That is just retaliation by the employer. "I'm pissed you left me and I have to hire a new person so I am going to punish you." If the person is so valuable that you need to prevent them from going to work for someone else then the company should be prepared to pay extra since clearly the employee's skill set is very valuable and could be very dangerous if used against the company. The simple truth is that is almost never true. It's just a way for employers to hold a knife to an employee's throat so they don't leave. Given this economy it is an employer's market and they know it and some will use that to their advantage to screw people. I know of one manager who hired a programmer for $10,000 less than normal. He said he did it because he knew the economy was bad and simply because he could get away with it and someone would really be desperate for a job and take it. Not every business owner is like that, but there are enough out there like that, so employees shouldn't have to put up with that crap. When the economy is bad employers screw employees because they know they can. When the economy is good employers whine about employees moving on to other jobs forcing them to look for a replacement. Some employers just want their cake and eat it to, they want everything good for themselves and screw everyone else. When the economy is good you can avoid employers like that. When the economy is really bad like now, sometimes your stuck working for those jerks just so your house isn't foreclosed on.
What is really dumb is if you look at the national average for someone staying at a job. Most people only stay at job on average for 5-6 years before moving on to another company. The days of working for one company your entire life and retiring from that company are pretty much over for a majority of Americans. So why do employers think they can screw employees over with non-competes that leave employees out of work in their field for 1-2 years? The reason is simple, laziness. They don't want to have to go through the hassle of hiring someone else because they are unwilling to match a better offer an employee got. 95% of the time an employee is not so valuable that if they left to work for a competitor that they would critically hurt the business. Maybe a VP in a firm, definitely a partner or owner selling out, but for most employees not a chance. The employer replaced someone when they hired that employee so clearly the employee is replaceable.
My father used to say remember you are not irreplaceable, a company can replace you in a heartbeat so always do the best work you can. If an employer is hiring someone for a position posted in an ad then clearly the person in the position is replaceable, and is not vital or critical to the company. That simple fact right there clearly says/shows non-compete contracts are a total sham tilted completely in the favor of the employer and are designed to punish the employee for leaving. If it was a critical role in the company then the company wouldn't post ads, they would hire a headhunter and talk with VC's and other similar people to try and find a replacement. It would be done very low key and highly selective and most likely very privately. Those types of hires getting a non-compete may make sense. Employers need to stop trying to screw the rest of the employees with non-competes.
I have told employers that I don't sign anything without having a lawyer look at it first. Some have just waived it off and sent me off to work. Others I mark up the contract with the parts that restrict me from working after I leave. If they balk then I say you hired me clearly for my skill set, are you saying my skills are so valuable and threatening to your company that I can't work for anyone else for 1-2 years? If that is the case then clearly you need to pay me more and I will gladly sign it. Most of the time they don't even notice I marked it up. A couple have looked at it, looked at me and said hmm, and filed it away. Not once has an HR person or employer said sign it or else, except in one case and the judge threw the whole employment contract out because of the illegal behavior to make me to sign it.
I'm pretty conservative and I wouldn't have a problem with this at all. I think the main things a company should be able to protect when an employee leaves are their customer list, in very limited cases their processes for doing business, and obviously trade secrets (chemical formulas, food recipes, etc.). Other than that an employee should be able to work for anyone they want that will pay them better than their current employer. If they are valuable enough for a non-compete then the employer obviously thinks they are important and can offer to pay them more to get them to stay. If the employer doesn't think the employee is valuable, but wants a non-compete then they are being vindictive jerks and the employee should leave such a crappy company. I would even go so far as to say the employee might even want to let the customers know how the company treats their employees when they leave.
Most positions that are worth having a non-compete contract are with employees who a company is hiring specifically because of their skills, not because they are going to train them and give them skills. So the employee should be able to offer those same valuable skills to another company who is willing to pay them more. Most non-competes are not written to reasonably protect the company, most are written to be vindictive to the employee if they decide to leave. Those types of agreements are crap.
Last I heard 35 or 36 states had already voted for a Constitutional Convention. My understanding is we only need 1-2 more states to vote for it and it will be forced by law to happen. I thought I also read that 2-3 states are considering bringing it up for a vote in their states. Some career politicians and lawyers are freaked out about it for fear of what kinds of things the people might want to have added as Constitutional Amendments. The radical left absolutely fears that because they know a majority of Americans are centrists rather than left or right in politics. A Constitutional Convention would very likely completely change the political landscape of this country.
I personally would push for a balanced budget amendment, no spending what you don't have. I would also be all for some form of term limits on congressmen. I think it would breath new life into the government and make it hard to bribe and peddle influence, not impossible but a bit harder. Same for some government positions at the higher levels where those people don't care about who is in office because they have been there through 3+ Presidents. I think limiting Supreme Court Justices terms of service would also be good rather than life sentence. I think like 10 years is plenty of time and prevents the court from going to far politically one way or the other. There are 9 of them just set it up so one judge is replaced every year or year and 6 months.
I suspect if it does happen relatively soon, given the climate of the country we would see a scale back of the size and scope of the federal government and the states have more control of their own affairs.
Microsoft is like every other business in the free market? I wasn't aware it was common in Fortune 500 companies to want to choke off the air supply of rival CEOs and say that you want to see them dead, like Microsoft has done. I don't recall seeing too many CEO's or upper executives throwing chairs around on a stage on video before the entire company. I don't recall too many companies who enter negotiations to buy a company, then bold face steal the company's work and claim it as their own and turn around to sue the crap out of anyone who tries to do the same. I also don't recall any company saying if you buy from us and someone else then we will never ever sell you our products again and we know this would put you out of business which is why we are threatening you like this. I don't recall any Fortune 500 companies trying to sell PowerPoint presentations as if they were actual real produce due out in the next few months just to sabotage another company when they had no plans to produce any competing product in reality. Microsoft did this so often and so blatantly that the industry came up with a name just for Microsoft doing this, vaporware. Microsoft is famous for announcing big long feature lists to drive other companies out and then quietly not include those touted features. Yes Microsoft inspired the term and later it went on to be applied to other companies. There are so many industry terms created just for Microsoft and their absolutely crappy business practices, Embrace-Extend-Extinguish, FUD. This doesn't even include Microsoft joining standards groups and then purposeful sabotaging them to let their products get ahead in an attempt to be the standard. I personally witnessed Microsoft employee's doing this on the attempt for a RFC standard for instant messaging. Microsoft has never ever been about industry standards. You only have to look at the crap pulled with Kerberos and Java as two examples off the top of my head. Look at the crap they pulled with DOCX recently. How about the crap Microsoft pull against Lotus where they intentionally made Lotus crash if you used it with MS-DOS. They invented a saying about this for Microsoft, it's not done until Lotus won't run. They did the same thing with their office products if used with non MS-DOS.
