The Abu Ghraib story broke in April 2004 (and officially became a non-story on November 2, 2004)
To simpletons in the American electorate, that might be true. But, if anything, Nov 2nd made the story much more relevant to about a billion muslims who view it as proof positive that the current US government may talk a good story, but where it counts, in real life, their actions are a whole lot different.
The page you not-linked says nothing to support your premise - namely that a merchant must check ID. They must only do so if the card is not already signed - at least that is all the not-linked page says.
It's like checking credit card IDs in retail - the credit card companies have the idea that if the card doesn't match the ID, the guy at the counter is supposed to confiscate the card.
However, they are not supposed to require ID unless they have reasonable suspicion that the card is stolen. Having a policy to always check ID with a credit card transaction is a sure way to get fined and possibly lose your merchant account.
The reason for this policy is that the credit card companies want their credit cards to be as easy to use as cash. Cash does not require ID except in extenuating circumstances, so they have decided that credit cards will not either.
FWIW, those people who write "check ID" in the signature box and think they are increasing their security are really just asking to have their cards confiscated. The rules in the merchant agreement state that the card must be signed - blank cards can be signed right there, but anything other than a signature invalidates the card.
We've all been waiting for MS to start fighting with patents. It is their last resort against a better product.
It has been reported here that the man primarily responsible for "productizing" IBM's patent portfolio went to microsoft to do the same thing a couple of years ago. So far, we've seen silly little things like attempting to patent the FAT32 format on flash devices, but nothing really used as an offensive weapon.
Ironically, our best hope of defeating Microsoft in the patent arena is IBM, and to a lesser extent, Novell. Both companies have significant patent portfolios that can be used as a retaliatory threat to MS for trying to lock-out Free software with their patents. Both companies have been hurt badly enough by MS in the past, but are currently stable enough that they aren't likely to make deals either (like Sun did).
Personally, I feel that the whole idea of patent portfolios and all encompassing cross-licensing agreements is an abuse of the patent system because it locks out the little guy. But, in this particular fight we don't have a hope of achieving patent reform soon enough (if ever), so we might as well be glad that we have a few big guns on our side.
So, apart from Dell, and Compaq(HP), who is there for x86/amd64 servers?
See Newisys pronounced like "New Isis." There are a lot of former HP, and former companies-acquired-by-HP, employees working there. They make top notch stuff and do real R&D on bleeding-edge tech. Sun seems to OEM their AMD64 stuff too.
No I don't work for them, just know people who do.
I wish they had a "burn on demand" (BOD) model where you pay a minimal fee (think rental cost, ideally cheaper) and get to burn a movie on DVD. No case, no extras, just the movie....
Blockbuster Video has a similar program too. Flat fee to rent all you can rent each month. Want a movie? Go get it for "free", rip and burn and now you are set. Probably not what the studios or rental companies have in mind, but there it is anyway.
The answer is simple. Only share porn. They don't seem to mind at all.
I think I've heard one or two complaints from the porn industry, but over all I think you are completely correct.
And I think I know why.
Royalties. There are none.
Very few, if any, porn contracts include royalties for anyone - performers, cameramen, "director," etc. They all get paid as a work for hire. The publisher then makes a run of DVDs and sells most, if not all, in one big transaction to a distributor who parcels them out to the buying public through various parallel channels.
By the time the end product has made it into a large enough number of hands so as to inevitably end up shared on the net, everybody has already been paid.
I think that bears repeating - by the time any widespreading "pirating" can get into gear, everybody involved has been compensated for their work, so they really don't care.
I think that if the music and mainstream movie industries could come up with a similar business model, the entire problem of "piracy" would disappear overnight, essentialy redefined out of existence.
If you copy (or just write) really big files, then there should be no reason for the raid-5 driver to read all the other sectors in the parity chunk (don't know official terminology for it offhand) since, if done right, you will be writing all of the sectors with brand new information anyway.
Yes, this coming from the same guys that can tell you what your weather will be like tomorrow correctly 90% of the time.
Who are also the same guys who can tell you what your weather will be like in exactly one month from now correctly less than 5% of the time.
So, if their weather forecasting skills have anything to do with the correctness of their global warming theories, which are a lot more long-term than even just "next month," you've just said that we shouldn't pay any attention to them.
