What is a graphic novel? Do you mean it has pictures in it?
And what's all this fuss about Wil Wheaton? The only reason he's so 'kind' to respond to Slashdot is because his celebrity status has disappeared and this is the only place he can get any attention.
So you're saying that profit is evil? People should be allowed to break the law as long as they don't make financial profit?
You profit from downloading something because you don't have to buy it.
This whole discussion is so shallow. No-one really gives a shit about copyright reform, they just want shit for free. They want to download music and films all day and night for free, because they can. Anything else is just a lie. "Oh, copyright law is wrong because it stifles innovation blah blah blah, in fact there's so little innovation I want to download it all anyway because it's so unoriginal. blah blah blah No I don't make logical sense but then I don't have to because I'm so self-righteous."
Re:And Paramount's response?
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Except you don't "own" a physical object.
The "ownership" is an artificial construct created by the government meant to achieve some high-minded purpose that justifies such meddling.
The absurdity of the underlying meddling is why burglary and theft is such a pervasive "problem".
In fact, as intellectual property is infinitely available, there's more justification for intellectual property laws than there are physical property laws. If someone owns some land, everyone else has less land, so land ownership is a government-granted priveledge not a right. It's an artificial monopoly over that land.
But if you own some intellectual property, everyone else can create their own, it's not taking anything from anyone else. If anything, physical property laws are where the problem is. You don't need TV shows or MP3s, they're just luxuries. But you need a house. You need food and water.
He wasn't so anxious about them getting control of it when they GAVE HIM MONEY for the rights. He took the cheque, but now he's complaining when they're keeping their half of the deal?
If you sell the rights to something, you no longer have the right to do things with it. I'm sure that was pretty clear when he signed on the dotted line.
Re:Already tried & failed
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It's not a surprise that failed. I'd pay for a whole book, if it had a good reputation. Or I'd read it for free from a library. But to pay chapter by chapter? What if half way through I get bored or the story loses its way, I'd have spent all my money on a book I didn't even finish, or the author didn't even finish.
I don't know if you can write an effective story writing it a chapter at a time. I think you need to write it as a whole, dividing it into chapters as necessary. If I'm paying for a book I want to know he's done the whole deal, not just written a few chapters.
Re:Then how is the production funded?
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$500,000 is nothing. And that's assuming he makes 50 a year. And they all buy it. That's still only $10,000 per show. You can't make Band of Brothers for that price. Assuming they all pay $10 per episode. $500 a year for a TV show. That's not going to be too popular. Anything which has fifty episodes per year is NEVER good quality. It's always the filler that's on every week, the quality comes in short bursts. You don't pay £10 for Newsnight.
I think some of you people really haven't done the sums.
On a side note I found Taken to be bland Spielburg dross. I don't think he really had enough material to fill that much screen-time. The screenplay was not very tight at all, as if most of it was filler. Haven't seen Band of Brothers. It was on TV a few years back but I saw the trailer and was instantly turned off. "We knew we were the best" in redneck drawl...bleh.
Re:Then how is the production funded?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
OK, I'll try to analyse this. A million is a LOT. I mean, a really huge amount. That's more people than watch most films in the cinemas. For something like Star Trek, that's often more than the people who watch it on TV. Not many DVDs sell a million.
That 'ten bucks' isn't your revenue. Out of that, you have the cost of pressing, the distribution, and the shop that sells it will take its cut. Out of that $10, how much is profit for the producers? (I mean, profit on the DVD, not on the production overall). That ten includes the tax. In the UK that's 17.5, so only $8.25 per DVD.
Where do you get your numbers for costs from? I've heard from admittedly a not very reliable source (Slashdot, although it's as reliable as your post which is another Slashdot post), that each episode of Star Trek Enterprise cost $6,000,000 to produce. That's $30,000,000 for your five-show DVD. If you made $6 from each DVD sold to a million people you'd break even. So out of your $8.25 per DVD, you need $6 of that going to the studio. In other words, $1.75 in TOTAL for the physical manufacturing of the DVD, the transport, and the cut for the shop. Assuming the DVD shops want to go bust, and they take a tiny tiny cut, you JUST might break even.