There is no other company in the world that I know of that investors will refuse to invest in a new company or idea simply because Microsoft *MIGHT* create something similar. Investors have known for a long time that Microsoft is illegally anti-competitive, but there was nothing they could about it. I know two guys personally who were told to forget their ideas/products because the investors heard Microsoft might be looking to make a somewhat similar product in the long-term future. It didn't matter that they basically had a product today ready to go. Microsoft didn't even have to make a product they could threaten to make one and it would drive companies out of business because companies/investors knew how Microsoft played the game. There is a reason Microsoft was convicted of illegal monopolistic/anti-competitive behaviors, using their position to drive others out of the marketplace. Microsoft was just lucky that they were cozy with the new administration that came in office during sentencing. Microsoft should have had their back broken by the courts for all the crap they have pulled over the years.
Microsoft as a corporation and those at the top have been absolute complete assholes to the rest of the computer industry and held it back far more than any other company in the industry. One of the big growth contributors for the Internet was that Microsoft didn't think it was important. Microsoft even tried to change everything and become the default site and way to do things on the Internet, but they were fortunately too late to the game. Not to mention, too many of the old guard from ARPA-net days were still around and refused to allow anyone to change how/the way things had been done for years.
Unfortunately several of the district courts have ruled that "shrink-wrap" licenses are enforceable. You can look this up yourself. I am not sure why the Slashdot crowd forgets this when there have even been stories posted here about that exact thing. I am only aware of 1-2 cases where the "shrink-wrap" license was not enforced and that was because the software was never open but resold to someone else despite what the EULA said/required.
I had such a thing happen to me here in Missouri. The company and the lawyer who forced me to sign an NDA and employment combined contract after I had been working there two-three weeks, both knew it was unenforceable and actually illegal to threaten me to have my paycheck withheld until I signed or fired if I didn't sign. The judge wasn't happy about that and threw the whole thing out. I suspect it was to send both the lawyer and the company and others a clear message that this kind of clear disregard for the law was absolutely not going to be tolerated and companies would be severely punished for it.
Without some kind of additional compensation you can not make or get an employee to sign another contract once they are hired and have been working. If you offer the employee $10-$1,000, or 2 more vacation days a year, or whatever to sign the contract and it is their choice then it is absolutely legal. If it is enforceable depend, on the state and what is in the contract, since the employment contract would still have to be reasonable/legal according to your state laws.
Or even better answer is to say that you have been burned by employment contracts in the past and you would like a lawyer to look this contract over for you before you sign it. If they are playing games and/or know it is unenforceable then they will just say never mind and go on with the day. If they must have the contract then they should have absolutely no problem with having you consult with a lawyer before signing it. The company never signs any contract without a lawyer so it shouldn't seem strange to them at all for you to do the same. If your such a low level employee that they don't understand why you need a lawyer to look at it, then the question would be if your so low level why do they need one?
I can tell you for a fact it is not just senior management or R&D level employees who are having these forced on them. I have had them forced on me for being a network administrator, and when I was network specialist supporting salesmen. As the support specialist I had very little contact with the customer other than making sure they filed out some forms of exactly what they wanted the network to do for their company and then I built/designed it and the sales guys sold it. So it isn't just R&D and high level managers getting the shaft on non-compete contracts. Fortunately most states in the Midwest limit them to not contacting the company's customers if you go to work for a competitor for a reasonable period of time like 6 months to a year. I have even heard of a few cases of the whole contract thrown out because the person was so low level that they didn't really have access to the company's trade secrets or direct access to customers thus they never should have been required to sign one.
In most states if you don't sign the contract before you start work that the company can not require you to sign one as a condition of continued employment. They must include some additional consideration for signing the contract other than the paycheck, and even then under some cases there is nothing the company can do if the person refuses to sign one after they start work. By that I mean the company coming to you 2-3 days to a week later, after you start demanding you sign an employment contract or a non-compete. I had this exact thing happen to me and the whole contract was thrown out because of no consideration and because they threatened to withhold paychecks or fire me, which is not legal at least in Missouri.
Actually in the state of Missouri unless you give the worker some kind of additional compensation you can not require them to sign any new employment contracts as a condition of their continued employment. I ran in to this very thing and the whole thing was toss out. I worked 4 weeks then the company wanted me to sign a non-compete and I went round and round with them on the language of it. When I left to work for someone else they tried to sue me and the whole contract was thrown out.
That is incorrect. There is a limit to how aggressive the public will allow a company to get in order to get more profits. Any company who steps over that line does so at their own risk and the risk of crashing and burning hard or at a bare minimum taking a serious hit. Just look at a few of the large national boycotts of the past to see how the public can be eventually pissed off enough to react.
There is also the mandate to insure the company's survival which may not always translate into making profit. Sometimes a company has to spend money just to stay at their current level of profit or spend money so they don't loose even more profit. An example of doing something for absolutely no profit or return is corporations giving to charity. It adds basically nothing to the bottom line but generally gives people a feel good image of the company, which may or may not long term translate into profits. All it might do is simply make people not hate the company. There are also times when companies spend money not to make money but to prevent losses. Supporting lobbing groups is an example of this. It doesn't make them money, but may help them from loosing money in the future. Companies have to plan for the future. The question is how that is done, and at what ratio of spending expense. These are things shareholders might end up fighting over.
Actually that is incorrect. Ideally you would prefer to have 51%, but in reality you rarely need to actually own 51% of the stock to do a "hostile takeover". Remember that larger companies have large blocks of stocks controlled by investment groups. So if you get a number of them on your side the amount needed begins to go way down. Most companies do not actually answer to mom and pop who have the stock in their retirement funds. The companies answer to those huge investment groups who manage all those funds.
I have read about hostile takeovers that have been done with as little as 10% but it seems that 15-25% is more common unless your going to slice up the company and sell it off piecemeal. How much you need depends on exactly what you intend to force the company to do. Although it seems these days more and more companies are putting a "poison pill" article in the corporation to help stop most of these types of things.
Your best bet for this is to develop and sell a super cheap spread spectrum high bandwidth wireless technology that is a meshed network with a percentage of the bandwidth reserved for backbone/back-haul data. Then everyone could link to their neighbors and it would bounce all around populated areas with no central network company to be charging everyone. It would also make the network next to impossible to take down completely. The only issue would be those in remote areas but I am sure some kind of repeater system could be developed to connect remote areas for less than what it currently costs. You would end up with high latency, which makes it not as useful for gaming and VOIP, but almost everything else would be fine. This would also be the perfect place to force the transition to IPv6 so every device would have it's own IP.