Or, in other words, emotional hyperbole is of no value to a scientific debate.
the MPAA and studio made the bulk of money from the movie, the soundtrack wasn't paid for that way, I am sure there were royalties paid, but nothing like what the studio got. The DVD is just icing on the cake for them.
However, almost all soundtracks are just compilations of already published songs. So, soundtracks are pretty much just icing on the cake for the RIAA too.
The movie's score, which usually is not released on CD is another thing. I haven't looked into how that is paid for, but I bet it is similar to the way the rest of the movie is paid for, thus box office royalties and foreign distribution rights probably cover it just as much as the they do the DVD.
It also goes straight into a reporting database where Microsoft can track trends like which resellers are selling large amounts of counterfeit copies of Windows.
Sounds like a great opportunity for a joe-job of a b&m computer store.
1) Get a list of known warez registration keys 2) Get a utility that lets you reset your XP registration key 3) Get a DSL or dial-up account which gives you a new IP every time your reconnect. 4) Find a key on the list of warez keys that will fail the test, then set your installed XP to that bogus one, dial-in for new IP and run the test. 5) When it fails, fill out report form indicating local BestBuy or whatever victim you prefer. 6) Rinse, repeat until local BestBuy is raided by the SPA/MPAA/RIAA/DHS/DHL/UPS.
Verizon has wired much of Northern NJ for FTTP, but NJ State legislation is preventing them from turning their network on.
My understanding, based solely on reading the forums at dslreports.com is that Verizon wants monopoly rights to the fibre they are laying. As in no second source ISP like Covad or Earthlink would be able to lease bandwidth or connectivity on the fibre lines at (low) state-set rates, like they are able to today on the copper lines.
Based on that, I think Verizon is in the wrong. They are dangling shiny trinkets of high-speed internet at a reasonable price in order to distract people from the inevitable long-term result of monopoly control over public works - erosion of price competitiveness and technological stagnation.
Sure, 15MBps at $50 looks GREAT today, but will it be that great in 5 years? What if the price goes up to $100? Pay no attention to the details behind the curtain!
Again, without knowing more than I've read at the forums, I think that if it were up to me, I'd be looking at a compromise. Verizon can have monopoly control over the fibre network with three caveats:
1) A viable competitor exists in each segment (neighborhood, town, whatever) such as cable which is priced within say 20% for equivalent levels of performance.
2) They agree to a more relaxed test for market collusion than what the FTC/DoJ uses in order to absolutely prevent Verizon and whoever their local competitor(s) are from abusing their certain oligopoly. Punishment for collusion being immediate and permanent loss of control of all the fibre in the area in which the collusion occurred plus enough of a geographical radius to cover enough more customers to equal 200% of the total affected. (The state would probably assume control and lease it back to Verizon and any other ISPs.)
3) Yearly review of their performance with a regular 5-year major examination of their quality of service and evaluation of their technological currentness.
These all assume that the details are worked out by Verizon and a team of negotiators for the state that are not biased by bribery of any sort (no cushy jobs at Verizon 6 months after the contracts are signed).
I am a big believer in "free markets" - as long as care is taken to prevent monopolistic abuses that can naturally arise in a loosely regulated market. But, public utilities are a natural monopoly and so special care, much better care than is usually applied, must be taken to keep a check on the monopolistic business practices that inevitably settle in. To do otherwise would be the equivalent of giving Verizon a money pipeline into the community's bank accounts.
Triumph is famous for his tag line, "That's a wonderful _blank_, for me to POOH on!" Fill in the blank as needed.
In this case, Rosen is not quite ready to take a dump on the copyright industry that put her up in fine style at over $1M/yr for the last couple of decades.
No one finds it really odd that suddenly she writes an article supporting the CC? What's in it for her? What is the underlying motive?
Having lost before the Supreme Court, Larry Lessig has changed his approach to implementing copyright reform. He's also changed his name. He now goes by the name Leisure Suit Larry and every thursday he makes sweet love to Ms. Rosen and in return, she gives him the public support he needs to change the industry from within. Deep within.
Dunno, probably a lot of people who like Office, Photoshop, applications they've heard of...
Hello? Let me phrase it even more obviously. How many people had a choice to pay or not pay for MS Windows? The answer in both absolute numbers and percentages is clearly less than those who have paid for X in the form of an off the shelf linux distribution like SuSE or Mandrake.
