Just imagine if half the tax dollars spent to equip buildings for wheelchair access had instead been spent on R&D to develop stuff like this! Not only would the rest of us be much less inconvenienced, but people with disabilities would likely get around better than everyone else.
Let's Get Serious about Wikibooks
on
Textbooks With EULAs
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, this isn't the first time I've heard about EULA textbooks. In fact, I've been using one. I won't name names, but it's the only web-text out there in my field. Compared to the print textbooks I could assign, it's exponentially cheaper, though the cost of one-year subscription has been rising every semester. The book works well for me because I don't want to lug around five pounds of dead trees either, and I get a free life-time subscription.
Nevertheless, I'm highly opposed to the "subscription" model and clearly see the badness down the road. So, to that end, I've been working (alone now, but hopefully soon to gain colleagues) on a free textbook for my field in the form of a wikibook. In my professional opinion, wikibooks--not commercial EULA-bound e-books--are the "right thing" for academic textbooks. We can all work on them, and it's in everyone's best interests (students and profs) to ensure that these texts are accurate, clear, and monitored for vandalism (which, if it is existed at all, would likely be from paid agents of the textbook syndicate).
I doubt that I'll be able to convince many of my esteemed colleagues too soon, though, because (a) textbooks aren't counted towards tenure and (b) lots of professors make good money writing the damn things (want that new car? Write a textbook for us!) Meanwhile, the textbook reps are knocking on my everyday depositing free textbooks in my office--though they tend not to mention how much they'll cost the students should I assign one.
Little do they know--I'm using these textbooks to help me construct the wikibook intended to destroy them! (sardonic laughter...)
I have been researching and exploring this topic for my own dissertation and think I can share some insight here. I tend to see the problem as one of "paradigms." There's an old way of doing scholarship that is best suited for print, and another way that involves some pretty radical changes that is better suited for the net. I'm not just talking about scanning in a paper journal and making it available as a PDF (which is what many journals and databases like JSTOR are doing these days). What I see is the biggest problem of moving to an online format is the serious threat to a professor's hiring/tenure/promotion.
The truth is, many folks sitting on these boards are locked into a mindset--Print Article in Prestigious Journal = Credibility++, Electronic Article in Online Prestigious Journal = 0. Nevermind that by the time an article hits print, it's a year or more old (in some cases, two years old!) and, in a field like IT, probably obsolete. Thus, the print journals serve as a sort of "fossil record" of where the field has been, but it's also useful for professors hoping to move up the er..Ivory ladder. I think this problem will go away eventually as the old codgers die off, but professors are infamous for refusing to retire, and senility is something of a virtue, it seems.
As far as what IEEE is looking at now, I'd say the best thing is to do what others have already suggested and allow others to mirror the site. Perhaps they could release everything under a CC license. I agree that editing is important; however, there is an important source of revenue already in place (conference fees, membership dues). Despite what one person says, many, many people aren't going to cancel their membership just because they can get the articles for free. They already have to pay a large fee to present/attend the conferences, and membership looks good (and is even essential) on many CVs. Finally, most professors are pretty damn ethical (almost to a fault). They'll want to support their professional organization, and many feel strongly about making their articles freely available anyway (after all, they don't get paid!)
Many print journals already charge authors steep publication fees. This is especially apparent in the medical field. We're talking about authors shelling out hundreds and possibly even thousands of dollars to an editor before she'll publish the article. Aw, poor author, right? Actually, it doesn't matter one whit to the author, because the publication expenses are covered by the grant he received to conduct the research. The same is most often true for his journal subscriptions and membership dues.
Many journals are subsidized by universities, others are subsidized by private or corporate donors. Plenty of journals also have advertisements, though these ads are much lower-key than magazine ads.
Chances are, IEEE could garner support from universities, corporations, private donors, author payments, and advertisers with no problem.
MuffTorrent is the adult version of LokiTorrent and is "part of the Lokitorrent family." This message was posted there:
MuffTorrent is now closed due to legal issues.
We'll miss this and our other sites as much as you will. Check back often as we will announce all of our newly created sites here. We will not be making any new torrent (or p2p) sites, but we will be making fun and useful sites that make the web what it is, an entertaining and educational escape.
