Free markets may have a place, but either it is a small place or there needs to be mechanisms that deal with the concentrating of wealth that is the end product of free markets and the effect they have on small communities.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. I suggest you do some research into the economic theories of Hernando de Soto and "(poor) people's capitalism".
Capitalism empowers the poor, and the fundamental reason for poverty is that there's not enough capitalism. The poor of the world have an estimated 9.3 billion in assets that they can do *nothing* with because of a lack of legal infrastructure. Ensuring that people can transfer, sell, lease, and borrow against their property is the fundamental problem of world poverty.
The funny thing in this is that you and I want the same thing - more individual liberty.
Yes, but you consider the works of artists to be "commons", and I do not. One a person writes a novel it is inherently a private creation. They don't have to share it. You believe that if they publicize it at all they must immediately, completely and forever abdicate *all* rights despite the fact that they are the ones who spend untold hours creating this work. The morality of this position seems patently flawed. You believe that artists and creators deserve no rights no whatsoever despite their hard work - their own creations must be secret or no longer belong to them.
I'm confident that not only is this not morally defensible, but that you will never convince the majority of artists that they can have *no* power over their own creations.
Odd that you should argue for limited government and copyright in the same breath.
Not at all. The old big gov't liberal vs. small gov't conservative dichotomy is what is odd. Why big for its own sake? Why small for its own sake? My conception of government is that it exists to secure individual liberties and ensure a free market. Powerful government is required to break up monopolies, mediate labor disputes, etc. There's a lot of work for government to do.
I consider copyright law - not as it exists today but as it was originally intended - to be both a matter of individual rights and of the free market.
It's more government, and less individual liberty - so that a few "creators" can profit.
"Rights" are not the same as "benefit". Simply because more people would benefit does not mean indvidiaul rights would be served. Those who do not create a work have no "right" to it. You do not have a right to demand that your buddy let you read his novel. That is no more a question of individual liberty than saying that anyone with a salary over $200,000 a year can no longer be the target of robbery (meaning: it's not a crime to rob them) would be an expression of individual liberty. Sure, the masses could profit at the expense of the few, but it is not theft: not a right.
RIAA, MPAA, DRM and so on and so forth all demonstrate that copyright is actually antithetical to the very values you claim to support.
No, they are all examples of how copyright has been twisted from it's original intentions. If you knew me at all, you'd know the level of hatred I have for all three of those acronyms. Browse the contents of my blog if you like, I probably dedicate more time to criticizing the **AA and DRM than any other topic on my blog.
Many different organizations would simply go away - like companies that hold on to patents solely to sue other companies.
Wait - you want to get rid of copyright *and* patents? This is worse than I thought. Without patents there would be no computers today. There might be in another couple hundred years or so, but private invention would barely eek along without patent law.
Look, I'm not going to keep going into this. I don't think we're really being productive here. This is my final position. Patents and copyrights allow creators to get a return on their investment. Without them, there is *no* financial incentive to create. In fact, there's a heavy financial penalty for creation, since you still need to make a living and every hour you spend writing your novel or perfecting your cotton gin is an hour you get paid $0 for.
You are depending on nothing but sheer goodwill to power an economy - literally. It's like communism, but even *less* realistic.
Current patent and copyright laws stifle creativity and innovation because they have gone too far. Our IP laws must be simplified and more room carved out for fair use. Old business models like MPAA and RIAA will die out - as they should. But the core principles behind copyright are even more necessary than they were when they were first invented (which was right after the printing press.)
I don't think we can reliably predict what will happen if we abolish copyright.
On the contrary, I think that basic economic principles tell us exactly what will happen. If a work can be freely copied without restriction the price you can charge for that work drops to 0. So the value of all electronic media would quickly drop to 0. This is, in fact, exactly what the advocates for dispelling all copyright want to have happen. Since all electronic media would be literally worthless, there would be no financial incentive to make any.
The suggested solutions include some type of mass patronage or charity. Ya'll just need to listen to MC Frontalot sing about that in "Charity Case" to see how that is working. Including such lines as "now I'm down on my knees begging ya'll to believe my cd isn't free". I don't know why I even have to say this, but *ANY* economic plan that relies on the good will of people is doomed to failure. I don't know how many failed utopian schemes we have to go through before people realize that.