People don't buy stick shifts anymore because automatics have reached a point where stick shift users are a fringe group who like the "grit" of performing the action. Automatics, in general use, have just as good or better gas mileage these days as their manual counterparts.
Funny, every car that I have considered purchasing in the last 5 years or so had a significant performance and/or functionality loss in the automatic version. That includes, but is not limited to, the volvo s60r, the audi A6 and the acura nsx.
No one likes RMS blabbering on about how software needs to be free
Yeah, sure. Tell that to the MacArthur Foundation.
Anyone who's messed with the guts of X11 knows this much better than I - I walked away from that mess about as quickly as it took to execute 'less' on a piece of source code.
Have you looked at the guts of MS Windows? Ok, probably not. But have you looked at the APIs to windows? If you think X11 is bad, you ain't seen nothing. Layer upon layer of discarded, mutually contradictory, half-completed interfaces. There is just no way that the code underneath that can be any better than X11's.
Free Software has nothing to do with quality.
I think you are arguing with a strawman. Sure, some people say Free software is about quality. But RMS doesn't. He says its about the FREEDOM. Freedom from vendor lock-in, freedom to fix that spaghetti code if it really bothers you so much and freedom to add in a little ravioli instead.
Your escrowed product would only be public domain under current copyright if law if all the people involved in its creation (author, screenwriters, set designers, musicians, etc) specifically agreed to make it so.
Well, yeah that's the point of it. I don't think anyone would be misled or tricked into "giving it away." Essentially everyone involved would be doing so under a "work for hire" contract. My point about not requiring any changes to the law is that starting today (or anytime in the past) people could start using the model of escrowed release. Once a few people start to become successful at it, the pressure is then on the "big 5" to join in the revolution. Kind of like Microsoft and the GPL, althought microsoft is just as the start of "joining in" and still very hesitant about the whole thing.
Requiring mandatory registration to receive protection before publication would make all works default to the public domain, and requiring yearly renewal of the those registrations would force a decision by producers as to whether it is worth the cost and effort to continue that protection once a work becomes unprofitable.
Mandatory registration eliminates the problem of abandoned works that no identifiable person owns the copyright on, and reduces the problem of hoarding copyrights just to prevent others from getting access.
But it does not eliminate the problem of a draconian enforcement infrastructure to prevent sharing. Under such a system, all the big corps will maintain their copyrights for at least the first few years - worse case they decide to set mandatory minimums for everything they produce, just to "be safe" in case they have a hidden gem or some new technology comes around that makes the original works more valuable (for example, all those 8-bit atari VCS games that were worthless up until a few years ago when someone realized they could put them on mobile phones and now it's, "use MAME go to JAIL!" Well, almost, anyway.
So, as long as the act of copying a creation is illegal -- even for a limited time, there will be justification for draconian anti-copying enforcement infrastructures like DRM and the DMCA and "phone home" licenses like some hi-def movies encoded & encrypted with Microsoft's Windows Media 9 codec use. I don't see mandatory registration making it any less likely that people will stop using the current equivalent of Napster, or that the copyright industry will back-off on their legislative and legal assaults on sharing and the consquent side-effects on society.
They got their first samples done and they sucked compared to their competitors who haven't exactly been sitting around.
Their LCOS competitors, primarily JVC have been just sitting around, which is one of the reasons some of us were really glad to see the initial announcement and really bummed by this one. The DLP guys have made incredible increases in performance - primarily in contrast levels over the last 5 years or so, and yes they too are competitors to LCOS. But, even the essentially five year-old LCOS tech that JVC is still using beats DLP in color quality, resolution and fill factor.
If JVC had been motivated to make the same kind of progress the DLP guys have been making, we'd have 4096x2048, 4000:1 contrast with 96+% fill for under $4K today. Since we don't, I sure was hoping Intel would get there instead.
There are much simpler solutions to increase the available of material in the public domain while still keeping it profitable for those who produce the movies. A few simple changes in copyright law would both suffice and be far easier to implement.
And would those changes remove the need to prevent sharing of copyrighted materials through ever more draconian and invasive practices as is happneing today? The point of the system is two-fold:
1) Make sure that creators get paid a fair fee for their work. 2) Accept that it is human nature to share stuff, especially good stuff and instead of fighting human nature, harness it.