Nice idea and it might possibly work. There is only one problem with the idea. The movie and music studios already do this. They sell records and produce movies and then turn around and tell the artists that the movies didn't make any profit so there is nothing to split with them. If you want this to actually work you would need to set up some very strict by-laws and have multiple accounting firms audit the books yearly so as to help prevent that kind of criminal behavior. I don't imagine you could guarantee to get rid of it all, but you could certainly make it much harder to do. Also putting a sunshine clause in the non-profit would be a huge help as well. As the saying goes, sunshine is a great disinfectant for unethical/criminal behavior.
I would love to see copyright lengths/terms reduced to their original Constitutional length. It would vastly expand the public domain and the level of culture in this country and other countries would rise significantly. Instead corporations have used copyright laws and lengths to hold society culture hostage and refuse to honor their end of the bargin provided by copyright's limited protection. Copyright was suppose to give very short exclusive rights to content creators to encourage them to create content to expand the public domain.
In the US the public domain is basically dying on the vine due to corporate abuse of copyright and patent laws. I suspect if something doesn't change soon that in 10-20 the US will have no meaningful public domain to speak of. This will effect science, culture, business, the economy...basically everything and retard the growth of the country significantly. This is probably one of the biggest hidden landmines this country faces in the future. A country with no culture will not survive, since there is nothing to bind them together.
Bill Gates was absolutely not in the right place at the right time, like it was just chance. Bill Gates got a meeting with IBM because his parents were on a non-profit board with some of the heads of IBM. They made the comment that they were doing some new personal computer stuff to compete with Apple and the Gates' told them that they should talk with their son who was doing computer stuff. Thus, it was his family connections that got him the meeting with IBM. When he took the meeting with IBM and they told him they wanted a DOS for their new PC, he completely bluffed his way through the meeting. He told them he had something he could convert for them. Balmer and Allen freaked out about the IBM deadline and wanted to know how in the world they would meet it when Bill lied about having a DOS and there was clearly no time to develop one. Bill Gates figured he could buy DOS from Tim Paterson, who wrote a 16bit version of CP/M because Digital was taking too long. Gate's bought the DOS for supposedly $10,000 and supposedly closed the contract on the DOS purchase very shortly after the meeting. Some say he closed the deal that week or something similar. He then polished it up and sold it to IBM for far more than that. He even got IBM to agree to allowing Microsoft to sell versions of the DOS for non-IBM systems rather than outright purchase which was very strange at the time for IBM. Most suspect it wasn't Gate's shrew negotiating skills but rather his parents relationship with some of the IBM executives. This also combined with the hubris of IBM to think that no one would be able to compete with them so what did it matter if the DOS was on other systems, since people would want IBM computers. The concept of a clone computer wasn't even a thought to most people at the time.
To a certain degree IBM ended up really screwing themselves in their desire to get in to the PC market fast. They made the mistake of using all off the shelf parts in standard configuration formats. So PC clones had a huge jump start in that they could also buy the same exact stuff IBM was buying and make clones. The only problem was the BIOS for the machine. That was eventually solved as well by Columbia Data Products doing a clean room development of a clone BIOS. Because these were clones of IBM's Microsoft was in the clear to sell MS-DOS to all these clone makers and thus history was made.
This was all pretty common knowledge for people who were around in the computer industry in the early days. Yes there are more details, but those are the basics.
Bill Gates did something related when he founded Corbis, the stock photo and film company. He bought the historic Bettmann Archive as the seed and began to purchase more images for the archive. I have no idea what the rates they charge are, but it would be nice to see them open up more of that archive for public use. They already add a million or so images a year to the archive, so it wouldn't exactly kill the company to do that with some of the really old German stuff from the Bettmann Archive. They are slowly digitizing the entire collection, which I guess is a good thing in case something happens to the originals.
It isn't exactly a gift to the public, but the images are being saved and converted to digital format. I would be far more impressed if Bill Gates had the company slowly give out a certain amount of images to the public every year. That would truly be giving back to the public, especially in the form of preserved history.
The cost of albums hasn't changed a whole lot in relation to singles. If anything the cost of albums has seemed to me to have gone up a bit in raw dollars, not buying power. In terms of album costs versus singles cost they seem kind of the same with maybe it being slightly cheaper for the album years ago. The cost of other good has changed but the price of music doesn't seem to have changed a lot and the ratio of single costs to album costs seems to about the same.
Actually Angry Bird's Rio was not exclusive to Amazon. You can get it on the Android Market, you can get it from iTunes. So it clearly isn't an exclusive in any possible sense of the word.
The amount required to recover on mobile games is exceedingly small which is why so many garage developers are able to get in on the game. It is also why so many of the big development houses are in the game because costs are small and profits are a much higher percentage. So even at $0.10 a copy it doesn't take long to recover the development costs. If you doubt that you might want to look at the amazingly large volume per month that apps are doing that are in the top 300 in the iTunes store. I last heard they were doing about 100,000 a month with top apps doing far more than that.
Well about the same exact price. I recall getting 45's for about $2 so that is 2 songs for $2, you know the A side and B side if your not old enough to remember. I also recall getting CD singles for about $3-$5 and those having 4-5 songs/versions. So again about $0.99 or less per song. I might also mention that these were singles of the top songs off the artist's latest album, so cherry picking has gone on for quite awhile. So what exactly was your point? Seems what your complaining about has gone on for..decades. At least going back to the 70's in my own personal experience.
The only people being screwed on music pricing is the artists. If you remember the music industry refused to deal with Apple because they weren't getting a good enough deal given the contracts at the time with artists. The contracts changed and suddenly Apple was good enough. It was because the studios got a bigger slice of the pie from the artists so they could afford to keep their mansions, hookers, and blow or whatever they blow their vast amounts on. Movie industry is exactly the same. Online TV and movies couldn't happen, well they modified contracts and suddenly it was all good to go. Neither had anything to do with online being bad, and everything to do with who got what slice of the pie. Remember if you want an audit of your royalties you have to use their accounting firms (both movie & music) because the accounting procedures are so unique only a few firms understand it. Which is another way of saying only a few firms won't tell you how your getting screwed and all the money/expenses the studios are misreporting and screwing you out of money.
This has to be one of the most stupid things I have ever heard from a industry group.
"1) Amazon steeply discounts a large chunk of its Appstore catalog (imagine: “our top 100-rated games are all 75% off!”). Some developers will probably win in this scenario, but some developers — most likely, those near the bottom of the list — will lose, not gaining enough sales to offset the loss in revenue per sale. Amazon benefits the most, because it captures all the customer goodwill generated by such a promotion."
