I used Ebay Australia a lot before this decision was made, and I'm very happy with it. Unlike what is being inferred, it isn't so that people will have to charge a tax on everything and do all the paperwork along with it. It is because of various auctions, e.g. a laptop, which would have a buy it now price or an auction price which seemed great or reasonable, but many sellers often left it in the fine print alongside unrelated things that the final cost needed 10% GST added, which was ultimately an easy way to get 10% more for your auctions, whether you were a business or not, and it was annoying.
It has nothing to do with making people charge a tax with their auctions, it's simply a measure to stop people grabbing an extra 10% under the guise of a tax where they may not have actually needed to collect GST.
Hey guys, just a quick note. I just saw the Episode III premiere here in Australia (midnight). Few spoilers ahead...
I'll cut to the chase. The first fifteen minutes of the movie left me with great hope, the fights were great (Aside from the greatest slaughter of Physics I've seen in a five minute interval), the characters used moves and powers from the games which was great to see. Then up to a point I'd say it was a great action movie, that you could sit down and enjoy without thinking or nit-picking, but unfortunately eventually a combination of the dialogue, various silly sounds/special effects, parts of scenes that were unintentionally funny, various pieces terrible CG, minature models and use of the blue screen dragged it down, along with plot elements that are just like the first two movies: Silly elaborate machines or creatures used for no purpose other than to look distinctive, combined with ludicrous physical scenareos (Such as where Obi Wan chases Grevious through a working area containing nothing but a huge empty, unused and unoccupied industrial space, or the end battle where pressing a few buttons makes a structure - That sits in lava itself and has lava lashing up against it - suddenly fall apart and be damaged by lava (on that note why the hell would machines on a lava planet/moon need to collect lava individually, when the entire structure is sitting in lava?)). Scenes like this simply augment an action scene just like a game - and it's just as obvious as the factory scene in Episode II.
But what absolutely killed the movie for me was the dialogue. In scenes with Padme and Anakin, just think and contrast it with one of thos e day-time soaps, and you'll find that they're almost identical, the music is even right. But above all, I can't believe that all the dialogue in the last five minutes couldn't break the movie a few notches for anybody who sees it. Hearing Padme say 'Luke!' and 'Leia!' clearly while dying is cringeworthy, but wait for the dialogue in the one of the last scenes with Vader. Once you hear that deep voice say the name 'Padme', then see Vader throw a hissy-fit then in the spirit of almost every melodrama actually end the scene screaming 'Nooooooooooooooo!!', you'll know how I felt.
In brief, since it is late:
Yes, that script on the web is the real thing, some scenes are even removed (such as one on Kashyyk with one of the Wookies feigning death) Are there great parts? Of course! A lot of the action scenes are incredible, and the scenes where the various Jedi get killed are very well done also and remind me of KOTR. Unfortunately, the great action is almost all there is. Is it better than the previous two movies? Yes, it definately is. Does that make it great in it's own right? In my opinion no.
Well that's my opinion on it. I'm not the most hardcore Star Wars person around, and I'm not going to say that I hated the movie. I wouldn't be melodramatic and say that watching it is punishment. It simply isn't good or great. I think that when you take away everybody's great hates from the prequels such as Jar Jar Binks and midichlorans (which gets a mention in III), you find that the rest simply isn't that good.
Misc stuff:
At the premiere they had a giveout of a poster/tickets for the best dressed, and in the lineup was a vulcan in a TNG uniform who won, just like in the online video. I took a laptop into the cinema to watch Empire Strikes Back in the 1.5 hour wait, and was asked to turn it off and put it under the chair due to 'piracy laws'. She also asked a guy with a PDA to get rid of it.
"As we're getting our own version of the DMCA thanks to the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement"
For some reason here in Australia people online have suddenly made a big hoo-haa about the Free Trade Agreement bringing the DMCA here and it makes me sit back and wonder where they were 5-6 years ago since it is already here and has been in effect for quite some time: Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Act 2000.
Not too long ago it was used in the Sony v Stevens case (and succeeded in the appeal) to make PS2 modchip sales illegal in Australia.
It's a bit late to be worrying about the affect of the DMCA in Australia now: We've had it for five years.
And what about the countries losing jobs? Workers will work for less and less and the scale will tip the other way. The problem needs to be fixed at the source, not merely rearranged for something that looks like a short-term fix for someone who doesn't understand history.