Escrowed release requires no changes to copyright law, since once paid for, the product is released to the public domain. If you have a few simple changes to copyright law that would suffice and are easier to implement, how about sharing?
Then you aren't considering "sleepers". Admittedly most are low budget, but there are cases where studios back risky projects that wouldn't generate enough public interest to cover their production costs
Such films tend to be financed by "patrons" of one sort or another, who generally don't expect to make their money back, at least not from the proceeds. Studios are just one source of patronage and it seems to me that such funding is already pretty close to my proposal - the studios and/or other patrons don't expect to make money off the production but they put up the money anyway.
In today's market, the studio may be hoping for that 1 in 100 like the Blair Witch to make up for all the others. But that isn't so different from doing something like signing a contract such that the studio/patron gets right of first refusal to play the same roll in follow-up productions for which the escrowed amount could contain a healthy profit for the artist and initial backers.
In fact, even though we are just now entering the age of "desktop cinema" movie-making is still going to remain a capital-intensive process for quite a while. I would not be surprised if any new film artists had to go with some form of investment/patronage to get their first film made. Pretty much the way it is today with just fairly minor alterations in the details.
Maybe not a bad idea on the surface but such a system would churn out even more mediocre pablum because the majority of people would only contribute to projects that would create works that they know they will like.
And how is that different from today? I am reasonably satisfied with the current amount of creative productions today, I just don't like the nefarious infrastructure being constructed to enforce the profits of the corps that fund the creation of insanely expensive and often uncreative works today.
I certainly can't see a marketplace where past performance is a major determination of future funding producing less creative works than get produced now.
Slashdot Mirror
The Abu Ghraib story broke in April 2004 (and officially became a non-story on November 2, 2004)
To simpletons in the American electorate, that might be true. But, if anything, Nov 2nd made the story much more relevant to about a billion muslims who view it as proof positive that the current US government may talk a good story, but where it counts, in real life, their actions are a whole lot different.
The page you not-linked says nothing to support your premise - namely that a merchant must check ID. They must only do so if the card is not already signed - at least that is all the not-linked page says.
It's like checking credit card IDs in retail - the credit card companies have the idea that if the card doesn't match the ID, the guy at the counter is supposed to confiscate the card.
However, they are not supposed to require ID unless they have reasonable suspicion that the card is stolen. Having a policy to always check ID with a credit card transaction is a sure way to get fined and possibly lose your merchant account.
The reason for this policy is that the credit card companies want their credit cards to be as easy to use as cash. Cash does not require ID except in extenuating circumstances, so they have decided that credit cards will not either.
FWIW, those people who write "check ID" in the signature box and think they are increasing their security are really just asking to have their cards confiscated. The rules in the merchant agreement state that the card must be signed - blank cards can be signed right there, but anything other than a signature invalidates the card.
We've all been waiting for MS to start fighting with patents.
It is their last resort against a better product.
It has been reported here that the man primarily responsible for "productizing" IBM's patent portfolio went to microsoft to do the same thing a couple of years ago. So far, we've seen silly little things like attempting to patent the FAT32 format on flash devices, but nothing really used as an offensive weapon.
Ironically, our best hope of defeating Microsoft in the patent arena is IBM, and to a lesser extent, Novell. Both companies have significant patent portfolios that can be used as a retaliatory threat to MS for trying to lock-out Free software with their patents. Both companies have been hurt badly enough by MS in the past, but are currently stable enough that they aren't likely to make deals either (like Sun did).
Personally, I feel that the whole idea of patent portfolios and all encompassing cross-licensing agreements is an abuse of the patent system because it locks out the little guy. But, in this particular fight we don't have a hope of achieving patent reform soon enough (if ever), so we might as well be glad that we have a few big guns on our side.
So, apart from Dell, and Compaq(HP), who is there for x86/amd64 servers?
See Newisys pronounced like "New Isis." There are a lot of former HP, and former companies-acquired-by-HP, employees working there. They make top notch stuff and do real R&D on bleeding-edge tech. Sun seems to OEM their AMD64 stuff too.
No I don't work for them, just know people who do.
I wish they had a "burn on demand" (BOD) model where you pay a minimal fee (think rental cost, ideally cheaper) and get to burn a movie on DVD. No case, no extras, just the movie....