In the example I was talking about it's a little different because there's the cost of actually printing the books. The value of the content is 0, but the books still need to be printed, bound, shipped, stored, and sold. This means that whoever can do that cheapest sells the books. If you pay an artist any significant amount of money - upfront or royalty it doesn't matter - you put yourself at a financial disadvantage against your competitors who can print the books cheaper and sell them cheaper.
This means that no large publishing company (who would focus on economies of sale) would pay an artist anything ever. They would merely wait for a book to be published, and then race to flood the market with cheap copies. So the only companies who would pay artists would be tiny boutique shops that would have to try and eek out a living on the sales of books in the tiny frame of time between when a book gets popular and when the major publishing houses get their copies on the market.
It's the basic prisoner's dilemma. The best solution is for all parties to cooperate, but form the perspective of each of the parties, it's too dangerous to cooperate, and so everyone would act defensively.
But it really comes down to what I already said: any economic plan that depends on the good will of people to work is doomed to fail.
The copyright law was designed to allow an author to fairly profit from their work and then get it into the public domain where others' could extend it and alter it, and publish it.
I agree 100%. I've been arguing in favor of copyright law at all, not copyright law as we have it in America now.
Patents and copyrights are fundamentally different. They may similar in the sense of the amount of work involved and that it is a temporary monopoly.
Right, which was all that I was talking about. We can quibble about whether the differences are significant or not, but we've established what is similar and what is different. Let's move on.
The minute the rights of a "creator" are such that it negatively impacts society and the ability of others to create - those rights that get in the way need to be abolished.
So much for individual rights. I think this is an extremely bad conception of the relationship between individual rights and society. I think the emphasis should be on individual rights, not societal welfare. It sounds like you are describing a rather tyrannical opposition to the classical western liberalism on which our nation is founded. You know - bill of rights, limited gov't and all that.
All law is a not a matter of ethics. Counter-example: Restaurant inspections. It's a matter of hygiene, not ethics.
Your counterexample fails with one simple question: why should the government have a say in hygiene? You'll reply "for the benefit of the people" or something similar. And I'll ask "but why should government be for the benefit of the people?". And so on. But the point is that ethics are normative. Whenever you invoke a "should" in this sense, you're invoking ethics. You're never going to be able to get the "should" from a purely objective beginning. At least, no philosopher in the history of moral philosophy has ever succeeded, but feel free to give it the old college try.
I don't see the flaw in my counter-example. Everyone who cares about the Beatles or music in general being available is a listener. If it is freely available, there is no incentive for anyone to "steal" it
Yeah, and there's no way to make money off of it either. Which means the Beatles all have to have day jobs. Do you really think we'll have art of the quality that we do today (not that it's *all* good quality) if there's no money in it? Who will pay for the instruments? Who will pay for publicity? How are we going to make movies without money? You just took *all* money out of art - and you don't see a problem with that?
What's the first thing an artist does when they manage to get money from their art: quit their day job to take the art more seriously. You're taking away that possibility and you see *no* negative implications?
Even here, you still can capitalize on performance with readings, speeches and discussion groups.
Right, charity. I think that's both a bad idea and morally wrong. When someone is paid for a reading, they are being paid for the reading. This means they are still uncompensated for the work itself. This is wrong, in my opinion.
Furthermore, you're not taking some money out of the system, you're taking virtually *all* money out of the system. If J. K. Rowling had not been able to secure compensation for book 1, we'd never have had book 7.
The focus should be on creativeity - not making money, because making money is not the point. It may be necessary to live - but there needs to be a way to meet that need without making it the focus.
This just smacks of utopian wishful thinking. Your ideas sound about as practical as communism.
I think that you, unfortunately, misunderstand the difference between stakeholders and stockholders.
Actually I'm painfully clear on it. As a systems engineer "determine the stakeholders" is one of the foundational elements of our general methodology. My point was to distinguish between stakeholders and stockholders. In American business theory, the stockholders are considered the stakeholders. That's just the way business works in America. Not that it has always been this way or will always be this way, but the current mantra, for at least the last 2 decades, is that the point of a business is to "maximize stockholder value". So clearly stockholders = stakeholders.
