Well, I know you can do it on one DVD. That's the problem: You would need to acquire the rights to distribute the movie. However, you wouldn't need to do this if you sold a disc with the additional audio and video tracks that could be used to turn a completely separate copy of the movie into an MST3K episode. Of course, this would require a computer and the ability to remaster a DVD, but it would be possible in theory to sell it that way (although maybe 10 people in the world would want it).
Some lawyers walk off with a few million and everyone who bought a PS3 gets a check for $6.71... or worse, a coupon for $10 off their next PS3 game purchase.
Upon re-reading your scenario, I think I (finally) understand what you meant by "modify" vs. "modify and distribute", but your argument against the GPL still seems completely contrived, and that's the part I don't understand.
If the movie were instead a piece of code, then the changes made to the movie could be made public with a list of SMTPe timestamps to cut or bleep or however they alter the movie (in accordance with the GPL). I think you are essentially paying them to do something you could do yourself, but may not know how, or may not want to bother. You have modified binaries (the new disc), the source is open (i.e., the specific edits are public information), the GPL is safe and we don't have to hear yet another angry rant from RMS.
_However_, there's a hitch that occurs to me with respect to the actual case, in which case I might side with the decision after all. The fact of the matter is, IIUC, that you (the customer) walk away with two copies of the movie: The original you bought and the copy they made for you. Ergo, you can now resell the original. I haven't read the decision or anything like that (this is/. after all), so this is only speculation, but that may have in fact been the crux of the biscuit for the whole case. Even though it is in essence meaningless that CleanFlix burns the media instead of the customer, it all probably boils down to that idea that CleanFlix is, in effect, facilitating piracy. (Of course, we still know the movie makers are cultural and artistic scumbags.)
This would be the same reasoning behind EBGames no longer selling used PC software... it's too easy to make a copy of the game and sell the original discs. The game companies, upon realizing this, leaned on EBGames to stop selling used discs. Now while that violates the Right of First Sale, i.e., I don't think the game manufacturers could use the law to force a game seller to do this, they could through normal negotiations require this if the game seller (e.g., EBGames) wishes to still do business with them.
Problem solved without lawsuits diluting the Fair Use rights.
Of course, ultimately it could mean the end to used DVD sales, or even rentals, because I often hear the claim "I just rent from Netflix and copy everything I want". That's where the new draconian formats come in and why the **AA companies want the unprotected or effectively unprotected Red Book audio and DVD formats to die.
So putting all this together, if CleanFlix could somehow (and I realize this isn't possible in real life) modify the original media so the DVD player would play the edited version of the movie, I don't think the movie studios could touch them. If CleanFlix sold you the information so you could make the change yourself, the movie studios couldn't do anything. If CleanFlix sold a special DVD player that could download (or read from a disc, etc), the specific edits and play the original disc with the edits made in real-time, the movie studios couldn't complain. I think this is consistent with the view you stated.
It's something I've actually thought about for another reason. My all-time favorite TV show is Mystery Science Theater 3000, wherein the cast makes fun of bad movies. Even though the show ended some 6 years ago, only about a quarter of the episodes were ever released because Rhino has the reacquire the rights to the original movies in order to distribute the show on DVD. In some cases (*cough*Sandy Frank*cough*) the original rights holder has not wanted to renew the rights even though it would make them extra money... some nonsense about being offended at the relentless mockery subject upon their "art" (see my original post). However, I always thought that if it were somehow possible (at least hypothetically) to distribute a DVD that contains the data for the edits, superimposed silhouettes and additional soundtrack, the customer could buy the original movie (assuming you could even do that, but I've seen many of the original movies for sale often as ch
While I, as a fat, spoiled lazy American who uses air-conditioning, would consider it a necessity, that doesn't make it so. However, there have been thousands of years of humanity thriving before air-conditioning was ever invented, and I would bet more than 3/4 of the world never experiences A/C even today.
The fact of the matter is that the "average" standard of living (at least in the industrialized West) today would have been considered the standard of living of the rich less than 100 years ago and that of royalty not too far before that.
1. You buy a car. 2. You take it to the detail shop. 3. They paint a nice racing stripe on your car. 4. You pay them and take your car and drive home, impressing your friends and neighbors with your cool racing stripe.
Here's the real reason the movie types don't like this: They have been in a "smut arms race" for the last 40 years or so to see who can outdo each other. You'll notice how many movies come out with "uncut" or "unrated" versions, which of course is a good way to make more money, while being true to their "vision" (not artistic) or seeing what they can get away with. Yet the edited versions also make more money for them because unlike piracy, these _are_ sales they would otherwise not make. They are just ticked off that there is someone out there who thinks the garbage they are shoehorning into every product they sell is just that: Garbage.
