is a retread of something else, or else Jon Katz popping up to tell us what we already know.
Why on earth don't they add a new poster or two--someone who's been reading for a while and knows what's been posted already? Any one of the people complaining that this is an old story, for example. This is just ridiculous. --
I'm also doubtful of how tasteful it is to bring the book out on the anniversary...but on the other hand, if the book could do some good in getting the nonsensical "Zero Tolerance" policies of the world lifted, then perhaps it's a good thing that it gets wider publicity. Here's a good page discussing the problem.
There are alot more then a few dozen geeks who are shouting about this.
Oh, I'm sure. That's why only twenty showed up at the great anti-DMCA protest? If there are three digits' worth of protesters, I'll be mildly surprised, and if there are four, I'll be stunned.
I believe the more we shout the more others will join us in this fight. Just because you can watch a movie in a high quality format is no reason to sarifice your rights.
Oh, please. Shout about it on Slashdot all you like. Maybe you'll get a few dozen more geeks.
(Free clue: a minority of people change laws all the time)
Then I'm sure the DMCA is as good as dead. How can it possibly stand up to being ranted about on Slashdot??? (BTW, in case you missed it, that's sarcasm.)
You want to sell out your rights and your childrens rights just so you can watch a prettier movie, go right a head. Comply like a little drone. When you're ready to fight let me know, I'll be happy to give you a list of things you can do to help.
Dude, I'm not selling anything. The fact is, you simply don't have enough people to make a difference. Where's the acknowledgement of your boycott? Where's the news coverage (that doesn't make fun of you)? I've not seen anyone suggest a DVD boycott anywhere except Slashdot, and I would think that if you were as effective at getting the word out as you think you are, there would be articles and banner ads and such all over the place. I'll happily write my congressmen and send nasty letters to the DVD companies, as I think there's a slight chance that would help affect the DVDCCA. But simply not buying DVDs won't do anything, because there are ten thousand other people for every one of you who still will.
If I have 0% effect at least I can stand up and say I tried. You, on the other hand, can say you help them stamp out are rights by not acting. how proud you must be.
Good for you. Try all you like. I have confidence in the government and the courts to do the right thing, with or without a boycott, and when they do, I'll have my DVD collection already, and the enjoyment I have had and will have out of watching the movies on it.
If you're a US citizen, go to Congress.org; they have a zipcode-based legislator-finder, with all the necessary contact information. Physical letters or phone calls would probably be better than email (and I intend to use Dialpad to call and make my feelings known), but email is better than nothing.
What really worries me--and should worry you, too--is that this numbnut has significant say in what exceptions may be made in the DMCA for matters of fair use.
Wheel works fine for me! I just followed the instructions on a "How do you get the mouse wheel to work in Netscape?" page I found via a websearch a while back, didn't do anything different while trying out Mozilla...
For me, I think, Moz's finally reached the point of usability? Why? The click on link with middle button to open in a new window shortcut finally works! That feature is the one I've been waiting for--it's the one I've missed using every other Moz build, and every other browser on every other platform. I'm happy now.
There's a really good legal journal article that goes into depth exploring the legal issues of fanfic. Wish I'd posted this back when the discussion was first out, so perhaps people would see and comment on it, but I somehow skipped over reading it at the time. Oh well.
Now, of course the article is just the opinion of the writer, and not worth the electrons it's printed on until some judge reads it and finds its arguments swaying. (If any lawyers are reading this, I'd be interested to hear what you think of that article.) But it's interesting to take a look at the precedents involved.
Q: Which is louder? The sound of one hand clapping, or the sound of a few dozen geeks boycotting?
A: Neither! Both make about the same amount of noise in the real world--which is to say, very nearly none at all.
Q: If a few dozen geeks boycott DVD and nobody's there to hear them, do they make a sound?
A: Not very much of one! I am certain that studios and DVD producers get much more angry mail about "how dare they put these black bars over the movie I paid good money for!" than they do about the evil DVDCCA and DMCA which are preventing people from legally watching movies on Linux.
Get with it, people. If you want to boycott DVD until the cows come home, that's your choice. But if you honestly expect it to have any impact at all on the behavior of (or funding of) the groups you're boycotting, you're fooling yourself. According to the editorial page linked in the above article, DVDs accounted for 13% of all video sales last year. That's an awful lot of DVDs bought by people who presumably couldn't care less. Unless you can get a pretty substantial amount of people to join your boycott, the only people who will be affected by it are you. (Free clue: if you want to reach the numbers of people who would actually do any good, you'd be better off buying ad space in national papers or magazines than spouting about it on Slashdot.)
But Das Boot is already subtitled on DVD, by default. You can't get it any other way. So if you buy any copy of it, it will be subtitled.