Thanks go out to everyone who have donated their time and money to make these sites what they were for the past year and helped to create a community out of an otherwise anonymous internet.
Good luck to everyone in their future endeavors,
The Muff Torrent staff
I wonder if the problem is really all the ads and money that these sites generate. I don't know much about the other bit torrent sites, but it seems that all the ads and such really do make it hard to defend a site from attack--after all, not only are you allegedly "infringing on copyrights," but quite visibly profiting by doing so.
Okay. Enough is enough. I think it's time we stopped being complacent here and started demanding better representation for the public interest from our elected officials. It's really painful and embarrassing for someone like me, who values the freedoms and honorable intentions of our U.S. Constitution, to read about affronts like this. What's even more unnerving is how many people are willing simply to rollover and play dead. We have a clear example of here of taxation without representation. Yes, it's in a different form than a Stamp Act, but it's the same principle--I say it's time for a new tea party in Boston.
Thoreau, where are you now? We need you to show Americans how a good man can stand up for justice and refuse to allow himself to be dominated by a government that prefers to give the public empty rhetoric rather than the freedoms to be good people and decent neighbors.
There is more at stake here than having to pay higher prices for broadband. What we have here is the government moving in to protect private interests who want to CONTROL the Internet; to inhibit free speech and deny users access to the single greatest resource we possess for enabling and maintaining a true global democracy. Do you really want AOL/Time Warner and Verizon dictating the terms we can access the Internet? Of course our well-bribed officials are siding with the multinationals; they know which side their bread is buttered on. It's time to show them what happens in America when the public gets fed up with corruption and a so-called elective system of government that offers taxation without representation.
I'd like to see them start arresting communities in masse and try to justify that to their electorate. Good luck! If people would just stand up for their rights, we wouldn't have to worry about crap like this.
Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers DIED for our freedom. Are we willing to go to jail for it?
Misquoted, eh? Well, here's the exact question I asked RMS via email:
Do you think the four rights should apply to games as well? Or do you think of free software as being limited mostly to applications, operating systems, utilities and the like?
His response:
They apply to all software, including game software. However, a game scenario can be considered art/fiction rather than software. So it is ok to split the game into engine and scenario, then treat the engine as software and the scenario as art/fiction.
See my speeches on Copyright vs Community for an explanation of what that means.
In another email, he wrote the following:
All software should be free, but I don't think all art needs to be
free.
So there you have it. Misquote? I don't think so.
Sigh. Here we go; now that Cloanto has done all they could to criminalize the Amiga emulation community, we need a company to do the same to Lemon and all the rest of the C-64 emulation sites. Value add? Zero. They serve a purely parasitical role and have NOTHING to do with the original development of the system. All they ask is that we now PAY for what we've been happy enough to enjoy and PROVIDE for FREE. Companies like this are the real pirates.
I wonder if the game is being compiled..
on
The Wiki Game
·
· Score: 1
It'd be neat if Wikipedia was compiling the data from this game--it'd provide some interesting stats that might give us some insight into the strange connections and intersections of the wikian's collective intelligence. I wonder what kind of bizarre graphs or images we could get by mapping out all the wiki pages attached to a single term.
It's almost like that old psychological game of free association.
Hmmm...I would have loved to read their responses to a question concerning intellectual property law. Asking them about free software might have been too much; they'd likely have turned to the official White House technology consultant, a certain Mr. William Gates.
What do you think Nader's spin would be? Perhaps he'd be the only one to take Stallman seriously.
Look here, buddy. The hurricane had long stopped posing a threat to the Tampa Bay area by the time the Olympic Opening ceremonies were on. That's why they didn't interrupt the ceremonies or even live up to their promise--their on-air promise, I might add--to skip the local commercials and replace them with updates of the hurricane reports. We got no replacements and no updates all during the ceremony, just one commercial after the other.
And, as far as NBC is concerned--the only reason they had to pay $1 billion dollars was to purchase a LEGAL MONOPOLY on broadcasting the freakin' games. As far as I'm concerned, there shouldn't be a legal monopoly on a public event, period, even one as "questionably public" as the Olympics. You may have a case with the Superbowl, since that's all commercial anyway, but I think it's harder to make the same case for the Olympics.