Well shit, it was 'expected', I suppose we should all pretend that it didn't happen then. Somehow I doubt that many people losing their jobs will take comfort on what analysts 'expected'.
No, a poor country doesn't require a shit-load of low-paying jobs. The citizens of a poor country require good-paying jobs with good conditions and workplace protection laws. Moving well-paying jobs to a poor country as you put it isn't 'helping them out', it's exploiting them.
13000, a full thirteen thousand lose their jobs and some guy on Slashdot says that it isn't a problem, they'll find work elsewhere. I'm glad that you're in a position to easily make such predictions without experiencing what is happening for yourself.
There is a third major reason: Piracy. It is well-known that the Dreamcast employed their GDROM system with a gigabyte of storage that at the time couldn't be burned by the home user market. Unfortunately, most games developers didn't actually fill their GDROMS, so one could be duplicated easily and burned to a CDROM. Add that to the fact that to pirate games all you needed was a bootdisk, no other modification, and the Dreamcast had a thriving market for pirated games. Having looked for a second hand Dreamcast not too long ago, I found that the majority of consoles selling either openly came with so-called 'backed-up' games, or a 'free gift' of hundreds of games. On top of the other reasons, the Dreamcast really didn't need this to kick it in the guts.
I dunno, a net profit of 2.56 billion that is almost double the amount for the same period last year is hardly the kiss of death on a company.
Why is it that Microsoft is always on the 'innovate or die' line when they're making billions of dollars? It's all well and good to point out a projection that didn't quite make it but when you're attaching it to a 2.56 billion dollar net profit, it sounds a little ludicrous. You could say that it is a 'sign' of Microsoft's future demise, but people have been pointing out little discrepencies in their profit reports over the last five years and they're still making an incredible profit. Like the game industry that isn't going to suddenly die because of a lack of innovation, I sincerely doubt that there will be the day that Microsoft close up shop within any reasonable timeframe. Look at IBM, they faced one of the worst losses in history and they're still around.
You say that 'it will not pay to stay with the old fashioned business model that no longer fits'. Does 2.56 billion net profit not count as pay?
You think that a game is going to be more innovative because it is on a console? The PC Gaming market has been declining compared to the consoles for a while now, but it doesn't have much to do with 'innovation' - the simple fact is that making a game for a console is both cheaper and reaches a larger gaming consumer-base
All of the latest buzz about 'innovation' doesn't mean much to the people that count. Gaming isn't a market that is decreasing - it is increasing. A game that is a marginal improvement over it's predecessor and sells two million copies isn't going to have it's creators shedding a tear over a lack of 'innovation'. For every 'real' gamer that will stop buying games because there is no 'innovation' there are ten average Joes who will buy the latest Football iteration as simply for something to do after work.
So where will this end? Well, some people and this article believe that consumers will slowly stop buying the 'un-innovative' titles, and kill the industry in one grand sweep. But it hasn't happened yet - in fact the games industry is still increasing in revenue. And why is it that people who will go out and make a rehashed mediocre action movie such as National Treasure a box office success are suddenly going to make a collective decision against rehashed games? They're not, and no amount of articles predicting doomsday will change that.
Someone can 'deliver all they promised' in a game, but that doesn't make it good. So as long as it never sets out to be a decent game it can't be seen for what it is? That's rediculous.
Right, and you actually think that companies get the large payments that they're awarded from people who are broke or have no income?
Most of the time they lose money on legal fees in cases such as these.
The idea that Microsoft is going to make a bundle of money out of this is ludicrous.
Knowing that this story is at the bottom of the Games front page, I just feel the need to reply nonetheless.
To me, Starsiege: Tribes filled a massive void that could probably never be filled again. Keeping it short, Tribes 2 tried, however the many performance issues, patches and the death of Dynamix stunted the growth of the game considerably.
I guess I somehow thought that the Tribes series would always be there, however this latest incarnation has proven the opposite: Take a look at the amount of servers for Tribes 1 (Over 200), then Tribes 2 (over 150) then T:V (Under 50) and you see how much it has failed. To think, there are over 200 servers for a game that came out in 1998, that isn't Half-Life!
Unfortunately, I have nothing to say that is insightful or that hasn't been mentioned in some way before that would help this game survive. People voted with their wallet with Tribes: Vengeance, and in my opinion any chance of there being a Tribes 4 (Or Starsiege: Tribes 2) washed away with the lack of this patch being released. Truly a sad day.