And why would you be strolling down to the local store to pick it up, anyway? You can get much better bargains and selection online at places like Express.com, not to mention Netflix's $20-a-month-unlimited-rentals by mail program (which I'd hop onto in a heartbeat if only I could afford right now).
Feh. If they wanted to do the thing right, they would get Peter Walker, whose Objective: Reflex Point tech files, while admittedly a fan-extrapolation, are the best, most detailed, most internally-consistent analysis of the TV show that I've ever seen.
As a long-time member of various Robotech mailing lists and general fan in touch (hey, just look at my handle there:) I can tell you that Mystery Science Thea--er, Robotech 3000 has two major strikes against it to start out.
One: It's being written by Carl "anime antichrist" Macek, who (as the stillborn Sentinels proves) can't write a series worth a darn--the only reason Robotech was so great is that he had 80% of the storyline handed to him completely intact on a silver platter, and all he had to do was switch some names and things around.
Two: It's set a thousand years after the original show. Which smells suspiciously like how they made the movie The Lawnmower Man--"let's use the name, because it's such a draw, but make it so we don't have to have any connection whatsoever to the original version." They'll probably end up screwing the hell out of the continuity of the original show, too.
And let's not forget Two and a Half: It's caused the cancellation/nongranting of all existing Robotech licenses for the last couple of years...no new computer games, books, toys, and so forth. Which is a good reason to be annoyed all by itself.
And by the way...Reba West was drunk when she recorded the songs for Robotech, because she was originally too self-conscious to sing on her own. If you listen close to a couple of the songs on the Perfect Collection CD, you can sort of tell...
Well, I could see you making a LART into a LART...you'd just need to add a sturdy aluminum case (spikes optional) and a carrying lanyard that would double as a morningstar-style thingie to swing it around your head with...
How many boycotts can you cite that have actually worked? I was talking to a friend of mine earlier today, and he could only come up with one--when the company that made.ARC compression got snippy with a fellow who wrote a better version of it...and so he wrote.ZIP instead and everyone switched.
What other boycotts do you know of that have worked? Amazon? Ha, ha. Christian fundamentalist groups find some new TV show to boycott for lewdness or blasphemy every time they turn around--but that didn't end Married With Children early, nor has it done much to derail South Park. What about the gay-rights advocates who're boycotting and protesting that new Dr. Laura talk show--do you see the network pulling it any time soon?
And the "free the DVD" crowd, even counting those who don't have anything to do with Linux, so far doesn't seem to have even the momentum they do--else more than 15 people would have showed up for the much-vaunted geek protest event in Washington a few weeks back.
I'm sorry. I can respect your decision not to buy any DVDs or DVD-playing apparatus...just don't expect me, or very many other people, to join you. Though the DVDCCA really does irritate the heck out of me, I can't see them suddenly seeing the light from me, or even from a hundred like me boycotting their products. Actually watching movies is more important to me than feeling smugly morally superior to other folk.
Oh, and as for it preceding a new Star Blazers...well, this project (courtesy of The Other Great Satan, Walt Disney) has been in the works for quite some time, and there's plenty here to make a dyed-in-the-wool fan of Starblazers shudder. (Even though I've never seen the show, but plan to remedy this soon...) Particularly the bit where the ship is changed to the Arizona...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm this close to disabling Jon Katz articles in my profile...if it weren't that he has that train-wreck sort of "stop and gawk at all the carnage" appeal, I probably would.
Jon, where are these lawyers you refer to in your first paragraph? As far as I know, Metallica hasn't yet named any of the 335K users as codefendants in any of the 10 "John Doe" slots they've got listed. All they've done was had a private agency look at Napster and compile a list of all the names showing up as having Metallica stuff. Hell, you or I could do exactly the same thing just by doing a search on "Metallica" and taking a screenshot of all the names that came up.
They haven't threatened to sue any of them; it would take much more time and effort than it would be worth. They've just asked Napster to carry through on the promise it's been hiding behind. "We'll block any user who you can show us is trading illegal MP3s," they say to Metallica & Dr. Dre. So Metallica's ponying up a list of names, and what Napster does in response could have a lot of power to help or hurt them--if they meekly remove those users, they could take a lot of the wind out of Metallica's legal sails.
This reminds me of a poem I once came across...
Nobody can honestly say that rampant MP3 trading of stuff you didn't buy is not illegal. No one. People can, and do, try to justify why they do it (myself included)...but in the end, their arguments come down to knowing it's a bad thing, but, like the verse says, "I like it."While Metallica may be making a rampant P.R. blunder, and their "art vs. commodity" quote belongs right up there with some of Danny Quayle's famed utterances, I can find no legal fault in what they're doing. They're perfectly within their rights. I'm an amateur writer, and if I ever write something worth getting paid for, I'll be very annoyed if someone rips it off without paying me.