Part of the reason it is expensive now is that you are paying for a HUGE overhead of hollywood, distributers, and local outlets. All of that expense goes away.
Making TV shows ALWAYS requires overhead. How do you distribute your DVDs? Hollywood are the producers. I'm assuming someone will be producing these new shows, or will they magically appear from thin air? Local outlets will still be needed, unless you only sell your DVDs on the Internet. I'm assuming Amazon wants a cut. I'm also assuming there is a lot of money to be made selling DVDs in 'brick and mortar' stores, as not many people tend to release DVDs solely over the Internet unless they're obscure. By limiting yourself to Internet distribution you're cutting into your success.
Yeah you could use bittorrent, but then a lot of these people who use bittorrent think that 'information wants to be free', and that copyright law is evil and greedy, and will have no qualms about not paying you a penny, downloading all your stuff, stripping out the adverts and sharing it with all their friends (all 50,000 of their Internet 'friends'). Bang, there goes your business model.
The nut for this is 500,000 viewers at 20 bucks a piece. If we get it- we will produce 5 episodes on DVD for those folks.
20 bucks for 5 episodes is a bit high (4 each). I got Family Guy for 50, with 50 episodes (I'm in the UK but I'll ignore currencies because prices in the UK are like in the US but with the symbols changed around). I got Red Dwarf for about a tenner each as well, over double the value for money, and they're classics which I've seen and KNOW are good, whereas yours would be untested waters.
I'm much more likely to spend money on DVDs for something I know I like rather than something for which I've only seen a pilot.
The cost of making things like this is dropping like a stone. You don't need 150 million dollars to do it if you don't go through hollywood.
Hollywood are greedy and penny-pinching, and yet they still have astronomical costs. Producers who are less greedy, and more willing to throw money around will end up spending MORE to make the same thing. And if they're less greedy, and have less business-sense, they're more likely to go bust, and scupper any future episodes.
The costs aren't dropping. All those costs are actually spent on things. If you want to see what's it's like when you don't spend money, go and watch the Blair Witch Project or Pi. Would you want to watch that every week? I mean, once the novelty wore off?
I apologise for the rambling and the poor spelling and grammer, I've had a few tins and it hits me like a train.
Re:Then how is the production funded?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There's nothing stopping Internet distribution from including ads. Sure, some people will remove them, but the majority wouldn't bother.
If someone won't watch adverts on TV, what makes you think he'll watch them on the computer? Bear in mind it's impossible to get viewing figures from bittorrent, not many advertisers would be up for it, especially when skipping them means just pressing a button.
Also your potential audience is vastly shrunk with an Internet distribution model. Not very many people at all want to watch TV on the computer. Compare the people with broadband Internet with TVs. The numbers are vastly different.
Who wants to spend all night downloading a TV show rather than just turning on the box? Who wants to get the family to sit around the computer to watch a programme, rather than in the living room? Not every programme is a geek-fest like Firefly.
Like all potential new things, I'll believe it when I see it, not before.
So if I write a book, and none of the publishers take it, it becomes public domain. Then the publisher takes the public domain work and starts selling it.
I wonder if these trolls clamouring for everything in the world to be public domain actually create anything themselves? I mean, anything that anyone would actually want to pay for.
Yeah I remember watching the 'Fellowship of the Ring' and when Boromir blew the horn the sound was from behind-left, I thought it was someone's phone going off.
I'm sorry, but that's terrible. It's like a teenager's poetry. If the rest of the book is written like that I can't really see it turning into a decent film.
The stock market is completely arbitrary. Remember that like in every other situation in the world, most people buying shares don't know what the hell they're doing. An increased stock price is only of much use if you're selling shares.
I don't buy that "predatory" bullshit. It's simply a way of competing. I own a business and my vendors do it all of the time. Totally normal.
And totally illegal. I can't see any result from this other than a total Intel defeat. The size of the monopoly of the company in question is proportional to how serious a crime it is.
What's underhanded is a company going whining to the gov't to give them a competitive advantage.
What about a company using immoral illegal practices to give their competitor a competitive disadvantage?