Considering the amount of defective products that make it into our hands already after this 'quality assurance' for various reasons, I'm not sure adding more that already have a defect, however minor, is such a brilliant move.
It may seem that there's a basic linear line between over-the-top quality control and cost and more economical quality control and cost, however one has to think that if it turns out that these chips are more likely to have defects in them and in fact do in the future, how long will costs remain low? The chip will still be useless and will have to be replaced, added to that the cost of making the returns from the customer/store and then the possible customer dissatisfaction with the company's quality which could result in a lost sale in the future. Will it actually be cheaper in the long term?
Is that this may seem like a large coup, however just like their aquisition of Rare it may not pay off. It still remains to be seen if Rare will make a large impact on Microsoft's console(s), and this is under the same circumstances of an entity that has created great games in the past, but does not have the rights to many of those games so all bets are off.
And just like Rare, it sounds impressive on paper right now, however we're talking about 2-4 years down the road, and then it's still only a maybe.
If this were about say drugs instead of music, would a person still be held accountable?
Example...
Hasn't it connected yet? Haven't you guys figured it out? Copyright isn't being considered the same as most other things. Look at the decisions that have been made. Decisions such as this get made, and somebody uses an analogy as to why it shouldn't agree, they get modded, people are merry, but that doesn't change the simple facts: This is the decision for this region, for now it is law, and an analogy won't change that. It is what it is.
If you'd wanted a killer analogy, you should have used the old 'Gee, if I find some links to illegal stuff on Google then they'd get nailed'.
And there's the problem: The Slashdot crowd seems to think that these courts and legislators are not only stupid, but have to be tied to a stupid set of rules. Make an analogy that paints it in a different light and it's all better; but if you think that they have to think in terms of these broad analogies e.g. 'Oh gee, it's only a link, people have links everywhere, therefore this site can't be specifically geared towards directing people to illegal content'. These people know perfectly well 'what is going on' and who to target, and making an analogy that may have some merit for people they aren't targetting isn't going to achieve anything. When making decisions such as these they don't have to reflect on the universe of possibilities of what may happen with ludicrous interpretations of it, because in the end they're simply going after the people categorising and making a service that points to infringing content.
At exactly what stage are you people going to realise that they know what the popular methods are for getting illegal content, and that they're not going to be fooled by a legitimate file here and there that 'some guy on the net' thinks will make a person with a lifetime of experience an utter moron and not realise it?
And the 'anti-copyright rights movement' wonders why decisions keep being made against their cause with laughable arguments that seem based on the idea that every person in the RIAA, MPAA, any court, etc. doesn't know how to turn on a computer. People constantly scream about how 'copying isn't stealing' and these computer and Internet processes are unique and are misunderstood and not realistically covered under conventional laws: Well guess what guys, this is why all of your analogies aren't worth they time spent typing them out, because the other side realises this also, and hence why these decisions for modern-day technologies are different when put in a traditional environment. You're getting something you asked for and something you didn't; and that something you didn't is the understanding that the courts and the legislators aren't as computer illiterate as you once imagined and they are creating decisions that wrap around a new environment for copyright protection.
Except that the torrent tracking sites don't expressly know that the files represent a copyright infringement. In this case the person was linking to files he knew (and evidently could be proven that he knew) would be illegal to download.
However; when there's infringing content constantly on the front page of the tracking site and asking almost any user why they're going there leads to the obvious answer, I don't know which court isn't going to make the leap of logic.
It's all well and good to cut things down into semantics, but when every man and his dog on the net knows a particular torrent tracking site as 'the source' for infringing content, it's a little hard to believe that the person(s) spending their money, designing and running the site aren't just as aware. Courts are smarter than many seem to think; and little schemes like this may sound great for getting out of legal hassles on the 'net, but when it comes to that silent courtroom where dozens of people are intently listening on every semantic of what is said, I don't think it has much of a hope of holding up.
Anyway it isn't the same thing. They link to a torrent, which is a harmless ~10kb piece of data. What the user does with the torrent is none of the web-site owner's business, and if the data is fed through the right programs the programs can connect to another site which can give links to where it may be downloaded. But the torrent sites aren't linking to the actual files.
It's all great that that's the way you think it should be, but the point is that these decisions are occuring now. Somehow I don't think that there are going to be many who would decide that linking is infringement, but then split hairs over whether linking to a torrent that basically links to the file is infringement.