I think they have forgotten that some people will never ever buy a product until it drops in price to a specific level. It doesn't matter what developers would like to happen. This is basic business 101. Businesses want to squeeze as much money as the possibly can out of customers. Customers want to pay as a little as possible for a service/product. So each of them have to decide on a price they can both agree on. The sale will bring you in more sales that you never would have gotten until you lowered the price as shown by the increase in sales. Not everyone who buys at the discounted price would ever have bought at the higher price. This is the same type of thinking that industry groups use to say every pirated copy of software is a lost sale when that is simply not true. I would also think that when an app goes on sale that people snatch up that is good that it increases the sales of your other apps. We see this exact thing happen for example when Baen sci-fi publisher gives away an author's book, the author's other books see significantly increased sales. Not to mention if the app is good the developer also gets just as much good will as Amazon probably more since the app is in front of the buy far more than the Amazon store.
"Amazon steeply discounts (or makes entirely free) a game that has a well-defined, well-connected niche audience. The members of that niche audience snap up the game during the promotional period, robbing the game’s developer of a significant percentage of its total potential revenue from its core audience."
The same thing happens on iTunes. A game gets set to free and people snap it up. All that has to happen is a developer doesn't give away the game and this never happens. I don't see the problem here at all. I should also mention that I have noticed huge numbers of apps that go on sale at a discount when first released then a few weeks later the price goes up. So I'm not sure I even see their point here at all when it seems this is an industry standard.
The other thing is that this seems to smack of telling developers, your too stupid to read the contracts you sign so let me explain it to you in simple terms so your little brain understands the big legal words here. I personally would find it insulting if an industry group ever sent me a letter like this, implying that I don't know the contracts I am signing. If I don't understand a contract I need to get a lawyer, which is always a good idea anyway. If I still sign a contract and get screwed, well then perhaps I deserve it since I am terrible at business, can't read and understand a contract or contact a lawyer, and should have just gone to work for someone else.
Looking right now at the top 25 paid game apps on iTunes the most expensive to develop would likely be: Asphalt 6 (although this is an upgrade), iStunt 2, Call of Duty: Zombies (again an upgrade/mod), Lego Harry Potter (a port and mod), Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12 (port and upgrade). Every single other game is a time waster with a game time of 1-4 minutes. World of Goo might be an exception, but it has been ported to/from several other platforms. In fact 10 of the 25 top titles are actually ports from web, console or computer games, 4 are variations of existing apps (mods), and at least 15 of them, that I know of, are available on multiple phone platforms.
I would also comment that there are also several other android market places as well. handmark.com, andspot.com, mobileapps.com, slideme.org, andappstore.com,
Blade Runner is an amazing film and could stand alone as it's own IP completely separate from the book, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep". The movie and books exist in the same universe and have many of the same ideas and concepts behind them, but Blade Runner in my opinion is definitely not a movie version of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep". It would be better to say Blade Runner was inspired by the book rather than a movie version of the book. Even Philip K. Dick and Ridley Scott have made this point. This is the reason why Bud Yorkin aka The Blade Runner Partnership have had so much control over the Blade Runner IP. It's also the reason why Philip K. Dick's estate has had so little control over anything to do with Blade Runner.
I am not sure how K. W. Jeter was able to secure the rights to the Blade Runner IP in order to write 3 novels based on the Blade Runner IP/universe. I suspect that the story behind that is a very interesting one. I suspect it was easier for him to get the rights for the books given he was a friend of Philip K. Dick.
Yes Yorkin has been a major problem with Blade Runner. There have many attempts to do something with the Blade Runner IP but Yorkin has been a dick and shot them all down. It was a very hard struggle with Yorkin to get all the updated versions of Blade Runner released. He seems like a complete dick to me based on his handling of the IP rights for Blade Runner. The fighting with Vangelis over the music certainly didn't help with the film getting better treatment for a long while. Personally I think he was being a big whiny baby, and one of those prima donna artists about the music for the movie. If you are hired to do a movie score then you are doing a work for hire and the movie producers should pretty much own the music that you created. He can be free to take his name off the work if he didn't like it, but the movie owners should have had the rights to the music and he shouldn't have been such a baby about the whole thing.
Personally I think Blade Runner would have been much more of a cult hit and gotten a lot better treatment over the years, after it was released, if Bud Yorkin hadn't owned the rights to Blade Runner. Personally I think Yorkin ended up screwing a lot people because of the financing deal he forced on them. I think Philip K. Dick's estate or even Ridley Scott would have handled the Blade Runner property much better than Bud Yorkin did and has. There is a special place in hell for Hollywood people like him.
Don't even get me started on the crappy Hollywood accounting that movie studios do and how this was done to Blade Runner as well. That certainly didn't help matters at all either when it was released or even over the years. Blade Runner is suppose to have cost about $28 Million. I suspect if you did actual real-world accounting rather that Hollywood/Enron accounting on it that the real costs would have closer to $15-18 Million to make Blade Runner. But you know Hollywood they love to do their messed up accounting and claim that almost no movie has ever made a profit. Hollywood tried to do this with Lord of the Rings and screw Peter Jackson out of his share of the money. Hollywood knows they are screwing everyone over with their Hollywood accounting because they write contracts that only certain accounting firms can audit the books, because supposedly only these firms understand how movie pictures are made. The reality is every time a movie studio has been dragged in to court over their accounting practices the judges have absolutely blasted the movie studio because of their accounting practices and every single time the movie studios have settled. The studios know if they get one legal precedent against their accounting practices that everyone would come out of the wood-work and demand their fair share and the movie studios would end up screwed because of how they have screwed so many people for so long. Also the studios definitely don't want the gravy train to end on how much money they actually suck out of a movie production that makes them rich. Just look at the salaries of the top studio execs. and then look at the profit levels for studios that are under publicly traded corporations. There are some movie studios who have mismanaged themselves right out of business, but the majority of the movie studios are raking it in hand over fist. That the is secret lie that Hollywood doesn't want to talk about. They want people to believe that most movies don't make any money and are huge risks. Movies are a bit risky as to if the public will like them and actually buy them, but then studios do so many focus groups on a movie before it hits your local theater that it usually isn't that much of a problem. Focus groups and greedy studio execs who want the easiest way to make a large profit by ripping off people with the Hollywood system is why we get so many reboots, sequels, etc. You fight the Hollywood system and actually demand your fair share and you won't last long in Hollywood.
Bud Yorkin is just one example of this whole messed up system, and the Blade Runner rights have been caught in the middle of this whole nasty system.