The problem is that Hollywood is the quite possibly the most conformist, narrow-minded, lock-step bunch of spineless, gutless whiners on the Earth. They would rather lose sales than for someone to publically prove that their "artistic vision" of ever-increasing sex, violence and depravity loses them sales among lots of people. If that weren't true then people would go back to making more G and PG movies, from which the majority of the most money-making movies come.
Ego. That's what this is all about. If it were about money, they would encourage these services. If it were about censorship they wouldn't sell out with edited-for-TV or -airplane versions. It's all about ego. It's all about a bunch of insecure, insular, mostly talentless freaks, many of whom wouldn't recognize art if they saw it, which they often don't, who refuse to admit that the world isn't as depraved and sick and they want it to be.
And that's exactly what wrong with advertising. Smart people (usually the ones with more money) are finding more and more ways to avoid it, which is fair since advertising has become more and more pervasing, intrusive and down-right annoying. I take great glee in shutting off loud obnoxious ads from the radio and TV, although when they are not obnoxious or (Heaven forfend!) interesting or entertaining, I might not bother.
I can't remember the last time I saw an animated ad on the Web.
I agree that advertising alone is an outdated business model. I mean, newspapers and radio are really hot right now, NOT. The fact of the matter is, however, that's exactly what Google is doing, and they seem to be doing just fine with advertising providing their only revenue.
Web 2.0 has been a big buzzword for the last year, and the technological achievements and potential are impressive and exciting. But name me one Web 2.0 business that is actually a successful business! And even if there are some (MySpace?) that are generating non-trivial revenue, they are doing so through advertising.
Paying for content online has some serious hills to climb because ultimately customers want something concrete for their money. If you buy a newspaper for 50 cents, you get dozens of pages of content (and full-page bra and panty ads if it's the Washington Post), so what would be a analogous price for a single article (let's forget for a minute that most Web-based news articles consist of about two paragraphs and are barely a summary leave alone an actual article)? Would you pay to post on/.? Micropayments are certainly a possibility, but after years of "all you can eat", who's going to want to suddenly start paying per page, even for good content?
For people who aren't selling actual objects and services, whether it's Amazon selling books or iTunes selling MP3 files (which are still concrete enough to make feel like you are "getting something") or Everquest selling some Chinese slave laborer a change to farm gold, who is actually making money on the Internet without relying mostly or even solely on advertising?
In other words, if the customers aren't shopping and there's no advertising, how exactly is someone going to make money on sites like/., Digg or IMDB? I go to IMDB almost daily, but I have to admit I'd balk at having to pay to access it. AOL's past success was in providing content their customers couldn't get anywhere else, but now they can't do that any more because relatively few people are still accessing the Internet through AOL and its client.
Ultimately, I don't think the post-advertising/non-subscription business model has been discovered yet. So I don't think you can criticize AOL for doing the only thing I think they possibly can do, at least for now. My biggest criticism would be that they took too long to figure this out. But the company is too big and has far too many resources to just disappear; it just won't be the AOL we've come to know and joke about.
I'm sure there would be an incredible killer app involving using your CueCat to scan barcodes from your screen on Barcodepedia. Maybe we could work Segways into it too.
I have to admit, this is one Big Web Thing I actually didn't think of before it happened.
I don't know about you, but iTunes doesn't go very far into the kind of stuff I listen to now, or listened to in college for that matter. It's still pretty strictly mainstream from my experience.
Of course when I was in college in the 80's, a couple of bucks at the used record store bought you all kinds of neat stuff that you can't find on iTunes (or even bittorrent most of the time).
Grammar and spelling are indeed important, but throwing the f-bomb around like you're feeding the chickens isn't a particularly good way to look like someone worth listening to.
Really? Is everyone on/. suffering from Tourette's Syndrome?
It's worse than that. Microsoft had already been convicted of abusing their monopoly and the new administration (the current one) came in and gave them a pass.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I know you can do it on one DVD. That's the problem: You would need to acquire the rights to distribute the movie. However, you wouldn't need to do this if you sold a disc with the additional audio and video tracks that could be used to turn a completely separate copy of the movie into an MST3K episode. Of course, this would require a computer and the ability to remaster a DVD, but it would be possible in theory to sell it that way (although maybe 10 people in the world would want it).
Sorry, I was too busy watching "The Matrix".
What were we talking about?
Kneel before the superior fast typing skills that allow me to make an obvious and lame joke before you. BWAHAHAHAHAHAH! :-)
I think you watch too many movies and don't get out enough.
Yeah, but Lucas will decide that Buzz shot, er, stepped out, first.
Yeah, class action suits... wonderful.