As for Jon's much-vaunted "chilling effect"--well, maybe people need to be chilled. Hello, MP3-traders of the world, this is your wakeup call! Stuff you do on the Internet is traceable! It always has been, and unless you take extreme precautions, it always will be. If you make information publically available, as your userID on Napster when you put a song up for download, it's not an "invasion of privacy" to collect and collate that information.
This is why we say never to post stuff to the Internet (when the saying originated, it was "to USENET," because that was the only publically-postable area of the Internet back then) that you wouldn't want your parents, kids, future employers and employees, etc. to see. We cheer and hoot and holler when this is used to track down spammers--but oh how conveniently we forget that it's a double-edged sword. If you do something that's illegal , why yes, you can be tracked down and held accountable. Surprise!
Wake up, grow up, and get real. "Because I want to!" is not sufficient legal justification to be able to do something.
--
I hate to say it, but I agree with the emusic CEO who was interviewed by Wired News a couple weeks back who predicted it. Doesn't anyone remember the rampant lawsuits against warez sites of a decade or so ago? Anyone remember Kevin Mitnick ? Whether you think you're not doing anything wrong to download the stuff is irrelevant--the law says you are.
--
Further, if you check these CDs, you will more than likely find them not to be put out by any major record label (though there are always exceptions), and hence, they're sold at "generic goods" prices instead of "name brand" prices, and there's no co-op advertising restriction on these CDs (especially since they aren't the sort to be advertised anyway). Which means the stores could well be selling them at below wholesale just as a loss leader to get people into their stores.
What's more, if you look for the "famous name" performers of classical music, like Pavarotti, etc., you'll usually find their prices to be more in line with normal CD prices than the discount classicals.
I'm not debating that record labels may be monopolistic in regard to their signing policies. But...consider that Metallica owns all their own music--not the label. Do they sell their CDs at substantially lower prices than all the other acts?
--
(It's also a great source of e-books and e-texts, via EBSCOhost, that I can download to my Visor and read, or my hard drive and keep, without having to pay a penny because my local tax dollar support it.)
Y'know...it's really a good thing that libraries are grandfathered into existence. If they wanted to invent libraries today, you just know all the copyright issues would sink them. And that's kind of sad, really.
--
Or did you perhaps mean Colombia , the small South American country that is the source of so many drug problems?
--
Leaving aside the dead horse of "It's piracy!" "No, it's not! Information wants to be free!" "Tell me that when they start pirating your books." which has been so ably flogged elsewhere in this discussion, let's look at the issue of another straw man Jon's set up and whacked on a little in the article, which I haven't seen addressed as much.
So CDs only cost fifty cents to make and are sold at $15. So what? Despite the implication here that the record labels are uniquely evil for overcharging so, this is hardly a one-of-a-kind case. I would wager that many or even most of the things we pay $10 to $20 for are knocked off at, at most, $2 to $3 of actual manufacturing cost. Take a class in basic Economics, Jon. Better yet, take two, one each of Macro and Micro. I'm sure a college in your area offers them as night courses.
As someone who has had them, and had a surprising number of misconceptions cleared up by them...Jon, that $14.50 is not pure profit--at least, not for the record companies. There's the $5 markup by the record store middleman, the fixed setup costs not represented in the 50 cents figure, the factory overhead...and, yes, the profit. Companies do have to make a profit, you know. That's how they stay in business, satisfy their shareholders, and continue to produce the products that we want.
Despite what many of the "free as in beer" crowd would have you believe, profit is not an evil or bad thing. You're making a profit yourself when you get your paycheck--getting paid at least as much as and probably more than you think your labor is worth--or else you'd go work somewhere else where you were.
--
Why on earth don't they add a new poster or two--someone who's been reading for a while and knows what's been posted already? Any one of the people complaining that this is an old story, for example. This is just ridiculous.
--
Wow...a Dungeons and Dragons episode script...that takes its setup from the Book of Job. And to think they say that D&D is anti-Christian...
I'm also doubtful of how tasteful it is to bring the book out on the anniversary...but on the other hand, if the book could do some good in getting the nonsensical "Zero Tolerance" policies of the world lifted, then perhaps it's a good thing that it gets wider publicity. Here's a good page discussing the problem.
Why, so you can start a war between Britain and China and get the exclusive media rights, of course! I mean, why else?
The URL in the above post should be http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,35178,00.ht ml. Don't know why it didn't show up properly.
Bus ride, one hour: $20
Finding book, one hour: $20
Bus fare: A couple of bucks.
Bus ride, one hour: $20
Literacy: PRICELESS.
If you're a US citizen, go to Congress.org; they have a zipcode-based legislator-finder, with all the necessary contact information. Physical letters or phone calls would probably be better than email (and I intend to use Dialpad to call and make my feelings known), but email is better than nothing.