Well, all I know is that I tried to watch the opening ceremony on NBC and saw more commercials than opening ceremony. I also didn't see it live, because NBC was kind enough to waste 15 minutes with stupid "hurricane emergency coverage" of Charley, which, shudder to think, severely damaged some tiles on a roof somewhere south of St. Pete. Anyway, the announcers, God bless their souls, make enough moolah doing these games to at least learn how to pronounce the names of the countries in addition to the two or three "factoids" and comments about snazzy green jackets.
What gets me madder than a rabid fundamentalist at a philosophy conference is the sheer hypocrisy of it all. We're talking about countries that can't afford toilet paper in their embassies sending out athletes to this event--and let's not even start wondering how Greece, itself a troubled country, is going to pay for this extravaganza. All this sacrifice, all this classic athletic devotion, and for what? One of America's most powerful television broadcast corporations (with ties to Microsoft, no less) can't find it in their generous hearts to air more than 8 minutes of the games or opening ceremonies without a "We'll be right back?"
This game's success is undoubtedly due to Don Bluth, a visionary who has somehow managed to avoid falling into the "profit is all that matters" trap of so many other creative greats. I heard an interview with him once in which he claimed that what was missing from so many games was characters to care about or enemies to truly hate. It's infinitely more satisfying to kill a flea that's been annoying the hell out of you off for the last twenty minutes than to slaughter a whole army of demons with no personality.
I think another great thing about this game is that it brings together two very abstract styles of expression: Cartoon animation and videogames. Cartoonists like Bluth have long known how to invest audiences emotionally into their abstract creations. Lesser games try to do the same with "photo realism," but if you can make me cry over the death of a mouse (Bluth's Secret of Nihm), you're onto something.
Well, I wrote my representative after reading this article and hope he will comply with my request to support this "push," though there doesn't seem to be any specific bills at question here.
As an academic who has published in commercial academic journals myself, I can only say that people probably don't realize how badly the commercial interests are impairing our ability to do research. These journals don't pay us to publish our articles, but then turn around and charge extremely high fees to our libraries--and upwards of $300 for an individual subscription (we're talking 4 Reader's Digest size journals here, folks).
Get this--Let's say a professor wants her class to read a paper she published in one of these journals and puts it in one of those "course packs" at Kinko's. The publishers can charge whatever fee they want for the privilege, and some of them charge enormous fees--you might as well just buy the book/journal.
Perhaps even funnier is when a professor wants to quote a sizable passage from her own work in another publication--say, a book. The commercial publisher will charge a massive fee for the privilege of reprinting a portion of YOUR OWN SCHOLARSHIP!
What's really ridiculous is another argument that ALWAYS comes up when I argue with the university presses about releasing journal content online for free. They say, "Well, if we do that, then people will stop subscribing to the paper version." I'm stunned to hear this excuse; I mean, "Yeah? And....?" To be fair, this all comes back to the professorial tenuring/hiring/promotion process. To get anywhere, you have to publish articles in recognized journals, and most of the committees refuse to accept online publications as valid scholarly activity. Yeah, I know, I'm embarrassed for us.
I really enjoyed the original NWN 2, though I usually RPGs where players get to create their own parties of adventurers. I think playing this game on a LAN with some buds makes a huge difference.
Anyway, my biggest complaint about the original NWN was that the game was far too easy, even with traditionally difficult chars like the wizard. Yes, I know I could have artificially inflated the difficulty by adding HP, but this seems more like being a glutton for punishment than seriously seeking a greater challenge. I like games that are easy to start, but hard to beat!
Anyway, I hope they can speed up that production before it becomes Never-ventured Nights!
Hmm...I clicked on one of the forms and got this really scary user agreement that said I couldn't copy, distribute, transmit, semaphore, or read it aloud without violating EA's proprietary rights. The buttons at the bottom said "AGREE" or "CANCEL," so I hit "CANCEL." Then the pdf showed up in my browser anyway.
So...Does this mean it's all fair game? If not, I'll put away my flags now.
Don't forget this older/. post concerning Loguidice's "Game Packaging Treasures" article in Armchair Arcade. It goes into more detail about PC game boxes; in my opinion, that's where the real innovation was occuring.