Think like a layperson. The question is: Will clicking on this link get you illegal content?, and wonder if the courts are going to get into semantics over it.
Like that myth that posting that the site is for 'educational purposes' or that no law enforcement officials are allowed to enter is going to stop someone from getting caught hosting a Warez site, so will this for the Torrent community.
I was referring to what is actually going to be in the movie, not the concept art.
Looks like Lucas wanted an interesting-looking character, saw the concept and stripped it of both interest and innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
It has nothing to do with making people charge a tax with their auctions, it's simply a measure to stop people grabbing an extra 10% under the guise of a tax where they may not have actually needed to collect GST.
I'll cut to the chase. The first fifteen minutes of the movie left me with great hope, the fights were great (Aside from the greatest slaughter of Physics I've seen in a five minute interval), the characters used moves and powers from the games which was great to see. Then up to a point I'd say it was a great action movie, that you could sit down and enjoy without thinking or nit-picking, but unfortunately eventually a combination of the dialogue, various silly sounds/special effects, parts of scenes that were unintentionally funny, various pieces terrible CG, minature models and use of the blue screen dragged it down, along with plot elements that are just like the first two movies: Silly elaborate machines or creatures used for no purpose other than to look distinctive, combined with ludicrous physical scenareos (Such as where Obi Wan chases Grevious through a working area containing nothing but a huge empty, unused and unoccupied industrial space, or the end battle where pressing a few buttons makes a structure - That sits in lava itself and has lava lashing up against it - suddenly fall apart and be damaged by lava (on that note why the hell would machines on a lava planet/moon need to collect lava individually, when the entire structure is sitting in lava?)). Scenes like this simply augment an action scene just like a game - and it's just as obvious as the factory scene in Episode II.
But what absolutely killed the movie for me was the dialogue. In scenes with Padme and Anakin, just think and contrast it with one of thos e day-time soaps, and you'll find that they're almost identical, the music is even right. But above all, I can't believe that all the dialogue in the last five minutes couldn't break the movie a few notches for anybody who sees it. Hearing Padme say 'Luke!' and 'Leia!' clearly while dying is cringeworthy, but wait for the dialogue in the one of the last scenes with Vader. Once you hear that deep voice say the name 'Padme', then see Vader throw a hissy-fit then in the spirit of almost every melodrama actually end the scene screaming 'Nooooooooooooooo!!', you'll know how I felt.
In brief, since it is late:
Yes, that script on the web is the real thing, some scenes are even removed (such as one on Kashyyk with one of the Wookies feigning death)
Are there great parts? Of course! A lot of the action scenes are incredible, and the scenes where the various Jedi get killed are very well done also and remind me of KOTR. Unfortunately, the great action is almost all there is.
Is it better than the previous two movies? Yes, it definately is. Does that make it great in it's own right? In my opinion no.
Well that's my opinion on it. I'm not the most hardcore Star Wars person around, and I'm not going to say that I hated the movie. I wouldn't be melodramatic and say that watching it is punishment. It simply isn't good or great. I think that when you take away everybody's great hates from the prequels such as Jar Jar Binks and midichlorans (which gets a mention in III), you find that the rest simply isn't that good.
Misc stuff:
At the premiere they had a giveout of a poster/tickets for the best dressed, and in the lineup was a vulcan in a TNG uniform who won, just like in the online video.
I took a laptop into the cinema to watch Empire Strikes Back in the 1.5 hour wait, and was asked to turn it off and put it under the chair due to 'piracy laws'. She also asked a guy with a PDA to get rid of it.
Jesus, a 12th Man quote on Slashdot moderated so quickly... *sniff* I'm so proud!
"As we're getting our own version of the DMCA thanks to the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement"
For some reason here in Australia people online have suddenly made a big hoo-haa about the Free Trade Agreement bringing the DMCA here and it makes me sit back and wonder where they were 5-6 years ago since it is already here and has been in effect for quite some time: Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Act 2000.
Not too long ago it was used in the Sony v Stevens case (and succeeded in the appeal) to make PS2 modchip sales illegal in Australia.
It's a bit late to be worrying about the affect of the DMCA in Australia now: We've had it for five years.
And what about the countries losing jobs? Workers will work for less and less and the scale will tip the other way. The problem needs to be fixed at the source, not merely rearranged for something that looks like a short-term fix for someone who doesn't understand history.