I'm fairly certian that a divison of troops (about 10,000) would make short work of any and all defenses on the structure. For that matter a brigade could probably handle it.
It's a platform on a couple of towers on the sea. Population 1. A single man with a rusty knife could take it over. A single missile would sink it instantly.
Because we like: 1. Fonts. 2. Decent colours. 3. Configurability (that doesn't involve typing in command-line options). 4. Settings that actually stick between sessions. 5. Tabs. 6. Backgrounds. 7. Transparency. 8. All sorts of features which are missing in the abortion known as 'xterm'.
But seriously, using xterm is like going back in time twenty years.
Buying a DVD burner is all well and good, but how do you know if it's going to work? In my experience, if you roll a dice and get a six, you're lucky enough to get a DVD burner that works as advertised, rather than a fraudulent one.
$41 for a piece of plastic which reads DVDs and doesn't burn them isn't what I consider a good deal. Also is delivery included in that price?
No wonder so many people hate computers. Even when you know enough about the obscure, obfuscated and badly-designed innards to be able to install hardware, half the time you get something which is useless. And there's no way to find out beforehand that doesn't involve hours/days of research crawling through messageboards reading thousands of conflicting opinions: "Brand A is crap, I use brand B." "Brand B is crap, I use brand C." "Brand C is crap, I use brand A."
What the fuck do you do then? Buy every brand until you find one which actually does what it says, rather than nothing?
I think it backs up his statement 'DVD burners are hell', when only a few of them actually work, and the rest mean spending £50 on a device which don't work properly. It's criminal, knowingly selling shoddy hardware which doesn't do what it's advertised to do. But I suppose the optical disk drive industry is too powerful. Hard disk makers wouldn't get away with disks that are so bad at writing.
I have a DVD burner and it writes at 0.5 speed, even though it's supposed to do 8 speed. That means it writes more slowly that it plays. It writes CDs fine though.
And when you play DVDs, the picture is jerky rather than smooth.
Of course, those millions of dollars and teams of programmers working for years are obviously spending their time working out how to do a for loop...
Perhaps they don't make Linux because the cost and effort aren't worth the rewards. Coding for a new architecture is more than re-writing a few API calls. You often have to completely write most of it from scratch. Then TEST IT ALL OVER AGAIN. Testing takes months. Testing for Linux would take even longer. All for a potential extra 10,000 customers, 9,000 of whom are convinced that 'information wants to be free' and look for your game on bittorrent.
I was talking about novels, not history books. With history books you can just skim over them and pick up the details. There's no such thing as a test to see how well you've read a novel. Why do people see reading as a chore that has to be rushed rather than something to enjoy?
BitTorrent is very close to optimal at what it does.
The upload requirement makes it unusable on all but the fastest connections. And the lack of a built-in search functionality is the second nail in the coffin.
Bittorrent has a long way to go before it's optimal.
So you're saying that if someone makes a living from something, it's 'diluted'? That's absolutely ridiculous.
If you're a musician who's written and recorded a song, which of these two options are preferable:
1. Sell it and make money, and spend your days creating music and other interesting and enjoyable things. 2. Don't sell it, don't make money, and spend your days working 12 hour shifts stacking shelves in order to buy enough frozen chips to survive, barely spending an hour a day being 'creative', that is if your creativity hasn't been destroyed by your day-job.
I can't think of a single 'free' song which is better than even an average-to-good 'non-free' song. Face it, if it's any good, people will want to buy it.
No doubt much of this 'crappy overpriced music' would be praised by people like you if it were given away for free by an independent musician, and you'd be asking why the commercial music industry can't make anything like it.
Who are you to tell musicians what to do with their careers?
Well, I'm not very intelligent, but at a very young age I knew the difference between its and it's, and you're and your. Perhaps that's what happens when people spend too much time watching TV and playing on the computer rather than learning literary skills properly.
I'm sorry but I learnt this when I was six years old. Why is this being taught on Slashdot, a forum populated largely by native English-speaking intelligent adults?
Slashdot Mirror
What is a graphic novel? Do you mean it has pictures in it?