I think you're exactly right about the online games. In the future, smart companies will likely release the game for free (downloadable or AOL CD in a tin giveaway style), then just charge people monthly access fees. It ends up working like inkjet printer or razor companies (cheap printer/razor, jack you on the ink carts/blades).
You know, I checked out a PBS special from the library the other day and noticed a big fat FBI warning (copy this DVD and you will be executed by a firing squad). I may be thicker than a whale omelette, but isn't PBS stuff paid for by the public anyway??
Cannon Fodder stands out in my memory as one of the best games I ever played on my Amiga 3000. The graphics and gameplay were very clean and engaging, and the squad control was always an excellent point of strategy. I do agree with the article that one of the best aspects of the game was its careful and concise use of humor; it isn't over-the-top, nor hopelessly cynical, but rather strikes that perfect balance that helps keep a game fresh even a decade after its release.
I felt that the Army Men series could have benefitted strongly had it borrowed more from Cannon Fodder.
Oh, if only we still had McCarthy. He could clear up all this open source nonsense and expose it for the grave threat to multinational corporate syndicate control that it is! Do you think there will be a "developer's blacklist" coming soon full of open source advocates that suddenly can't get jobs?
Even if there were no IP laws in place protecting creative works, publishers (and the tenth or fiftieth or whatever it is they offer to authors) would still be making money selling books. Why? Because there's still enough old-fashioned types out there who hate reading online because they can't bring the monitor into the bathtub with them.
Authors of the future are going to have to find new ways to earn money from their work than trying to control its distribution. I'd say, start with the given that people will copy your work all over the place, then think of ways you could profit.
One of my good friends (who is a published author) is conducting an experiment with a process model. Her novel is free to everyone--however, there's a catch. She publishes a chapter at the time, then elicits feedback from her readers about what will happen in the next chapter. She admits that she listens a bit more carefully to readers who DONATE money than to those who don't. Results? So far, $200. Sure, chump change, but it's more than most short story writers get (usually $50-$200).
My prophecy is that artists of the future will work more like those of our ancient past; namely, the bards, griots, and so on that were paid performers. We already see this taking place to some extent with artists like Prince shifting his attention to profiting from concerts rather than albums. The Internet provides a way for artists to interact with audiences in ways that traditional novelists and the like could not; readers can expect more influence over the process than ever before.
I don't understand companies like Tulip or Cloanto (who's been trying to do the same thing with Amiga). I see them more as rom squatters than people who are serious about supporting the existing retro-computer community. It's all about how they can squeeze a few dollars from some fossils, and, Oh! if someone tries to get around paying the toll, how they bite the hands that feed them!
What I don't understand is why these people don't try to add some value to these products. They need to provide another answer than "It's illegal" when someone asks, "Why not just download the ROM for free?" Can Tulip or Cloanto offer *ANYTHING* of value other than the "good conscious" of paying people a toll who had nothing whatsoever to do with the development of these games? I can see value in Cloanto's games in a stick--but selling these old roms is just flat out silly.
If I owned the patents or copyrights to this old stuff, the first thing I'd so is release it all into the public domain and spend the rest of my time trying to get people to take advantage of it and build some new markets.
Let's just put it this way. The overwhelming tendency among creative artists, whether they be musicians or novelists, is to start off with a tremendous BANG!, then go downhill fast as the money comes in. Look at old Metallica vs. new Metallica. Old Star Wars vs. New Star Wars.
I don't disagree with you that artists ought to be rewarded highly for great work--it's just that the rewards should be mostly from fame and just knowing that their work got so much attention and made such an impact. If they have to go back to mining coal after their sales drop off, so be it. They had their moment; if they have the talent to pull it off, let them do it.
One of the biggest factors stifling innovation and creativity in this country is a bloated intellectual property law. We need to stop thinking of art as products and start rewarding artists for engaging in the process.
Slashdot Mirror
Just imagine if half the tax dollars spent to equip buildings for wheelchair access had instead been spent on R&D to develop stuff like this! Not only would the rest of us be much less inconvenienced, but people with disabilities would likely get around better than everyone else.
Ha, must be. Or maybe they're Vogons.