Slashdot Mirror
That is just retaliation by the employer. "I'm pissed you left me and I have to hire a new person so I am going to punish you." If the person is so valuable that you need to prevent them from going to work for someone else then the company should be prepared to pay extra since clearly the employee's skill set is very valuable and could be very dangerous if used against the company. The simple truth is that is almost never true. It's just a way for employers to hold a knife to an employee's throat so they don't leave. Given this economy it is an employer's market and they know it and some will use that to their advantage to screw people. I know of one manager who hired a programmer for $10,000 less than normal. He said he did it because he knew the economy was bad and simply because he could get away with it and someone would really be desperate for a job and take it. Not every business owner is like that, but there are enough out there like that, so employees shouldn't have to put up with that crap. When the economy is bad employers screw employees because they know they can. When the economy is good employers whine about employees moving on to other jobs forcing them to look for a replacement. Some employers just want their cake and eat it to, they want everything good for themselves and screw everyone else. When the economy is good you can avoid employers like that. When the economy is really bad like now, sometimes your stuck working for those jerks just so your house isn't foreclosed on.
What is really dumb is if you look at the national average for someone staying at a job. Most people only stay at job on average for 5-6 years before moving on to another company. The days of working for one company your entire life and retiring from that company are pretty much over for a majority of Americans. So why do employers think they can screw employees over with non-competes that leave employees out of work in their field for 1-2 years? The reason is simple, laziness. They don't want to have to go through the hassle of hiring someone else because they are unwilling to match a better offer an employee got. 95% of the time an employee is not so valuable that if they left to work for a competitor that they would critically hurt the business. Maybe a VP in a firm, definitely a partner or owner selling out, but for most employees not a chance. The employer replaced someone when they hired that employee so clearly the employee is replaceable.
My father used to say remember you are not irreplaceable, a company can replace you in a heartbeat so always do the best work you can. If an employer is hiring someone for a position posted in an ad then clearly the person in the position is replaceable, and is not vital or critical to the company. That simple fact right there clearly says/shows non-compete contracts are a total sham tilted completely in the favor of the employer and are designed to punish the employee for leaving. If it was a critical role in the company then the company wouldn't post ads, they would hire a headhunter and talk with VC's and other similar people to try and find a replacement. It would be done very low key and highly selective and most likely very privately. Those types of hires getting a non-compete may make sense. Employers need to stop trying to screw the rest of the employees with non-competes.
I have told employers that I don't sign anything without having a lawyer look at it first. Some have just waived it off and sent me off to work. Others I mark up the contract with the parts that restrict me from working after I leave. If they balk then I say you hired me clearly for my skill set, are you saying my skills are so valuable and threatening to your company that I can't work for anyone else for 1-2 years? If that is the case then clearly you need to pay me more and I will gladly sign it. Most of the time they don't even notice I marked it up. A couple have looked at it, looked at me and said hmm, and filed it away. Not once has an HR person or employer said sign it or else, except in one case and the judge threw the whole employment contract out because of the illegal behavior to make me to sign it.
I'm pretty conservative and I wouldn't have a problem with this at all. I think the main things a company should be able to protect when an employee leaves are their customer list, in very limited cases their processes for doing business, and obviously trade secrets (chemical formulas, food recipes, etc.). Other than that an employee should be able to work for anyone they want that will pay them better than their current employer. If they are valuable enough for a non-compete then the employer obviously thinks they are important and can offer to pay them more to get them to stay. If the employer doesn't think the employee is valuable, but wants a non-compete then they are being vindictive jerks and the employee should leave such a crappy company. I would even go so far as to say the employee might even want to let the customers know how the company treats their employees when they leave.
Most positions that are worth having a non-compete contract are with employees who a company is hiring specifically because of their skills, not because they are going to train them and give them skills. So the employee should be able to offer those same valuable skills to another company who is willing to pay them more. Most non-competes are not written to reasonably protect the company, most are written to be vindictive to the employee if they decide to leave. Those types of agreements are crap.
Last I heard 35 or 36 states had already voted for a Constitutional Convention. My understanding is we only need 1-2 more states to vote for it and it will be forced by law to happen. I thought I also read that 2-3 states are considering bringing it up for a vote in their states. Some career politicians and lawyers are freaked out about it for fear of what kinds of things the people might want to have added as Constitutional Amendments. The radical left absolutely fears that because they know a majority of Americans are centrists rather than left or right in politics. A Constitutional Convention would very likely completely change the political landscape of this country.
I personally would push for a balanced budget amendment, no spending what you don't have. I would also be all for some form of term limits on congressmen. I think it would breath new life into the government and make it hard to bribe and peddle influence, not impossible but a bit harder. Same for some government positions at the higher levels where those people don't care about who is in office because they have been there through 3+ Presidents. I think limiting Supreme Court Justices terms of service would also be good rather than life sentence. I think like 10 years is plenty of time and prevents the court from going to far politically one way or the other. There are 9 of them just set it up so one judge is replaced every year or year and 6 months.
I suspect if it does happen relatively soon, given the climate of the country we would see a scale back of the size and scope of the federal government and the states have more control of their own affairs.
Microsoft is like every other business in the free market? I wasn't aware it was common in Fortune 500 companies to want to choke off the air supply of rival CEOs and say that you want to see them dead, like Microsoft has done. I don't recall seeing too many CEO's or upper executives throwing chairs around on a stage on video before the entire company. I don't recall too many companies who enter negotiations to buy a company, then bold face steal the company's work and claim it as their own and turn around to sue the crap out of anyone who tries to do the same. I also don't recall any company saying if you buy from us and someone else then we will never ever sell you our products again and we know this would put you out of business which is why we are threatening you like this. I don't recall any Fortune 500 companies trying to sell PowerPoint presentations as if they were actual real produce due out in the next few months just to sabotage another company when they had no plans to produce any competing product in reality. Microsoft did this so often and so blatantly that the industry came up with a name just for Microsoft doing this, vaporware. Microsoft is famous for announcing big long feature lists to drive other companies out and then quietly not include those touted features. Yes Microsoft inspired the term and later it went on to be applied to other companies. There are so many industry terms created just for Microsoft and their absolutely crappy business practices, Embrace-Extend-Extinguish, FUD. This doesn't even include Microsoft joining standards groups and then purposeful sabotaging them to let their products get ahead in an attempt to be the standard. I personally witnessed Microsoft employee's doing this on the attempt for a RFC standard for instant messaging. Microsoft has never ever been about industry standards. You only have to look at the crap pulled with Kerberos and Java as two examples off the top of my head. Look at the crap they pulled with DOCX recently. How about the crap Microsoft pull against Lotus where they intentionally made Lotus crash if you used it with MS-DOS. They invented a saying about this for Microsoft, it's not done until Lotus won't run. They did the same thing with their office products if used with non MS-DOS.