Some lawyers walk off with a few million and everyone who bought a PS3 gets a check for $6.71... or worse, a coupon for $10 off their next PS3 game purchase.
That'll put Sony in their place.
Upon re-reading your scenario, I think I (finally) understand what you meant by "modify" vs. "modify and distribute", but your argument against the GPL still seems completely contrived, and that's the part I don't understand.
/. after all), so this is only speculation, but that may have in fact been the crux of the biscuit for the whole case. Even though it is in essence meaningless that CleanFlix burns the media instead of the customer, it all probably boils down to that idea that CleanFlix is, in effect, facilitating piracy. (Of course, we still know the movie makers are cultural and artistic scumbags.)
If the movie were instead a piece of code, then the changes made to the movie could be made public with a list of SMTPe timestamps to cut or bleep or however they alter the movie (in accordance with the GPL). I think you are essentially paying them to do something you could do yourself, but may not know how, or may not want to bother. You have modified binaries (the new disc), the source is open (i.e., the specific edits are public information), the GPL is safe and we don't have to hear yet another angry rant from RMS.
_However_, there's a hitch that occurs to me with respect to the actual case, in which case I might side with the decision after all. The fact of the matter is, IIUC, that you (the customer) walk away with two copies of the movie: The original you bought and the copy they made for you. Ergo, you can now resell the original. I haven't read the decision or anything like that (this is
This would be the same reasoning behind EBGames no longer selling used PC software... it's too easy to make a copy of the game and sell the original discs. The game companies, upon realizing this, leaned on EBGames to stop selling used discs. Now while that violates the Right of First Sale, i.e., I don't think the game manufacturers could use the law to force a game seller to do this, they could through normal negotiations require this if the game seller (e.g., EBGames) wishes to still do business with them.
Problem solved without lawsuits diluting the Fair Use rights.
Of course, ultimately it could mean the end to used DVD sales, or even rentals, because I often hear the claim "I just rent from Netflix and copy everything I want". That's where the new draconian formats come in and why the **AA companies want the unprotected or effectively unprotected Red Book audio and DVD formats to die.
So putting all this together, if CleanFlix could somehow (and I realize this isn't possible in real life) modify the original media so the DVD player would play the edited version of the movie, I don't think the movie studios could touch them. If CleanFlix sold you the information so you could make the change yourself, the movie studios couldn't do anything. If CleanFlix sold a special DVD player that could download (or read from a disc, etc), the specific edits and play the original disc with the edits made in real-time, the movie studios couldn't complain. I think this is consistent with the view you stated.
It's something I've actually thought about for another reason. My all-time favorite TV show is Mystery Science Theater 3000, wherein the cast makes fun of bad movies. Even though the show ended some 6 years ago, only about a quarter of the episodes were ever released because Rhino has the reacquire the rights to the original movies in order to distribute the show on DVD. In some cases (*cough*Sandy Frank*cough*) the original rights holder has not wanted to renew the rights even though it would make them extra money... some nonsense about being offended at the relentless mockery subject upon their "art" (see my original post). However, I always thought that if it were somehow possible (at least hypothetically) to distribute a DVD that contains the data for the edits, superimposed silhouettes and additional soundtrack, the customer could buy the original movie (assuming you could even do that, but I've seen many of the original movies for sale often as ch
While I, as a fat, spoiled lazy American who uses air-conditioning, would consider it a necessity, that doesn't make it so. However, there have been thousands of years of humanity thriving before air-conditioning was ever invented, and I would bet more than 3/4 of the world never experiences A/C even today.
The fact of the matter is that the "average" standard of living (at least in the industrialized West) today would have been considered the standard of living of the rich less than 100 years ago and that of royalty not too far before that.
Your analogy doesn't make any sense at all.
Here's the analogy:
1. You buy a car.
2. You take it to the detail shop.
3. They paint a nice racing stripe on your car.
4. You pay them and take your car and drive home, impressing your friends and neighbors with your cool racing stripe.
Here's the real reason the movie types don't like this: They have been in a "smut arms race" for the last 40 years or so to see who can outdo each other. You'll notice how many movies come out with "uncut" or "unrated" versions, which of course is a good way to make more money, while being true to their "vision" (not artistic) or seeing what they can get away with. Yet the edited versions also make more money for them because unlike piracy, these _are_ sales they would otherwise not make. They are just ticked off that there is someone out there who thinks the garbage they are shoehorning into every product they sell is just that: Garbage.
The problem is that Hollywood is the quite possibly the most conformist, narrow-minded, lock-step bunch of spineless, gutless whiners on the Earth. They would rather lose sales than for someone to publically prove that their "artistic vision" of ever-increasing sex, violence and depravity loses them sales among lots of people. If that weren't true then people would go back to making more G and PG movies, from which the majority of the most money-making movies come.