Well shit, it was 'expected', I suppose we should all pretend that it didn't happen then. Somehow I doubt that many people losing their jobs will take comfort on what analysts 'expected'.
No, a poor country doesn't require a shit-load of low-paying jobs. The citizens of a poor country require good-paying jobs with good conditions and workplace protection laws. Moving well-paying jobs to a poor country as you put it isn't 'helping them out', it's exploiting them.
13000, a full thirteen thousand lose their jobs and some guy on Slashdot says that it isn't a problem, they'll find work elsewhere. I'm glad that you're in a position to easily make such predictions without experiencing what is happening for yourself.
There is a third major reason: Piracy. It is well-known that the Dreamcast employed their GDROM system with a gigabyte of storage that at the time couldn't be burned by the home user market. Unfortunately, most games developers didn't actually fill their GDROMS, so one could be duplicated easily and burned to a CDROM. Add that to the fact that to pirate games all you needed was a bootdisk, no other modification, and the Dreamcast had a thriving market for pirated games. Having looked for a second hand Dreamcast not too long ago, I found that the majority of consoles selling either openly came with so-called 'backed-up' games, or a 'free gift' of hundreds of games. On top of the other reasons, the Dreamcast really didn't need this to kick it in the guts.
You don't get funding grants by claiming your project outcome will be mediocre.
I dunno, a net profit of 2.56 billion that is almost double the amount for the same period last year is hardly the kiss of death on a company.
Why is it that Microsoft is always on the 'innovate or die' line when they're making billions of dollars? It's all well and good to point out a projection that didn't quite make it but when you're attaching it to a 2.56 billion dollar net profit, it sounds a little ludicrous. You could say that it is a 'sign' of Microsoft's future demise, but people have been pointing out little discrepencies in their profit reports over the last five years and they're still making an incredible profit. Like the game industry that isn't going to suddenly die because of a lack of innovation, I sincerely doubt that there will be the day that Microsoft close up shop within any reasonable timeframe. Look at IBM, they faced one of the worst losses in history and they're still around.
You say that 'it will not pay to stay with the old fashioned business model that no longer fits'. Does 2.56 billion net profit not count as pay?
You think that a game is going to be more innovative because it is on a console? The PC Gaming market has been declining compared to the consoles for a while now, but it doesn't have much to do with 'innovation' - the simple fact is that making a game for a console is both cheaper and reaches a larger gaming consumer-base
All of the latest buzz about 'innovation' doesn't mean much to the people that count. Gaming isn't a market that is decreasing - it is increasing. A game that is a marginal improvement over it's predecessor and sells two million copies isn't going to have it's creators shedding a tear over a lack of 'innovation'. For every 'real' gamer that will stop buying games because there is no 'innovation' there are ten average Joes who will buy the latest Football iteration as simply for something to do after work.
So where will this end? Well, some people and this article believe that consumers will slowly stop buying the 'un-innovative' titles, and kill the industry in one grand sweep. But it hasn't happened yet - in fact the games industry is still increasing in revenue. And why is it that people who will go out and make a rehashed mediocre action movie such as National Treasure a box office success are suddenly going to make a collective decision against rehashed games? They're not, and no amount of articles predicting doomsday will change that.
Someone can 'deliver all they promised' in a game, but that doesn't make it good. So as long as it never sets out to be a decent game it can't be seen for what it is? That's rediculous.
Right, and you actually think that companies get the large payments that they're awarded from people who are broke or have no income? Most of the time they lose money on legal fees in cases such as these. The idea that Microsoft is going to make a bundle of money out of this is ludicrous.
I guess I somehow thought that the Tribes series would always be there, however this latest incarnation has proven the opposite: Take a look at the amount of servers for Tribes 1 (Over 200), then Tribes 2 (over 150) then T:V (Under 50) and you see how much it has failed. To think, there are over 200 servers for a game that came out in 1998, that isn't Half-Life!
Unfortunately, I have nothing to say that is insightful or that hasn't been mentioned in some way before that would help this game survive. People voted with their wallet with Tribes: Vengeance, and in my opinion any chance of there being a Tribes 4 (Or Starsiege: Tribes 2) washed away with the lack of this patch being released. Truly a sad day.
Not at all, this was in a scene between Data and Geordi in Star Trek: Generations.