There is no other company in the world that I know of that investors will refuse to invest in a new company or idea simply because Microsoft *MIGHT* create something similar. Investors have known for a long time that Microsoft is illegally anti-competitive, but there was nothing they could about it. I know two guys personally who were told to forget their ideas/products because the investors heard Microsoft might be looking to make a somewhat similar product in the long-term future. It didn't matter that they basically had a product today ready to go. Microsoft didn't even have to make a product they could threaten to make one and it would drive companies out of business because companies/investors knew how Microsoft played the game. There is a reason Microsoft was convicted of illegal monopolistic/anti-competitive behaviors, using their position to drive others out of the marketplace. Microsoft was just lucky that they were cozy with the new administration that came in office during sentencing. Microsoft should have had their back broken by the courts for all the crap they have pulled over the years.
Microsoft as a corporation and those at the top have been absolute complete assholes to the rest of the computer industry and held it back far more than any other company in the industry. One of the big growth contributors for the Internet was that Microsoft didn't think it was important. Microsoft even tried to change everything and become the default site and way to do things on the Internet, but they were fortunately too late to the game. Not to mention, too many of the old guard from ARPA-net days were still around and refused to allow anyone to change how/the way things had been done for years.
Unfortunately several of the district courts have ruled that "shrink-wrap" licenses are enforceable. You can look this up yourself. I am not sure why the Slashdot crowd forgets this when there have even been stories posted here about that exact thing. I am only aware of 1-2 cases where the "shrink-wrap" license was not enforced and that was because the software was never open but resold to someone else despite what the EULA said/required.
I had such a thing happen to me here in Missouri. The company and the lawyer who forced me to sign an NDA and employment combined contract after I had been working there two-three weeks, both knew it was unenforceable and actually illegal to threaten me to have my paycheck withheld until I signed or fired if I didn't sign. The judge wasn't happy about that and threw the whole thing out. I suspect it was to send both the lawyer and the company and others a clear message that this kind of clear disregard for the law was absolutely not going to be tolerated and companies would be severely punished for it.
Without some kind of additional compensation you can not make or get an employee to sign another contract once they are hired and have been working. If you offer the employee $10-$1,000, or 2 more vacation days a year, or whatever to sign the contract and it is their choice then it is absolutely legal. If it is enforceable depend, on the state and what is in the contract, since the employment contract would still have to be reasonable/legal according to your state laws.
Or even better answer is to say that you have been burned by employment contracts in the past and you would like a lawyer to look this contract over for you before you sign it. If they are playing games and/or know it is unenforceable then they will just say never mind and go on with the day. If they must have the contract then they should have absolutely no problem with having you consult with a lawyer before signing it. The company never signs any contract without a lawyer so it shouldn't seem strange to them at all for you to do the same. If your such a low level employee that they don't understand why you need a lawyer to look at it, then the question would be if your so low level why do they need one?
I can tell you for a fact it is not just senior management or R&D level employees who are having these forced on them. I have had them forced on me for being a network administrator, and when I was network specialist supporting salesmen. As the support specialist I had very little contact with the customer other than making sure they filed out some forms of exactly what they wanted the network to do for their company and then I built/designed it and the sales guys sold it. So it isn't just R&D and high level managers getting the shaft on non-compete contracts. Fortunately most states in the Midwest limit them to not contacting the company's customers if you go to work for a competitor for a reasonable period of time like 6 months to a year. I have even heard of a few cases of the whole contract thrown out because the person was so low level that they didn't really have access to the company's trade secrets or direct access to customers thus they never should have been required to sign one.
In most states if you don't sign the contract before you start work that the company can not require you to sign one as a condition of continued employment. They must include some additional consideration for signing the contract other than the paycheck, and even then under some cases there is nothing the company can do if the person refuses to sign one after they start work. By that I mean the company coming to you 2-3 days to a week later, after you start demanding you sign an employment contract or a non-compete. I had this exact thing happen to me and the whole contract was thrown out because of no consideration and because they threatened to withhold paychecks or fire me, which is not legal at least in Missouri.
Actually in the state of Missouri unless you give the worker some kind of additional compensation you can not require them to sign any new employment contracts as a condition of their continued employment. I ran in to this very thing and the whole thing was toss out. I worked 4 weeks then the company wanted me to sign a non-compete and I went round and round with them on the language of it. When I left to work for someone else they tried to sue me and the whole contract was thrown out.
That is incorrect. There is a limit to how aggressive the public will allow a company to get in order to get more profits. Any company who steps over that line does so at their own risk and the risk of crashing and burning hard or at a bare minimum taking a serious hit. Just look at a few of the large national boycotts of the past to see how the public can be eventually pissed off enough to react.
There is also the mandate to insure the company's survival which may not always translate into making profit. Sometimes a company has to spend money just to stay at their current level of profit or spend money so they don't loose even more profit. An example of doing something for absolutely no profit or return is corporations giving to charity. It adds basically nothing to the bottom line but generally gives people a feel good image of the company, which may or may not long term translate into profits. All it might do is simply make people not hate the company. There are also times when companies spend money not to make money but to prevent losses. Supporting lobbing groups is an example of this. It doesn't make them money, but may help them from loosing money in the future. Companies have to plan for the future. The question is how that is done, and at what ratio of spending expense. These are things shareholders might end up fighting over.
Actually that is incorrect. Ideally you would prefer to have 51%, but in reality you rarely need to actually own 51% of the stock to do a "hostile takeover". Remember that larger companies have large blocks of stocks controlled by investment groups. So if you get a number of them on your side the amount needed begins to go way down. Most companies do not actually answer to mom and pop who have the stock in their retirement funds. The companies answer to those huge investment groups who manage all those funds.
I have read about hostile takeovers that have been done with as little as 10% but it seems that 15-25% is more common unless your going to slice up the company and sell it off piecemeal. How much you need depends on exactly what you intend to force the company to do. Although it seems these days more and more companies are putting a "poison pill" article in the corporation to help stop most of these types of things.
Your best bet for this is to develop and sell a super cheap spread spectrum high bandwidth wireless technology that is a meshed network with a percentage of the bandwidth reserved for backbone/back-haul data. Then everyone could link to their neighbors and it would bounce all around populated areas with no central network company to be charging everyone. It would also make the network next to impossible to take down completely. The only issue would be those in remote areas but I am sure some kind of repeater system could be developed to connect remote areas for less than what it currently costs. You would end up with high latency, which makes it not as useful for gaming and VOIP, but almost everything else would be fine. This would also be the perfect place to force the transition to IPv6 so every device would have it's own IP.