They do, it is called:Hollywood Video's Movie Value Pass.
Blockbuster Video has a similar program too. Flat fee to rent all you can rent each month. Want a movie? Go get it for "free", rip and burn and now you are set. Probably not what the studios or rental companies have in mind, but there it is anyway.
The answer is simple. Only share porn. They don't seem to mind at all.
I think I've heard one or two complaints from the porn industry, but over all I think you are completely correct.
And I think I know why.
Royalties. There are none.
Very few, if any, porn contracts include royalties for anyone - performers, cameramen, "director," etc. They all get paid as a work for hire. The publisher then makes a run of DVDs and sells most, if not all, in one big transaction to a distributor who parcels them out to the buying public through various parallel channels.
By the time the end product has made it into a large enough number of hands so as to inevitably end up shared on the net, everybody has already been paid.
I think that bears repeating - by the time any widespreading "pirating" can get into gear, everybody involved has been compensated for their work, so they really don't care.
I think that if the music and mainstream movie industries could come up with a similar business model, the entire problem of "piracy" would disappear overnight, essentialy redefined out of existence.
You should know that the metal alloy film that contains the phase change layer is less stable than the dye used in the -R/+R discs.
NIST did a study of CD and DVD backup methodologies and that statement is part of one of their final reports.
Here's the NIST starting point.
Here's the part about RW vs R longevity.
If you copy (or just write) really big files, then there should be no reason for the raid-5 driver to read all the other sectors in the parity chunk (don't know official terminology for it offhand) since, if done right, you will be writing all of the sectors with brand new information anyway.
Sometimes, leading is leaving. Or pissing off. If you do what everyone wants you to do, you will have no real influence on the world whatsoever.
That's exactly what George Bush and his syncophants say too.
Yes, this coming from the same guys that can tell you what your weather will be like tomorrow correctly 90% of the time.
Who are also the same guys who can tell you what your weather will be like in exactly one month from now correctly less than 5% of the time.
So, if their weather forecasting skills have anything to do with the correctness of their global warming theories, which are a lot more long-term than even just "next month," you've just said that we shouldn't pay any attention to them.
Or, in other words, emotional hyperbole is of no value to a scientific debate.
the MPAA and studio made the bulk of money from the movie, the soundtrack wasn't paid for that way, I am sure there were royalties paid, but nothing like what the studio got. The DVD is just icing on the cake for them.
However, almost all soundtracks are just compilations of already published songs. So, soundtracks are pretty much just icing on the cake for the RIAA too.
The movie's score, which usually is not released on CD is another thing. I haven't looked into how that is paid for, but I bet it is similar to the way the rest of the movie is paid for, thus box office royalties and foreign distribution rights probably cover it just as much as the they do the DVD.
It also goes straight into a reporting database where Microsoft can track trends like which resellers are selling large amounts of counterfeit copies of Windows.
Sounds like a great opportunity for a joe-job of a b&m computer store.
1) Get a list of known warez registration keys
2) Get a utility that lets you reset your XP registration key
3) Get a DSL or dial-up account which gives you a new IP every time your reconnect.
4) Find a key on the list of warez keys that will fail the test, then set your installed XP to that bogus one, dial-in for new IP and run the test.
5) When it fails, fill out report form indicating local BestBuy or whatever victim you prefer.
6) Rinse, repeat until local BestBuy is raided by the SPA/MPAA/RIAA/DHS/DHL/UPS.
I thought you said "gynecological project."
Unfortunately for the average slashdotter, that would require more download and less upload capacity. Verizon's 2MBps upstream wouldn't help a bit.
Verizon has wired much of Northern NJ for FTTP, but NJ State legislation is preventing them from turning their network on.
My understanding, based solely on reading the forums at dslreports.com is that Verizon wants monopoly rights to the fibre they are laying. As in no second source ISP like Covad or Earthlink would be able to lease bandwidth or connectivity on the fibre lines at (low) state-set rates, like they are able to today on the copper lines.
Based on that, I think Verizon is in the wrong. They are dangling shiny trinkets of high-speed internet at a reasonable price in order to distract people from the inevitable long-term result of monopoly control over public works - erosion of price competitiveness and technological stagnation.
Sure, 15MBps at $50 looks GREAT today, but will it be that great in 5 years? What if the price goes up to $100? Pay no attention to the details behind the curtain!
