I don't understand the economics of what you're suggesting here.
You're saying that EA should be ashamed of converting their recent release on Xbox to Xbox360? That's the same as saying they're lazy because they made the same game for both PS2 and Xbox. It's a new platform. EA wants to deliver the Burnout title on every platform they possibly can, so they're porting it to the 360 as well as the current consoles.
If, instead, EA had said "We're not making it for 360, wait for MSFT to get it into their emulator" THAT would be derided as laziness. "Why do we only have the old Xbox version with its lower resolution and fewer shaders? Those bastards!"
Why in the world would EA rework the gameplay of a recent release when porting it between platforms?
Now if you'd said that EA was bringing Burnout3 over to the 360 with no gameplay changes, I'd be right there with you. But bringing "this year's games" to the 360 with the same basic feature set is just economics.
You're right, you probably don't want a Creative Commons license. You have a visible presence as the author and copyright holder of your work, and are easily contactable if someone wants permission to use your work. And you want to maintain careful control over who uses your work.
If someday someone wants to use your strip, and you can't be located, they can't use it. Even if they're just printing it on a flyer to promote donations to orphans, they're going to avoid liability and not use a work without permission. But if you want to be sure only the orphan fundraisers are using your stuff, and not the crazy cultists, you probably DO want to stick with your basic copyright protections and not grant anything further with CC.
Creative Commons is most simply a way for an author to say "Don't bother contacting me, I give you permission in advance." It's an easier way to grant the permissions you routinely grant without having to deal with every person wishing to use your work.
That way someone without the resources of Xerox can ensure they're legally allowed to use it. If you don't want your work used, even non-commercially, don't use a CC license.
Creative Commons isn't about subtracting protection from works that the author wants to be protected. It's about allowing reuse of works that the author doesn't mind sharing.
The difference between those two is something only the author can decide.
Re:Hollywood Still Missing The Obvious
on
P2P and TV
·
· Score: 1
I agree with the parent here. If you are a studio and you've produced a work (failed pilot, successful show, whatever) that is being downloaded on P2P, you are currently making zero dollars from these fans of your content.
If you offer a legitimate, legal way to download your content for a small (large, whatever) fee, you are now making X dollars online from your content where X is greater than zero. As long as X is greater than Y, the cost of hosting the download (neatly mitigated with things like BT if you like), you're making a profit.
You don't need everyone to pay. You don't even necessarily need a majority of people to pay. This is win-win! You've already paid to produce the content either way, why not profit from the polite/honest/naive folks who are willing to pay?
Not to mention the fact that once you've done this, NOW you have a moral leg to stand on when you're outraged at the content pirates. You can point them right at your reasonably-priced legal alternative.
Come on TV honchos, somebody put together iTunes for TV and give this some legitimacy.
Most of the EA Sports line was still being released on PS1 up until a year ago or so. There's nothing "odd" about it. EA would be stupid to disregard the huge pre-install base and solely pursue the new console owners. Likewise, EA would be stupid to just release an XBox version and say "use your backward compatibility" to XBox2 owners. Those with new consoles will want games that actually push their hardware.
Gradually the previous generation's support will diminish, just like the PS1 games gradually became little more than roster updates and had no new-feature-similarity to their PS2 cousins.
Like any huge company, process changes take an incredible amount of effort and momentum to achieve. Jamming as many new features into the game as possible is the priority, not designing those features right.
I don't think EA "encourages" this behavior, as you put it -- it's just incredibly hard to affect a change against "how things have been done in the past".
Check this writeup
on the earning report that was at 5pm EST today.
Significant excerpt (emphasis mine):
"Despite disappointing the Street, EA officials touted the company's success in the quarter. The company's Madden NFL 2005 title has posted double-digit growth in units and revenue over last year despite competition from ESPN NFL 2K5, which is co-published by Sega and Take-Two Interactive, said company CFO Warren Jenson."
When I moved into my new place last May, I was able to determine availability of DSL with a little bit of detective work. The problem is that everything on the phone company's end is linked to a telephone number, not necessarily an address. I found out the phone number of the guys living in the place at the time and checked online for availability using their phone number and address, and was able to find out that BellSouth offered DSL in that area and Covad didn't. However, if you don't have a phone number for the place, odds are bad that you can find out what local loop it's on and thus whether that loop has DSL. If the phone companies really maintained an exacting database of addresses corresponding to local loops, it would be simple, but their systems tend to be so patchwork and arbitrary that they don't. Plus, they probably never needed to know this before. All local loops are roughly equal for voice.:)
I've found that Mushkin is a great place to get high-quality memory at a good price. They shipped quickly and have the whole range of speeds & qualities.
Pro/E is functional for just about any type of mechanical design you'd like to do. PTC offers a huge array of libraries for special tasks (all for a price of course).
The drawback is that Pro/E is really not that similar to AutoCAD -- the main difference is the fact that it's a parametric modelling system (closer to AutoDesk's Mechanical Desktop). You can design a part with several steps (rotating surfaces, quilting them together, beveling, cloning, whatever) and then go back and change a parameter of your initial solid. Pro/E will rebuild your model, following the steps you took originally, to create the new model. This keeps you from having to rebuild things from scratch when values change, and also helps if you need to generate many very similar models that differ only in size/rotation/etc.