Nice idea and it might possibly work. There is only one problem with the idea. The movie and music studios already do this. They sell records and produce movies and then turn around and tell the artists that the movies didn't make any profit so there is nothing to split with them. If you want this to actually work you would need to set up some very strict by-laws and have multiple accounting firms audit the books yearly so as to help prevent that kind of criminal behavior. I don't imagine you could guarantee to get rid of it all, but you could certainly make it much harder to do. Also putting a sunshine clause in the non-profit would be a huge help as well. As the saying goes, sunshine is a great disinfectant for unethical/criminal behavior.
I would love to see copyright lengths/terms reduced to their original Constitutional length. It would vastly expand the public domain and the level of culture in this country and other countries would rise significantly. Instead corporations have used copyright laws and lengths to hold society culture hostage and refuse to honor their end of the bargin provided by copyright's limited protection. Copyright was suppose to give very short exclusive rights to content creators to encourage them to create content to expand the public domain.
In the US the public domain is basically dying on the vine due to corporate abuse of copyright and patent laws. I suspect if something doesn't change soon that in 10-20 the US will have no meaningful public domain to speak of. This will effect science, culture, business, the economy...basically everything and retard the growth of the country significantly. This is probably one of the biggest hidden landmines this country faces in the future. A country with no culture will not survive, since there is nothing to bind them together.
Bill Gates was absolutely not in the right place at the right time, like it was just chance. Bill Gates got a meeting with IBM because his parents were on a non-profit board with some of the heads of IBM. They made the comment that they were doing some new personal computer stuff to compete with Apple and the Gates' told them that they should talk with their son who was doing computer stuff. Thus, it was his family connections that got him the meeting with IBM. When he took the meeting with IBM and they told him they wanted a DOS for their new PC, he completely bluffed his way through the meeting. He told them he had something he could convert for them. Balmer and Allen freaked out about the IBM deadline and wanted to know how in the world they would meet it when Bill lied about having a DOS and there was clearly no time to develop one. Bill Gates figured he could buy DOS from Tim Paterson, who wrote a 16bit version of CP/M because Digital was taking too long. Gate's bought the DOS for supposedly $10,000 and supposedly closed the contract on the DOS purchase very shortly after the meeting. Some say he closed the deal that week or something similar. He then polished it up and sold it to IBM for far more than that. He even got IBM to agree to allowing Microsoft to sell versions of the DOS for non-IBM systems rather than outright purchase which was very strange at the time for IBM. Most suspect it wasn't Gate's shrew negotiating skills but rather his parents relationship with some of the IBM executives. This also combined with the hubris of IBM to think that no one would be able to compete with them so what did it matter if the DOS was on other systems, since people would want IBM computers. The concept of a clone computer wasn't even a thought to most people at the time.
To a certain degree IBM ended up really screwing themselves in their desire to get in to the PC market fast. They made the mistake of using all off the shelf parts in standard configuration formats. So PC clones had a huge jump start in that they could also buy the same exact stuff IBM was buying and make clones. The only problem was the BIOS for the machine. That was eventually solved as well by Columbia Data Products doing a clean room development of a clone BIOS. Because these were clones of IBM's Microsoft was in the clear to sell MS-DOS to all these clone makers and thus history was made.
This was all pretty common knowledge for people who were around in the computer industry in the early days. Yes there are more details, but those are the basics.
Bill Gates did something related when he founded Corbis, the stock photo and film company. He bought the historic Bettmann Archive as the seed and began to purchase more images for the archive. I have no idea what the rates they charge are, but it would be nice to see them open up more of that archive for public use. They already add a million or so images a year to the archive, so it wouldn't exactly kill the company to do that with some of the really old German stuff from the Bettmann Archive. They are slowly digitizing the entire collection, which I guess is a good thing in case something happens to the originals.
It isn't exactly a gift to the public, but the images are being saved and converted to digital format. I would be far more impressed if Bill Gates had the company slowly give out a certain amount of images to the public every year. That would truly be giving back to the public, especially in the form of preserved history.
The cost of albums hasn't changed a whole lot in relation to singles. If anything the cost of albums has seemed to me to have gone up a bit in raw dollars, not buying power. In terms of album costs versus singles cost they seem kind of the same with maybe it being slightly cheaper for the album years ago. The cost of other good has changed but the price of music doesn't seem to have changed a lot and the ratio of single costs to album costs seems to about the same.
Actually Angry Bird's Rio was not exclusive to Amazon. You can get it on the Android Market, you can get it from iTunes. So it clearly isn't an exclusive in any possible sense of the word.
Amazon AppStore
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004SBS8LA/ref=bt_atcg_mine_img_0?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0PHR5R090MXJ5QMY29TC&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1293151222&pf_rd_i=2478844011
Android Market
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.rovio.angrybirdsrio&feature=search_result
iTunes
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/angry-birds-rio/id420635506?mt=8
Clearly you can see it is available in two places for Android and also for the iPhone. So clearly not an exclusive to anyone.
The amount required to recover on mobile games is exceedingly small which is why so many garage developers are able to get in on the game. It is also why so many of the big development houses are in the game because costs are small and profits are a much higher percentage. So even at $0.10 a copy it doesn't take long to recover the development costs. If you doubt that you might want to look at the amazingly large volume per month that apps are doing that are in the top 300 in the iTunes store. I last heard they were doing about 100,000 a month with top apps doing far more than that.
Well about the same exact price. I recall getting 45's for about $2 so that is 2 songs for $2, you know the A side and B side if your not old enough to remember. I also recall getting CD singles for about $3-$5 and those having 4-5 songs/versions. So again about $0.99 or less per song. I might also mention that these were singles of the top songs off the artist's latest album, so cherry picking has gone on for quite awhile. So what exactly was your point? Seems what your complaining about has gone on for..decades. At least going back to the 70's in my own personal experience.
The only people being screwed on music pricing is the artists. If you remember the music industry refused to deal with Apple because they weren't getting a good enough deal given the contracts at the time with artists. The contracts changed and suddenly Apple was good enough. It was because the studios got a bigger slice of the pie from the artists so they could afford to keep their mansions, hookers, and blow or whatever they blow their vast amounts on. Movie industry is exactly the same. Online TV and movies couldn't happen, well they modified contracts and suddenly it was all good to go. Neither had anything to do with online being bad, and everything to do with who got what slice of the pie. Remember if you want an audit of your royalties you have to use their accounting firms (both movie & music) because the accounting procedures are so unique only a few firms understand it. Which is another way of saying only a few firms won't tell you how your getting screwed and all the money/expenses the studios are misreporting and screwing you out of money.
This has to be one of the most stupid things I have ever heard from a industry group.
"1) Amazon steeply discounts a large chunk of its Appstore catalog (imagine: “our top 100-rated games are all 75% off!”). Some developers will probably win in this scenario, but some developers — most likely, those near the bottom of the list — will lose, not gaining enough sales to offset the loss in revenue per sale. Amazon benefits the most, because it captures all the customer goodwill generated by such a promotion."