Again, without knowing more than I've read at the forums, I think that if it were up to me, I'd be looking at a compromise. Verizon can have monopoly control over the fibre network with three caveats:
1) A viable competitor exists in each segment (neighborhood, town, whatever) such as cable which is priced within say 20% for equivalent levels of performance.
2) They agree to a more relaxed test for market collusion than what the FTC/DoJ uses in order to absolutely prevent Verizon and whoever their local competitor(s) are from abusing their certain oligopoly. Punishment for collusion being immediate and permanent loss of control of all the fibre in the area in which the collusion occurred plus enough of a geographical radius to cover enough more customers to equal 200% of the total affected. (The state would probably assume control and lease it back to Verizon and any other ISPs.)
3) Yearly review of their performance with a regular 5-year major examination of their quality of service and evaluation of their technological currentness.
These all assume that the details are worked out by Verizon and a team of negotiators for the state that are not biased by bribery of any sort (no cushy jobs at Verizon 6 months after the contracts are signed).
I am a big believer in "free markets" - as long as care is taken to prevent monopolistic abuses that can naturally arise in a loosely regulated market. But, public utilities are a natural monopoly and so special care, much better care than is usually applied, must be taken to keep a check on the monopolistic business practices that inevitably settle in. To do otherwise would be the equivalent of giving Verizon a money pipeline into the community's bank accounts.
I am sorry but never in my life did I encounter the expression pooh-pooh, can someone please enlighten me?
See, Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog (warning, flash or some sort of plugin required).
Triumph is famous for his tag line, "That's a wonderful _blank_, for me to POOH on!" Fill in the blank as needed.
In this case, Rosen is not quite ready to take a dump on the copyright industry that put her up in fine style at over $1M/yr for the last couple of decades.
No one finds it really odd that suddenly she writes an article supporting the CC? What's in it for her? What is the underlying motive?
Having lost before the Supreme Court, Larry Lessig has changed his approach to implementing copyright reform. He's also changed his name. He now goes by the name Leisure Suit Larry and every thursday he makes sweet love to Ms. Rosen and in return, she gives him the public support he needs to change the industry from within. Deep within.
Dunno, probably a lot of people who like Office, Photoshop, applications they've heard of...
Hello? Let me phrase it even more obviously. How many people had a choice to pay or not pay for MS Windows? The answer in both absolute numbers and percentages is clearly less than those who have paid for X in the form of an off the shelf linux distribution like SuSE or Mandrake.
People don't buy stick shifts anymore because automatics have reached a point where stick shift users are a fringe group who like the "grit" of performing the action. Automatics, in general use, have just as good or better gas mileage these days as their manual counterparts.
Funny, every car that I have considered purchasing in the last 5 years or so had a significant performance and/or functionality loss in the automatic version. That includes, but is not limited to, the volvo s60r, the audi A6 and the acura nsx.
No one likes RMS blabbering on about how software needs to be free
Yeah, sure. Tell that to the MacArthur Foundation.
Anyone who's messed with the guts of X11 knows this much better than I - I walked away from that mess about as quickly as it took to execute 'less' on a piece of source code.
Have you looked at the guts of MS Windows? Ok, probably not. But have you looked at the APIs to windows? If you think X11 is bad, you ain't seen nothing. Layer upon layer of discarded, mutually contradictory, half-completed interfaces. There is just no way that the code underneath that can be any better than X11's.
Free Software has nothing to do with quality.
I think you are arguing with a strawman. Sure, some people say Free software is about quality. But RMS doesn't. He says its about the FREEDOM. Freedom from vendor lock-in, freedom to fix that spaghetti code if it really bothers you so much and freedom to add in a little ravioli instead.
Really, how many of you would willingly use X11 if it was not free?
I dunno. How many individuals have willingly paid for MS Windows?
hypotypical as defined by the dictionary of neologistics--
:less than / below :common
hypo-
typical
Less than common example.
Doesn't do anything to support his point though.
Your escrowed product would only be public domain under current copyright if law if all the people involved in its creation (author, screenwriters, set designers, musicians, etc) specifically agreed to make it so.