And what's all this fuss about Wil Wheaton? The only reason he's so 'kind' to respond to Slashdot is because his celebrity status has disappeared and this is the only place he can get any attention.
So you're saying that profit is evil? People should be allowed to break the law as long as they don't make financial profit?
You profit from downloading something because you don't have to buy it.
This whole discussion is so shallow. No-one really gives a shit about copyright reform, they just want shit for free. They want to download music and films all day and night for free, because they can. Anything else is just a lie.
"Oh, copyright law is wrong because it stifles innovation blah blah blah, in fact there's so little innovation I want to download it all anyway because it's so unoriginal. blah blah blah No I don't make logical sense but then I don't have to because I'm so self-righteous."
Except you don't "own" a physical object.
The "ownership" is an artificial construct created by the government meant to achieve some high-minded purpose that justifies such meddling.
The absurdity of the underlying meddling is why burglary and theft is such a pervasive "problem".
In fact, as intellectual property is infinitely available, there's more justification for intellectual property laws than there are physical property laws. If someone owns some land, everyone else has less land, so land ownership is a government-granted priveledge not a right. It's an artificial monopoly over that land.
But if you own some intellectual property, everyone else can create their own, it's not taking anything from anyone else. If anything, physical property laws are where the problem is. You don't need TV shows or MP3s, they're just luxuries. But you need a house. You need food and water.
He wasn't so anxious about them getting control of it when they GAVE HIM MONEY for the rights. He took the cheque, but now he's complaining when they're keeping their half of the deal?
If you sell the rights to something, you no longer have the right to do things with it. I'm sure that was pretty clear when he signed on the dotted line.
It's not a surprise that failed. I'd pay for a whole book, if it had a good reputation. Or I'd read it for free from a library. But to pay chapter by chapter? What if half way through I get bored or the story loses its way, I'd have spent all my money on a book I didn't even finish, or the author didn't even finish.
I don't know if you can write an effective story writing it a chapter at a time. I think you need to write it as a whole, dividing it into chapters as necessary. If I'm paying for a book I want to know he's done the whole deal, not just written a few chapters.
$500,000 is nothing. And that's assuming he makes 50 a year. And they all buy it. That's still only $10,000 per show. You can't make Band of Brothers for that price. Assuming they all pay $10 per episode. $500 a year for a TV show. That's not going to be too popular. Anything which has fifty episodes per year is NEVER good quality. It's always the filler that's on every week, the quality comes in short bursts. You don't pay £10 for Newsnight.
I think some of you people really haven't done the sums.
On a side note I found Taken to be bland Spielburg dross. I don't think he really had enough material to fill that much screen-time. The screenplay was not very tight at all, as if most of it was filler. Haven't seen Band of Brothers. It was on TV a few years back but I saw the trailer and was instantly turned off. "We knew we were the best" in redneck drawl...bleh.
OK, I'll try to analyse this. A million is a LOT. I mean, a really huge amount. That's more people than watch most films in the cinemas. For something like Star Trek, that's often more than the people who watch it on TV. Not many DVDs sell a million.
That 'ten bucks' isn't your revenue. Out of that, you have the cost of pressing, the distribution, and the shop that sells it will take its cut. Out of that $10, how much is profit for the producers? (I mean, profit on the DVD, not on the production overall). That ten includes the tax. In the UK that's 17.5, so only $8.25 per DVD.
Where do you get your numbers for costs from? I've heard from admittedly a not very reliable source (Slashdot, although it's as reliable as your post which is another Slashdot post), that each episode of Star Trek Enterprise cost $6,000,000 to produce. That's $30,000,000 for your five-show DVD. If you made $6 from each DVD sold to a million people you'd break even. So out of your $8.25 per DVD, you need $6 of that going to the studio. In other words, $1.75 in TOTAL for the physical manufacturing of the DVD, the transport, and the cut for the shop. Assuming the DVD shops want to go bust, and they take a tiny tiny cut, you JUST might break even.
Part of the reason it is expensive now is that you are paying for a HUGE overhead of hollywood, distributers, and local outlets. All of that expense goes away.