What really worries me--and should worry you, too--is that this numbnut has significant say in what exceptions may be made in the DMCA for matters of fair use.
For me, I think, Moz's finally reached the point of usability? Why? The click on link with middle button to open in a new window shortcut finally works! That feature is the one I've been waiting for--it's the one I've missed using every other Moz build, and every other browser on every other platform. I'm happy now.
Now, of course the article is just the opinion of the writer, and not worth the electrons it's printed on until some judge reads it and finds its arguments swaying. (If any lawyers are reading this, I'd be interested to hear what you think of that article.) But it's interesting to take a look at the precedents involved.
A: Neither! Both make about the same amount of noise in the real world--which is to say, very nearly none at all.
Q: If a few dozen geeks boycott DVD and nobody's there to hear them, do they make a sound?
A: Not very much of one! I am certain that studios and DVD producers get much more angry mail about "how dare they put these black bars over the movie I paid good money for!" than they do about the evil DVDCCA and DMCA which are preventing people from legally watching movies on Linux.
Get with it, people. If you want to boycott DVD until the cows come home, that's your choice. But if you honestly expect it to have any impact at all on the behavior of (or funding of) the groups you're boycotting, you're fooling yourself. According to the editorial page linked in the above article, DVDs accounted for 13% of all video sales last year. That's an awful lot of DVDs bought by people who presumably couldn't care less. Unless you can get a pretty substantial amount of people to join your boycott, the only people who will be affected by it are you. (Free clue: if you want to reach the numbers of people who would actually do any good, you'd be better off buying ad space in national papers or magazines than spouting about it on Slashdot.)
But Das Boot is already subtitled on DVD, by default. You can't get it any other way. So if you buy any copy of it, it will be subtitled.
And why would you be strolling down to the local store to pick it up, anyway? You can get much better bargains and selection online at places like Express.com, not to mention Netflix's $20-a-month-unlimited-rentals by mail program (which I'd hop onto in a heartbeat if only I could afford right now).
Feh. If they wanted to do the thing right, they would get Peter Walker, whose Objective: Reflex Point tech files, while admittedly a fan-extrapolation, are the best, most detailed, most internally-consistent analysis of the TV show that I've ever seen.
(...gee, where did all my Karma go?)
One: It's being written by Carl "anime antichrist" Macek, who (as the stillborn Sentinels proves) can't write a series worth a darn--the only reason Robotech was so great is that he had 80% of the storyline handed to him completely intact on a silver platter, and all he had to do was switch some names and things around.
Two: It's set a thousand years after the original show. Which smells suspiciously like how they made the movie The Lawnmower Man--"let's use the name, because it's such a draw, but make it so we don't have to have any connection whatsoever to the original version." They'll probably end up screwing the hell out of the continuity of the original show, too.
And let's not forget Two and a Half: It's caused the cancellation/nongranting of all existing Robotech licenses for the last couple of years...no new computer games, books, toys, and so forth. Which is a good reason to be annoyed all by itself.
And by the way...Reba West was drunk when she recorded the songs for Robotech, because she was originally too self-conscious to sing on her own. If you listen close to a couple of the songs on the Perfect Collection CD, you can sort of tell...
Well, I could see you making a LART into a LART...you'd just need to add a sturdy aluminum case (spikes optional) and a carrying lanyard that would double as a morningstar-style thingie to swing it around your head with...
How many boycotts can you cite that have actually worked? I was talking to a friend of mine earlier today, and he could only come up with one--when the company that made .ARC compression got snippy with a fellow who wrote a better version of it...and so he wrote .ZIP instead and everyone switched.
What other boycotts do you know of that have worked? Amazon? Ha, ha. Christian fundamentalist groups find some new TV show to boycott for lewdness or blasphemy every time they turn around--but that didn't end Married With Children early, nor has it done much to derail South Park. What about the gay-rights advocates who're boycotting and protesting that new Dr. Laura talk show--do you see the network pulling it any time soon?
And the "free the DVD" crowd, even counting those who don't have anything to do with Linux, so far doesn't seem to have even the momentum they do--else more than 15 people would have showed up for the much-vaunted geek protest event in Washington a few weeks back.
I'm sorry. I can respect your decision not to buy any DVDs or DVD-playing apparatus...just don't expect me, or very many other people, to join you. Though the DVDCCA really does irritate the heck out of me, I can't see them suddenly seeing the light from me, or even from a hundred like me boycotting their products. Actually watching movies is more important to me than feeling smugly morally superior to other folk.
Oh, and as for it preceding a new Star Blazers...well, this project (courtesy of The Other Great Satan, Walt Disney) has been in the works for quite some time, and there's plenty here to make a dyed-in-the-wool fan of Starblazers shudder. (Even though I've never seen the show, but plan to remedy this soon...) Particularly the bit where the ship is changed to the Arizona...