Nevertheless, I'm highly opposed to the "subscription" model and clearly see the badness down the road. So, to that end, I've been working (alone now, but hopefully soon to gain colleagues) on a free textbook for my field in the form of a wikibook. In my professional opinion, wikibooks--not commercial EULA-bound e-books--are the "right thing" for academic textbooks. We can all work on them, and it's in everyone's best interests (students and profs) to ensure that these texts are accurate, clear, and monitored for vandalism (which, if it is existed at all, would likely be from paid agents of the textbook syndicate).
I doubt that I'll be able to convince many of my esteemed colleagues too soon, though, because (a) textbooks aren't counted towards tenure and (b) lots of professors make good money writing the damn things (want that new car? Write a textbook for us!) Meanwhile, the textbook reps are knocking on my everyday depositing free textbooks in my office--though they tend not to mention how much they'll cost the students should I assign one.
Little do they know--I'm using these textbooks to help me construct the wikibook intended to destroy them! (sardonic laughter...)
Wow. Now all of those classic astronomers' talk of the Music of the Spheres doesn't sound so antiquated.
The truth is, many folks sitting on these boards are locked into a mindset--Print Article in Prestigious Journal = Credibility++, Electronic Article in Online Prestigious Journal = 0. Nevermind that by the time an article hits print, it's a year or more old (in some cases, two years old!) and, in a field like IT, probably obsolete. Thus, the print journals serve as a sort of "fossil record" of where the field has been, but it's also useful for professors hoping to move up the er..Ivory ladder. I think this problem will go away eventually as the old codgers die off, but professors are infamous for refusing to retire, and senility is something of a virtue, it seems.
As far as what IEEE is looking at now, I'd say the best thing is to do what others have already suggested and allow others to mirror the site. Perhaps they could release everything under a CC license. I agree that editing is important; however, there is an important source of revenue already in place (conference fees, membership dues). Despite what one person says, many, many people aren't going to cancel their membership just because they can get the articles for free. They already have to pay a large fee to present/attend the conferences, and membership looks good (and is even essential) on many CVs. Finally, most professors are pretty damn ethical (almost to a fault). They'll want to support their professional organization, and many feel strongly about making their articles freely available anyway (after all, they don't get paid!)
Many print journals already charge authors steep publication fees. This is especially apparent in the medical field. We're talking about authors shelling out hundreds and possibly even thousands of dollars to an editor before she'll publish the article. Aw, poor author, right? Actually, it doesn't matter one whit to the author, because the publication expenses are covered by the grant he received to conduct the research. The same is most often true for his journal subscriptions and membership dues.
Many journals are subsidized by universities, others are subsidized by private or corporate donors. Plenty of journals also have advertisements, though these ads are much lower-key than magazine ads.
Chances are, IEEE could garner support from universities, corporations, private donors, author payments, and advertisers with no problem.
Thoreau, where are you now? We need you to show Americans how a good man can stand up for justice and refuse to allow himself to be dominated by a government that prefers to give the public empty rhetoric rather than the freedoms to be good people and decent neighbors.
There is more at stake here than having to pay higher prices for broadband. What we have here is the government moving in to protect private interests who want to CONTROL the Internet; to inhibit free speech and deny users access to the single greatest resource we possess for enabling and maintaining a true global democracy. Do you really want AOL/Time Warner and Verizon dictating the terms we can access the Internet? Of course our well-bribed officials are siding with the multinationals; they know which side their bread is buttered on. It's time to show them what happens in America when the public gets fed up with corruption and a so-called elective system of government that offers taxation without representation.
I'd like to see them start arresting communities in masse and try to justify that to their electorate. Good luck! If people would just stand up for their rights, we wouldn't have to worry about crap like this.
Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers DIED for our freedom. Are we willing to go to jail for it?
Do you think the four rights should apply to games as well? Or do you think of free software as being limited mostly to applications, operating systems, utilities and the like?
His response: They apply to all software, including game software. However, a game scenario can be considered art/fiction rather than software. So it is ok to split the game into engine and scenario, then treat the engine as software and the scenario as art/fiction.
See my speeches on Copyright vs Community for an explanation of what that means.
In another email, he wrote the following:
All software should be free, but I don't think all art needs to be free. So there you have it. Misquote? I don't think so.