Making TV shows ALWAYS requires overhead. How do you distribute your DVDs? Hollywood are the producers. I'm assuming someone will be producing these new shows, or will they magically appear from thin air? Local outlets will still be needed, unless you only sell your DVDs on the Internet. I'm assuming Amazon wants a cut. I'm also assuming there is a lot of money to be made selling DVDs in 'brick and mortar' stores, as not many people tend to release DVDs solely over the Internet unless they're obscure. By limiting yourself to Internet distribution you're cutting into your success.
Yeah you could use bittorrent, but then a lot of these people who use bittorrent think that 'information wants to be free', and that copyright law is evil and greedy, and will have no qualms about not paying you a penny, downloading all your stuff, stripping out the adverts and sharing it with all their friends (all 50,000 of their Internet 'friends'). Bang, there goes your business model.
The nut for this is 500,000 viewers at 20 bucks a piece. If we get it- we will produce 5 episodes on DVD for those folks.
20 bucks for 5 episodes is a bit high (4 each). I got Family Guy for 50, with 50 episodes (I'm in the UK but I'll ignore currencies because prices in the UK are like in the US but with the symbols changed around). I got Red Dwarf for about a tenner each as well, over double the value for money, and they're classics which I've seen and KNOW are good, whereas yours would be untested waters.
I'm much more likely to spend money on DVDs for something I know I like rather than something for which I've only seen a pilot.
The cost of making things like this is dropping like a stone. You don't need 150 million dollars to do it if you don't go through hollywood.
Hollywood are greedy and penny-pinching, and yet they still have astronomical costs. Producers who are less greedy, and more willing to throw money around will end up spending MORE to make the same thing. And if they're less greedy, and have less business-sense, they're more likely to go bust, and scupper any future episodes.
The costs aren't dropping. All those costs are actually spent on things. If you want to see what's it's like when you don't spend money, go and watch the Blair Witch Project or Pi. Would you want to watch that every week? I mean, once the novelty wore off?
I apologise for the rambling and the poor spelling and grammer, I've had a few tins and it hits me like a train.
There's nothing stopping Internet distribution from including ads. Sure, some people will remove them, but the majority wouldn't bother.
If someone won't watch adverts on TV, what makes you think he'll watch them on the computer? Bear in mind it's impossible to get viewing figures from bittorrent, not many advertisers would be up for it, especially when skipping them means just pressing a button.
Also your potential audience is vastly shrunk with an Internet distribution model. Not very many people at all want to watch TV on the computer. Compare the people with broadband Internet with TVs. The numbers are vastly different.
Who wants to spend all night downloading a TV show rather than just turning on the box? Who wants to get the family to sit around the computer to watch a programme, rather than in the living room? Not every programme is a geek-fest like Firefly.
Like all potential new things, I'll believe it when I see it, not before.
So if I write a book, and none of the publishers take it, it becomes public domain. Then the publisher takes the public domain work and starts selling it.
I wonder if these trolls clamouring for everything in the world to be public domain actually create anything themselves? I mean, anything that anyone would actually want to pay for.
Yeah I remember watching the 'Fellowship of the Ring' and when Boromir blew the horn the sound was from behind-left, I thought it was someone's phone going off.
I'm sorry, but that's terrible. It's like a teenager's poetry. If the rest of the book is written like that I can't really see it turning into a decent film.
The stock market is completely arbitrary. Remember that like in every other situation in the world, most people buying shares don't know what the hell they're doing. An increased stock price is only of much use if you're selling shares.
I don't buy that "predatory" bullshit. It's simply a way of competing. I own a business and my vendors do it all of the time. Totally normal.
And totally illegal. I can't see any result from this other than a total Intel defeat. The size of the monopoly of the company in question is proportional to how serious a crime it is.
What's underhanded is a company going whining to the gov't to give them a competitive advantage.
What about a company using immoral illegal practices to give their competitor a competitive disadvantage?
Actually it was. They retook it didn't they? It would be hard to take it from armed occupiers without destroying it.