I think they have forgotten that some people will never ever buy a product until it drops in price to a specific level. It doesn't matter what developers would like to happen. This is basic business 101. Businesses want to squeeze as much money as the possibly can out of customers. Customers want to pay as a little as possible for a service/product. So each of them have to decide on a price they can both agree on. The sale will bring you in more sales that you never would have gotten until you lowered the price as shown by the increase in sales. Not everyone who buys at the discounted price would ever have bought at the higher price. This is the same type of thinking that industry groups use to say every pirated copy of software is a lost sale when that is simply not true. I would also think that when an app goes on sale that people snatch up that is good that it increases the sales of your other apps. We see this exact thing happen for example when Baen sci-fi publisher gives away an author's book, the author's other books see significantly increased sales. Not to mention if the app is good the developer also gets just as much good will as Amazon probably more since the app is in front of the buy far more than the Amazon store.
"Amazon steeply discounts (or makes entirely free) a game that has a well-defined, well-connected niche audience. The members of that niche audience snap up the game during the promotional period, robbing the game’s developer of a significant percentage of its total potential revenue from its core audience."
The same thing happens on iTunes. A game gets set to free and people snap it up. All that has to happen is a developer doesn't give away the game and this never happens. I don't see the problem here at all. I should also mention that I have noticed huge numbers of apps that go on sale at a discount when first released then a few weeks later the price goes up. So I'm not sure I even see their point here at all when it seems this is an industry standard.
The other thing is that this seems to smack of telling developers, your too stupid to read the contracts you sign so let me explain it to you in simple terms so your little brain understands the big legal words here. I personally would find it insulting if an industry group ever sent me a letter like this, implying that I don't know the contracts I am signing. If I don't understand a contract I need to get a lawyer, which is always a good idea anyway. If I still sign a contract and get screwed, well then perhaps I deserve it since I am terrible at business, can't read and understand a contract or contact a lawyer, and should have just gone to work for someone else.
Looking right now at the top 25 paid game apps on iTunes the most expensive to develop would likely be: Asphalt 6 (although this is an upgrade), iStunt 2, Call of Duty: Zombies (again an upgrade/mod), Lego Harry Potter (a port and mod), Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12 (port and upgrade). Every single other game is a time waster with a game time of 1-4 minutes. World of Goo might be an exception, but it has been ported to/from several other platforms. In fact 10 of the 25 top titles are actually ports from web, console or computer games, 4 are variations of existing apps (mods), and at least 15 of them, that I know of, are available on multiple phone platforms.
I would also comment that there are also several other android market places as well. handmark.com, andspot.com, mobileapps.com, slideme.org, andappstore.com,
Blade Runner is an amazing film and could stand alone as it's own IP completely separate from the book, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep". The movie and books exist in the same universe and have many of the same ideas and concepts behind them, but Blade Runner in my opinion is definitely not a movie version of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep". It would be better to say Blade Runner was inspired by the book rather than a movie version of the book. Even Philip K. Dick and Ridley Scott have made this point. This is the reason why Bud Yorkin aka The Blade Runner Partnership have had so much control over the Blade Runner IP. It's also the reason why Philip K. Dick's estate has had so little control over anything to do with Blade Runner.
I am not sure how K. W. Jeter was able to secure the rights to the Blade Runner IP in order to write 3 novels based on the Blade Runner IP/universe. I suspect that the story behind that is a very interesting one. I suspect it was easier for him to get the rights for the books given he was a friend of Philip K. Dick.
Yes Yorkin has been a major problem with Blade Runner. There have many attempts to do something with the Blade Runner IP but Yorkin has been a dick and shot them all down. It was a very hard struggle with Yorkin to get all the updated versions of Blade Runner released. He seems like a complete dick to me based on his handling of the IP rights for Blade Runner. The fighting with Vangelis over the music certainly didn't help with the film getting better treatment for a long while. Personally I think he was being a big whiny baby, and one of those prima donna artists about the music for the movie. If you are hired to do a movie score then you are doing a work for hire and the movie producers should pretty much own the music that you created. He can be free to take his name off the work if he didn't like it, but the movie owners should have had the rights to the music and he shouldn't have been such a baby about the whole thing.
Personally I think Blade Runner would have been much more of a cult hit and gotten a lot better treatment over the years, after it was released, if Bud Yorkin hadn't owned the rights to Blade Runner. Personally I think Yorkin ended up screwing a lot people because of the financing deal he forced on them. I think Philip K. Dick's estate or even Ridley Scott would have handled the Blade Runner property much better than Bud Yorkin did and has. There is a special place in hell for Hollywood people like him.
Don't even get me started on the crappy Hollywood accounting that movie studios do and how this was done to Blade Runner as well. That certainly didn't help matters at all either when it was released or even over the years. Blade Runner is suppose to have cost about $28 Million. I suspect if you did actual real-world accounting rather that Hollywood/Enron accounting on it that the real costs would have closer to $15-18 Million to make Blade Runner. But you know Hollywood they love to do their messed up accounting and claim that almost no movie has ever made a profit. Hollywood tried to do this with Lord of the Rings and screw Peter Jackson out of his share of the money. Hollywood knows they are screwing everyone over with their Hollywood accounting because they write contracts that only certain accounting firms can audit the books, because supposedly only these firms understand how movie pictures are made. The reality is every time a movie studio has been dragged in to court over their accounting practices the judges have absolutely blasted the movie studio because of their accounting practices and every single time the movie studios have settled. The studios know if they get one legal precedent against their accounting practices that everyone would come out of the wood-work and demand their fair share and the movie studios would end up screwed because of how they have screwed so many people for so long. Also the studios definitely don't want the gravy train to end on how much money they actually suck out of a movie production that makes them rich. Just look at the salaries of the top studio execs. and then look at the profit levels for studios that are under publicly traded corporations. There are some movie studios who have mismanaged themselves right out of business, but the majority of the movie studios are raking it in hand over fist. That the is secret lie that Hollywood doesn't want to talk about. They want people to believe that most movies don't make any money and are huge risks. Movies are a bit risky as to if the public will like them and actually buy them, but then studios do so many focus groups on a movie before it hits your local theater that it usually isn't that much of a problem. Focus groups and greedy studio execs who want the easiest way to make a large profit by ripping off people with the Hollywood system is why we get so many reboots, sequels, etc. You fight the Hollywood system and actually demand your fair share and you won't last long in Hollywood.
Bud Yorkin is just one example of this whole messed up system, and the Blade Runner rights have been caught in the middle of this whole nasty system.