It may seem that there's a basic linear line between over-the-top quality control and cost and more economical quality control and cost, however one has to think that if it turns out that these chips are more likely to have defects in them and in fact do in the future, how long will costs remain low? The chip will still be useless and will have to be replaced, added to that the cost of making the returns from the customer/store and then the possible customer dissatisfaction with the company's quality which could result in a lost sale in the future. Will it actually be cheaper in the long term?
Correct me if I am wrong, but aren't games in the UK PAL as in Australia? Why would you need to mod exactly?
Is that this may seem like a large coup, however just like their aquisition of Rare it may not pay off. It still remains to be seen if Rare will make a large impact on Microsoft's console(s), and this is under the same circumstances of an entity that has created great games in the past, but does not have the rights to many of those games so all bets are off. And just like Rare, it sounds impressive on paper right now, however we're talking about 2-4 years down the road, and then it's still only a maybe.
It's one thing for it to have spyware; it's something else for one of the company's head honcho to admit it.
Hasn't it connected yet? Haven't you guys figured it out? Copyright isn't being considered the same as most other things. Look at the decisions that have been made. Decisions such as this get made, and somebody uses an analogy as to why it shouldn't agree, they get modded, people are merry, but that doesn't change the simple facts: This is the decision for this region, for now it is law, and an analogy won't change that. It is what it is.
If you'd wanted a killer analogy, you should have used the old 'Gee, if I find some links to illegal stuff on Google then they'd get nailed'.
And there's the problem: The Slashdot crowd seems to think that these courts and legislators are not only stupid, but have to be tied to a stupid set of rules. Make an analogy that paints it in a different light and it's all better; but if you think that they have to think in terms of these broad analogies e.g. 'Oh gee, it's only a link, people have links everywhere, therefore this site can't be specifically geared towards directing people to illegal content'. These people know perfectly well 'what is going on' and who to target, and making an analogy that may have some merit for people they aren't targetting isn't going to achieve anything. When making decisions such as these they don't have to reflect on the universe of possibilities of what may happen with ludicrous interpretations of it, because in the end they're simply going after the people categorising and making a service that points to infringing content.
At exactly what stage are you people going to realise that they know what the popular methods are for getting illegal content, and that they're not going to be fooled by a legitimate file here and there that 'some guy on the net' thinks will make a person with a lifetime of experience an utter moron and not realise it?
And the 'anti-copyright rights movement' wonders why decisions keep being made against their cause with laughable arguments that seem based on the idea that every person in the RIAA, MPAA, any court, etc. doesn't know how to turn on a computer. People constantly scream about how 'copying isn't stealing' and these computer and Internet processes are unique and are misunderstood and not realistically covered under conventional laws: Well guess what guys, this is why all of your analogies aren't worth they time spent typing them out, because the other side realises this also, and hence why these decisions for modern-day technologies are different when put in a traditional environment. You're getting something you asked for and something you didn't; and that something you didn't is the understanding that the courts and the legislators aren't as computer illiterate as you once imagined and they are creating decisions that wrap around a new environment for copyright protection.
However; when there's infringing content constantly on the front page of the tracking site and asking almost any user why they're going there leads to the obvious answer, I don't know which court isn't going to make the leap of logic.
It's all well and good to cut things down into semantics, but when every man and his dog on the net knows a particular torrent tracking site as 'the source' for infringing content, it's a little hard to believe that the person(s) spending their money, designing and running the site aren't just as aware. Courts are smarter than many seem to think; and little schemes like this may sound great for getting out of legal hassles on the 'net, but when it comes to that silent courtroom where dozens of people are intently listening on every semantic of what is said, I don't think it has much of a hope of holding up.
It's all great that that's the way you think it should be, but the point is that these decisions are occuring now. Somehow I don't think that there are going to be many who would decide that linking is infringement, but then split hairs over whether linking to a torrent that basically links to the file is infringement.
Think like a layperson. The question is: Will clicking on this link get you illegal content?, and wonder if the courts are going to get into semantics over it.
Like that myth that posting that the site is for 'educational purposes' or that no law enforcement officials are allowed to enter is going to stop someone from getting caught hosting a Warez site, so will this for the Torrent community.
General
Originality
I was referring to what is actually going to be in the movie, not the concept art. Looks like Lucas wanted an interesting-looking character, saw the concept and stripped it of both interest and innovation.