I'm fairly certian that a divison of troops (about 10,000) would make short work of any and all defenses on the structure. For that matter a brigade could probably handle it.
s s.jpg
10,000? Have you seen it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sealand_fortre
It's a platform on a couple of towers on the sea. Population 1. A single man with a rusty knife could take it over. A single missile would sink it instantly.
Because we like:
1. Fonts.
2. Decent colours.
3. Configurability (that doesn't involve typing in command-line options).
4. Settings that actually stick between sessions.
5. Tabs.
6. Backgrounds.
7. Transparency.
8. All sorts of features which are missing in the abortion known as 'xterm'.
But seriously, using xterm is like going back in time twenty years.
Buying a DVD burner is all well and good, but how do you know if it's going to work? In my experience, if you roll a dice and get a six, you're lucky enough to get a DVD burner that works as advertised, rather than a fraudulent one.
$41 for a piece of plastic which reads DVDs and doesn't burn them isn't what I consider a good deal. Also is delivery included in that price?
No wonder so many people hate computers. Even when you know enough about the obscure, obfuscated and badly-designed innards to be able to install hardware, half the time you get something which is useless. And there's no way to find out beforehand that doesn't involve hours/days of research crawling through messageboards reading thousands of conflicting opinions:
"Brand A is crap, I use brand B."
"Brand B is crap, I use brand C."
"Brand C is crap, I use brand A."
What the fuck do you do then? Buy every brand until you find one which actually does what it says, rather than nothing?
I think it backs up his statement 'DVD burners are hell', when only a few of them actually work, and the rest mean spending £50 on a device which don't work properly. It's criminal, knowingly selling shoddy hardware which doesn't do what it's advertised to do. But I suppose the optical disk drive industry is too powerful. Hard disk makers wouldn't get away with disks that are so bad at writing.
I have a DVD burner and it writes at 0.5 speed, even though it's supposed to do 8 speed. That means it writes more slowly that it plays. It writes CDs fine though.
And when you play DVDs, the picture is jerky rather than smooth.
Of course, those millions of dollars and teams of programmers working for years are obviously spending their time working out how to do a for loop...
Perhaps they don't make Linux because the cost and effort aren't worth the rewards. Coding for a new architecture is more than re-writing a few API calls. You often have to completely write most of it from scratch. Then TEST IT ALL OVER AGAIN. Testing takes months. Testing for Linux would take even longer. All for a potential extra 10,000 customers, 9,000 of whom are convinced that 'information wants to be free' and look for your game on bittorrent.
I was talking about novels, not history books. With history books you can just skim over them and pick up the details. There's no such thing as a test to see how well you've read a novel. Why do people see reading as a chore that has to be rushed rather than something to enjoy?
BitTorrent is very close to optimal at what it does.
The upload requirement makes it unusable on all but the fastest connections. And the lack of a built-in search functionality is the second nail in the coffin.
Bittorrent has a long way to go before it's optimal.
If you don't know how to use mkisofs, then perhaps OpenBSD is not for you. Not every operating system is aiming for the lowest common denominator.
So you're saying that if someone makes a living from something, it's 'diluted'? That's absolutely ridiculous.
If you're a musician who's written and recorded a song, which of these two options are preferable:
1. Sell it and make money, and spend your days creating music and other interesting and enjoyable things.
2. Don't sell it, don't make money, and spend your days working 12 hour shifts stacking shelves in order to buy enough frozen chips to survive, barely spending an hour a day being 'creative', that is if your creativity hasn't been destroyed by your day-job.
I can't think of a single 'free' song which is better than even an average-to-good 'non-free' song. Face it, if it's any good, people will want to buy it.
No doubt much of this 'crappy overpriced music' would be praised by people like you if it were given away for free by an independent musician, and you'd be asking why the commercial music industry can't make anything like it.
Who are you to tell musicians what to do with their careers?
Well, I'm not very intelligent, but at a very young age I knew the difference between its and it's, and you're and your. Perhaps that's what happens when people spend too much time watching TV and playing on the computer rather than learning literary skills properly.
I'm sorry but I learnt this when I was six years old. Why is this being taught on Slashdot, a forum populated largely by native English-speaking intelligent adults?