Sigh. Here we go; now that Cloanto has done all they could to criminalize the Amiga emulation community, we need a company to do the same to Lemon and all the rest of the C-64 emulation sites. Value add? Zero. They serve a purely parasitical role and have NOTHING to do with the original development of the system. All they ask is that we now PAY for what we've been happy enough to enjoy and PROVIDE for FREE. Companies like this are the real pirates.
It'd be neat if Wikipedia was compiling the data from this game--it'd provide some interesting stats that might give us some insight into the strange connections and intersections of the wikian's collective intelligence. I wonder what kind of bizarre graphs or images we could get by mapping out all the wiki pages attached to a single term. It's almost like that old psychological game of free association.
Hmmm...I would have loved to read their responses to a question concerning intellectual property law. Asking them about free software might have been too much; they'd likely have turned to the official White House technology consultant, a certain Mr. William Gates. What do you think Nader's spin would be? Perhaps he'd be the only one to take Stallman seriously.
And, as far as NBC is concerned--the only reason they had to pay $1 billion dollars was to purchase a LEGAL MONOPOLY on broadcasting the freakin' games. As far as I'm concerned, there shouldn't be a legal monopoly on a public event, period, even one as "questionably public" as the Olympics. You may have a case with the Superbowl, since that's all commercial anyway, but I think it's harder to make the same case for the Olympics.
What gets me madder than a rabid fundamentalist at a philosophy conference is the sheer hypocrisy of it all. We're talking about countries that can't afford toilet paper in their embassies sending out athletes to this event--and let's not even start wondering how Greece, itself a troubled country, is going to pay for this extravaganza. All this sacrifice, all this classic athletic devotion, and for what? One of America's most powerful television broadcast corporations (with ties to Microsoft, no less) can't find it in their generous hearts to air more than 8 minutes of the games or opening ceremonies without a "We'll be right back?"
Man, I wish we had a BBC.
I think another great thing about this game is that it brings together two very abstract styles of expression: Cartoon animation and videogames. Cartoonists like Bluth have long known how to invest audiences emotionally into their abstract creations. Lesser games try to do the same with "photo realism," but if you can make me cry over the death of a mouse (Bluth's Secret of Nihm), you're onto something.
As an academic who has published in commercial academic journals myself, I can only say that people probably don't realize how badly the commercial interests are impairing our ability to do research. These journals don't pay us to publish our articles, but then turn around and charge extremely high fees to our libraries--and upwards of $300 for an individual subscription (we're talking 4 Reader's Digest size journals here, folks).
Get this--Let's say a professor wants her class to read a paper she published in one of these journals and puts it in one of those "course packs" at Kinko's. The publishers can charge whatever fee they want for the privilege, and some of them charge enormous fees--you might as well just buy the book/journal.
Perhaps even funnier is when a professor wants to quote a sizable passage from her own work in another publication--say, a book. The commercial publisher will charge a massive fee for the privilege of reprinting a portion of YOUR OWN SCHOLARSHIP!
What's really ridiculous is another argument that ALWAYS comes up when I argue with the university presses about releasing journal content online for free. They say, "Well, if we do that, then people will stop subscribing to the paper version." I'm stunned to hear this excuse; I mean, "Yeah? And....?" To be fair, this all comes back to the professorial tenuring/hiring/promotion process. To get anywhere, you have to publish articles in recognized journals, and most of the committees refuse to accept online publications as valid scholarly activity. Yeah, I know, I'm embarrassed for us.
Anyway, my biggest complaint about the original NWN was that the game was far too easy, even with traditionally difficult chars like the wizard. Yes, I know I could have artificially inflated the difficulty by adding HP, but this seems more like being a glutton for punishment than seriously seeking a greater challenge. I like games that are easy to start, but hard to beat!
Anyway, I hope they can speed up that production before it becomes Never-ventured Nights!
Hmm...I clicked on one of the forms and got this really scary user agreement that said I couldn't copy, distribute, transmit, semaphore, or read it aloud without violating EA's proprietary rights. The buttons at the bottom said "AGREE" or "CANCEL," so I hit "CANCEL." Then the pdf showed up in my browser anyway. So...Does this mean it's all fair game? If not, I'll put away my flags now.