Anyway, from what I've heard, there's a definite learning curve going from AutoCAD to Pro/E, but I have yet to run into someone that didn't like Pro/E once they figured it out. It ain't cheap, though.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand the economics of what you're suggesting here.
You're saying that EA should be ashamed of converting their recent release on Xbox to Xbox360? That's the same as saying they're lazy because they made the same game for both PS2 and Xbox. It's a new platform. EA wants to deliver the Burnout title on every platform they possibly can, so they're porting it to the 360 as well as the current consoles.
If, instead, EA had said "We're not making it for 360, wait for MSFT to get it into their emulator" THAT would be derided as laziness. "Why do we only have the old Xbox version with its lower resolution and fewer shaders? Those bastards!"
Why in the world would EA rework the gameplay of a recent release when porting it between platforms?
Now if you'd said that EA was bringing Burnout3 over to the 360 with no gameplay changes, I'd be right there with you. But bringing "this year's games" to the 360 with the same basic feature set is just economics.
If the movie version of DOOM is Art, then so is the game it was based on.
It's not much of a stretch to extrapolate from there.
You're right, you probably don't want a Creative Commons license. You have a visible presence as the author and copyright holder of your work, and are easily contactable if someone wants permission to use your work. And you want to maintain careful control over who uses your work.
If someday someone wants to use your strip, and you can't be located, they can't use it. Even if they're just printing it on a flyer to promote donations to orphans, they're going to avoid liability and not use a work without permission. But if you want to be sure only the orphan fundraisers are using your stuff, and not the crazy cultists, you probably DO want to stick with your basic copyright protections and not grant anything further with CC.
Creative Commons is most simply a way for an author to say "Don't bother contacting me, I give you permission in advance." It's an easier way to grant the permissions you routinely grant without having to deal with every person wishing to use your work.
That way someone without the resources of Xerox can ensure they're legally allowed to use it.
If you don't want your work used, even non-commercially, don't use a CC license.
Creative Commons isn't about subtracting protection from works that the author wants to be protected. It's about allowing reuse of works that the author doesn't mind sharing.
The difference between those two is something only the author can decide.
If you offer a legitimate, legal way to download your content for a small (large, whatever) fee, you are now making X dollars online from your content where X is greater than zero. As long as X is greater than Y, the cost of hosting the download (neatly mitigated with things like BT if you like), you're making a profit.
You don't need everyone to pay. You don't even necessarily need a majority of people to pay. This is win-win! You've already paid to produce the content either way, why not profit from the polite/honest/naive folks who are willing to pay?
Not to mention the fact that once you've done this, NOW you have a moral leg to stand on when you're outraged at the content pirates. You can point them right at your reasonably-priced legal alternative.
Come on TV honchos, somebody put together iTunes for TV and give this some legitimacy.
Most of the EA Sports line was still being released on PS1 up until a year ago or so. There's nothing "odd" about it. EA would be stupid to disregard the huge pre-install base and solely pursue the new console owners. Likewise, EA would be stupid to just release an XBox version and say "use your backward compatibility" to XBox2 owners. Those with new consoles will want games that actually push their hardware.
Gradually the previous generation's support will diminish, just like the PS1 games gradually became little more than roster updates and had no new-feature-similarity to their PS2 cousins.
Like any huge company, process changes take an incredible amount of effort and momentum to achieve. Jamming as many new features into the game as possible is the priority, not designing those features right.
I don't think EA "encourages" this behavior, as you put it -- it's just incredibly hard to affect a change against "how things have been done in the past".
Significant excerpt (emphasis mine):
"Despite disappointing the Street, EA officials touted the company's success in the quarter. The company's Madden NFL 2005 title has posted double-digit growth in units and revenue over last year despite competition from ESPN NFL 2K5, which is co-published by Sega and Take-Two Interactive, said company CFO Warren Jenson."
When I moved into my new place last May, I was able to determine availability of DSL with a little bit of detective work. The problem is that everything on the phone company's end is linked to a telephone number, not necessarily an address. :)
I found out the phone number of the guys living in the place at the time and checked online for availability using their phone number and address, and was able to find out that BellSouth offered DSL in that area and Covad didn't.
However, if you don't have a phone number for the place, odds are bad that you can find out what local loop it's on and thus whether that loop has DSL.
If the phone companies really maintained an exacting database of addresses corresponding to local loops, it would be simple, but their systems tend to be so patchwork and arbitrary that they don't. Plus, they probably never needed to know this before. All local loops are roughly equal for voice.
I've found that Mushkin is a great place to get high-quality memory at a good price. They shipped quickly and have the whole range of speeds & qualities.
The drawback is that Pro/E is really not that similar to AutoCAD -- the main difference is the fact that it's a parametric modelling system (closer to AutoDesk's Mechanical Desktop). You can design a part with several steps (rotating surfaces, quilting them together, beveling, cloning, whatever) and then go back and change a parameter of your initial solid. Pro/E will rebuild your model, following the steps you took originally, to create the new model. This keeps you from having to rebuild things from scratch when values change, and also helps if you need to generate many very similar models that differ only in size/rotation/etc.
Anyway, from what I've heard, there's a definite learning curve going from AutoCAD to Pro/E, but I have yet to run into someone that didn't like Pro/E once they figured it out. It ain't cheap, though.