Ego. That's what this is all about. If it were about money, they would encourage these services. If it were about censorship they wouldn't sell out with edited-for-TV or -airplane versions. It's all about ego. It's all about a bunch of insecure, insular, mostly talentless freaks, many of whom wouldn't recognize art if they saw it, which they often don't, who refuse to admit that the world isn't as depraved and sick and they want it to be.
"Pervasing"... I meant "pervasive". My brain was three words ahead of my fingers...
Is "microchasm" just another word for "ditch"?
No thanks. I'll stick with Firefox and AdBlock.
And that's exactly what wrong with advertising. Smart people (usually the ones with more money) are finding more and more ways to avoid it, which is fair since advertising has become more and more pervasing, intrusive and down-right annoying. I take great glee in shutting off loud obnoxious ads from the radio and TV, although when they are not obnoxious or (Heaven forfend!) interesting or entertaining, I might not bother.
I can't remember the last time I saw an animated ad on the Web.
I agree that advertising alone is an outdated business model. I mean, newspapers and radio are really hot right now, NOT. The fact of the matter is, however, that's exactly what Google is doing, and they seem to be doing just fine with advertising providing their only revenue.
/.? Micropayments are certainly a possibility, but after years of "all you can eat", who's going to want to suddenly start paying per page, even for good content?
/., Digg or IMDB? I go to IMDB almost daily, but I have to admit I'd balk at having to pay to access it. AOL's past success was in providing content their customers couldn't get anywhere else, but now they can't do that any more because relatively few people are still accessing the Internet through AOL and its client.
Web 2.0 has been a big buzzword for the last year, and the technological achievements and potential are impressive and exciting. But name me one Web 2.0 business that is actually a successful business! And even if there are some (MySpace?) that are generating non-trivial revenue, they are doing so through advertising.
Paying for content online has some serious hills to climb because ultimately customers want something concrete for their money. If you buy a newspaper for 50 cents, you get dozens of pages of content (and full-page bra and panty ads if it's the Washington Post), so what would be a analogous price for a single article (let's forget for a minute that most Web-based news articles consist of about two paragraphs and are barely a summary leave alone an actual article)? Would you pay to post on
For people who aren't selling actual objects and services, whether it's Amazon selling books or iTunes selling MP3 files (which are still concrete enough to make feel like you are "getting something") or Everquest selling some Chinese slave laborer a change to farm gold, who is actually making money on the Internet without relying mostly or even solely on advertising?
In other words, if the customers aren't shopping and there's no advertising, how exactly is someone going to make money on sites like
Ultimately, I don't think the post-advertising/non-subscription business model has been discovered yet. So I don't think you can criticize AOL for doing the only thing I think they possibly can do, at least for now. My biggest criticism would be that they took too long to figure this out. But the company is too big and has far too many resources to just disappear; it just won't be the AOL we've come to know and joke about.
In America, movie stars act in goofy science fiction movies.
In Scientology, movie stars believe goofy science fiction is real.
People dont do this, lazy critics who cannot refute your arguments do. I'm never hung up on peoples spelling because it doesnt matter.
No, you don't get hung up on people's spelling because you're a lousy speller yourself. At least be honest.
Too bad CueCat was a few years too early.
I'm sure there would be an incredible killer app involving using your CueCat to scan barcodes from your screen on Barcodepedia. Maybe we could work Segways into it too.
I have to admit, this is one Big Web Thing I actually didn't think of before it happened.
I don't know about you, but iTunes doesn't go very far into the kind of stuff I listen to now, or listened to in college for that matter. It's still pretty strictly mainstream from my experience.
Of course when I was in college in the 80's, a couple of bucks at the used record store bought you all kinds of neat stuff that you can't find on iTunes (or even bittorrent most of the time).
obviousLY, of course.
Stupid fingers.
Yeah, you obvious understand what's going on.
Now that was sarcasm.
I find it to be a crutch for people who are too lazy to find a real world to express what they are saying.
Godot just came back from visiting Hell. He spent a month of Sundays iceskating, skiing, and watching pigs fly by the light of the blue month.
He wanted to play some games on his spankin' new Windows Vista system, but Duke Nukem Forever hadn't shipped yet.
No, the next one will be ext2008.
Then extxp.
Grammar and spelling are indeed important, but throwing the f-bomb around like you're feeding the chickens isn't a particularly good way to look like someone worth listening to.
/. suffering from Tourette's Syndrome?
Really? Is everyone on
No, but you're in the minority.
It's worse than that. Microsoft had already been convicted of abusing their monopoly and the new administration (the current one) came in and gave them a pass.