Geez, with no Pulse, I guess I'd have to learn how to live with WinAmp. Nah, Deliplayer, for sure.
Don't forget this older /. post concerning Loguidice's "Game Packaging Treasures" article in Armchair Arcade. It goes into more detail about PC game boxes; in my opinion, that's where the real innovation was occuring.
I think you're exactly right about the online games. In the future, smart companies will likely release the game for free (downloadable or AOL CD in a tin giveaway style), then just charge people monthly access fees. It ends up working like inkjet printer or razor companies (cheap printer/razor, jack you on the ink carts/blades). You know, I checked out a PBS special from the library the other day and noticed a big fat FBI warning (copy this DVD and you will be executed by a firing squad). I may be thicker than a whale omelette, but isn't PBS stuff paid for by the public anyway??
Cannon Fodder stands out in my memory as one of the best games I ever played on my Amiga 3000. The graphics and gameplay were very clean and engaging, and the squad control was always an excellent point of strategy. I do agree with the article that one of the best aspects of the game was its careful and concise use of humor; it isn't over-the-top, nor hopelessly cynical, but rather strikes that perfect balance that helps keep a game fresh even a decade after its release. I felt that the Army Men series could have benefitted strongly had it borrowed more from Cannon Fodder.
Oh, if only we still had McCarthy. He could clear up all this open source nonsense and expose it for the grave threat to multinational corporate syndicate control that it is! Do you think there will be a "developer's blacklist" coming soon full of open source advocates that suddenly can't get jobs?
Even if there were no IP laws in place protecting creative works, publishers (and the tenth or fiftieth or whatever it is they offer to authors) would still be making money selling books. Why? Because there's still enough old-fashioned types out there who hate reading online because they can't bring the monitor into the bathtub with them. Authors of the future are going to have to find new ways to earn money from their work than trying to control its distribution. I'd say, start with the given that people will copy your work all over the place, then think of ways you could profit. One of my good friends (who is a published author) is conducting an experiment with a process model. Her novel is free to everyone--however, there's a catch. She publishes a chapter at the time, then elicits feedback from her readers about what will happen in the next chapter. She admits that she listens a bit more carefully to readers who DONATE money than to those who don't. Results? So far, $200. Sure, chump change, but it's more than most short story writers get (usually $50-$200). My prophecy is that artists of the future will work more like those of our ancient past; namely, the bards, griots, and so on that were paid performers. We already see this taking place to some extent with artists like Prince shifting his attention to profiting from concerts rather than albums. The Internet provides a way for artists to interact with audiences in ways that traditional novelists and the like could not; readers can expect more influence over the process than ever before.
I don't understand companies like Tulip or Cloanto (who's been trying to do the same thing with Amiga). I see them more as rom squatters than people who are serious about supporting the existing retro-computer community. It's all about how they can squeeze a few dollars from some fossils, and, Oh! if someone tries to get around paying the toll, how they bite the hands that feed them! What I don't understand is why these people don't try to add some value to these products. They need to provide another answer than "It's illegal" when someone asks, "Why not just download the ROM for free?" Can Tulip or Cloanto offer *ANYTHING* of value other than the "good conscious" of paying people a toll who had nothing whatsoever to do with the development of these games? I can see value in Cloanto's games in a stick--but selling these old roms is just flat out silly. If I owned the patents or copyrights to this old stuff, the first thing I'd so is release it all into the public domain and spend the rest of my time trying to get people to take advantage of it and build some new markets.
Let's just put it this way. The overwhelming tendency among creative artists, whether they be musicians or novelists, is to start off with a tremendous BANG!, then go downhill fast as the money comes in. Look at old Metallica vs. new Metallica. Old Star Wars vs. New Star Wars. I don't disagree with you that artists ought to be rewarded highly for great work--it's just that the rewards should be mostly from fame and just knowing that their work got so much attention and made such an impact. If they have to go back to mining coal after their sales drop off, so be it. They had their moment; if they have the talent to pull it off, let them do it. One of the biggest factors stifling innovation and creativity in this country is a bloated intellectual property law. We need to stop thinking of art as products and start rewarding artists for engaging in the process.