Well, yeah that's the point of it. I don't think anyone would be misled or tricked into "giving it away." Essentially everyone involved would be doing so under a "work for hire" contract. My point about not requiring any changes to the law is that starting today (or anytime in the past) people could start using the model of escrowed release. Once a few people start to become successful at it, the pressure is then on the "big 5" to join in the revolution. Kind of like Microsoft and the GPL, althought microsoft is just as the start of "joining in" and still very hesitant about the whole thing.
Requiring mandatory registration to receive protection before publication would make all works default to the public domain, and requiring yearly renewal of the those registrations would force a decision by producers as to whether it is worth the cost and effort to continue that protection once a work becomes unprofitable.
Mandatory registration eliminates the problem of abandoned works that no identifiable person owns the copyright on, and reduces the problem of hoarding copyrights just to prevent others from getting access.
But it does not eliminate the problem of a draconian enforcement infrastructure to prevent sharing. Under such a system, all the big corps will maintain their copyrights for at least the first few years - worse case they decide to set mandatory minimums for everything they produce, just to "be safe" in case they have a hidden gem or some new technology comes around that makes the original works more valuable (for example, all those 8-bit atari VCS games that were worthless up until a few years ago when someone realized they could put them on mobile phones and now it's, "use MAME go to JAIL!" Well, almost, anyway.
So, as long as the act of copying a creation is illegal -- even for a limited time, there will be justification for draconian anti-copying enforcement infrastructures like DRM and the DMCA and "phone home" licenses like some hi-def movies encoded & encrypted with Microsoft's Windows Media 9 codec use. I don't see mandatory registration making it any less likely that people will stop using the current equivalent of Napster, or that the copyright industry will back-off on their legislative and legal assaults on sharing and the consquent side-effects on society.
They got their first samples done and they sucked compared to their competitors who haven't exactly been sitting around.
Their LCOS competitors, primarily JVC have been just sitting around, which is one of the reasons some of us were really glad to see the initial announcement and really bummed by this one. The DLP guys have made incredible increases in performance - primarily in contrast levels over the last 5 years or so, and yes they too are competitors to LCOS. But, even the essentially five year-old LCOS tech that JVC is still using beats DLP in color quality, resolution and fill factor.
If JVC had been motivated to make the same kind of progress the DLP guys have been making, we'd have 4096x2048, 4000:1 contrast with 96+% fill for under $4K today. Since we don't, I sure was hoping Intel would get there instead.
There are much simpler solutions to increase the available of material in the public domain while still keeping it profitable for those who produce the movies. A few simple changes in copyright law would both suffice and be far easier to implement.
And would those changes remove the need to prevent sharing of copyrighted materials through ever more draconian and invasive practices as is happneing today? The point of the system is two-fold:
1) Make sure that creators get paid a fair fee for their work.
2) Accept that it is human nature to share stuff, especially good stuff and instead of fighting human nature, harness it.
Escrowed release requires no changes to copyright law, since once paid for, the product is released to the public domain. If you have a few simple changes to copyright law that would suffice and are easier to implement, how about sharing?
Then you aren't considering "sleepers". Admittedly most are low budget, but there are cases where studios back risky projects that wouldn't generate enough public interest to cover their production costs
Such films tend to be financed by "patrons" of one sort or another, who generally don't expect to make their money back, at least not from the proceeds. Studios are just one source of patronage and it seems to me that such funding is already pretty close to my proposal - the studios and/or other patrons don't expect to make money off the production but they put up the money anyway.
In today's market, the studio may be hoping for that 1 in 100 like the Blair Witch to make up for all the others. But that isn't so different from doing something like signing a contract such that the studio/patron gets right of first refusal to play the same roll in follow-up productions for which the escrowed amount could contain a healthy profit for the artist and initial backers.
In fact, even though we are just now entering the age of "desktop cinema" movie-making is still going to remain a capital-intensive process for quite a while. I would not be surprised if any new film artists had to go with some form of investment/patronage to get their first film made. Pretty much the way it is today with just fairly minor alterations in the details.
Maybe not a bad idea on the surface but such a system would churn out even more mediocre pablum because the majority of people would only contribute to projects that would create works that they know they will like.
And how is that different from today? I am reasonably satisfied with the current amount of creative productions today, I just don't like the nefarious infrastructure being constructed to enforce the profits of the corps that fund the creation of insanely expensive and often uncreative works today.
I certainly can't see a marketplace where past performance is a major determination of future funding producing less creative works than get produced now.