As I pointed out, this is not the case in Europe or Japan, where employees, management, and other companies are also considered stakeholders. In the case of Japan the other companies are considered stakeholders based on the fact that they are stockholders. That's due to American influence. But Japanesee companies are also extremely paternalistic and treat employees as stakeholders even when they own no stock. German companies work the same way: employees are considered stakeholders. This is based more on liberal philosophy than on paternalism.
In any case, I really do understand the difference between stakeholders and stockholders.
No, I'm not. I'm speaking in general terms about intellectual property - both patents and copyrights (throw in service marks and trademarks if you like, but I think those are kind of a different idea). Patents and copyrights, however, are essentially the same thing. You work hard to create something intangible. I said "idea". You could substitute "invention" for patent "work" for copyright: but the principle is the same. Provide a temporary monopoly so that the creator can recoup costs and make a profit. For copyright on a song or patent on a new drug it's the same general concept.
You don't have to be a lawyer to understand the general law. In fact, I'd suggest that a philosopher is probably better at the generalities.
Copyright law is not a matter of ethics
On the contrary, all law is ultimately a matter of ethics. I encourage you to try and show me otherwise. But if you don't believe me (and I'm sure you don't) try answering the question "why should we have laws" without recourse to ethical values: implicitly or explicitly.
Tragedy of the commons is actually based on scarcity.
You are correct. I referenced the wrong economic concept. My mistake. The actual problem I referred to, however, is dead on. The example is more clear with patents, but the idea is the same. It takes a lot of money to research new drugs. It's extremely cheap to actually manufacture a lot of them. So if companies A, B, and C are pondering whether or not to design drug X, each has to weigh whether or not they can recoup their investment.
In a world with no patent law each benefits the most if someone else does the research, and loses the most if they do the research and everyone else copies. So it's more like the prisoner's dilemma than the tragedy of the commons. (Again, my mistake for citing the wrong example.) So less research would get done.
Does this work for music, novels, and other works of art that can be digitally reproduced as well? Of course it does. You incur a cost to create the work - anyone else can copy the work for free.
You see that's the flaw in your counterexample. Everyone in your hypothetical scenario is an artist or a listener. You've got the Beatles, and you've got other artists who might want to use their stuff to make more art, and you've got listeners. So you're not really talking about the possibility that someone might take every single song the Beatles published, stick it on a CD, and sell it themselves.
Of course the Beatles would probably be immune to such an attack, but any smaller musician who wants to make money by distributing their work is vulnerable to a larger company with far greater resources swooping in and making exact and entire copies of the music.
So there are only two possibilities. Either no one makes any money from music (in which case there's no motivation for such predatory copying) or the only people who make money from music are not creators of music but distributors who now have to incur no cost to copy and sell music from artists.
If you really think a world where artists can get by on donations and charity is a good idea, I can't argue against you. I just don't think putting all artists on public welfare is a good idea. Failing that, copyright law of some sort is essential to enable them to recoup costs from creating these works. And these rights must be transferable in order to have genuine worth.
Keep in mind that I'm not arguing in favor of current copyright law. It's too strict. We need to allow for more reuse in the form of sampling to create new works. And I'm *certainly* not arguing in favor of DRM. There's a distinction between saying "we should have some copyright law" and saying "we can use DRM to enforce that copyright law". How you enforce a law is not the same question as what law to have.
Also as most musicians know, your money comes from touring - which isn't about copyright
Maybe if every teeny bopper whore who wants to pout at a camera, sing to an over-produced track and get paid millions for it suddenly can't make money because the artificial monopoly supporting such a business model vanishes, we wouldn't be innundated with mindless crap. Maybe we would all be better off if the only people who made art were the ones that were passionate enough to make it without thought of getting paid.
This strikes me as really funny. Like it or not, the reason that pop songs like this keep getting made is because people by them. It's actually relatively democratic. I mean, you might not like the music. I certainly don't care for it. But you can't argue with the fact that a lot of people like the music enough to pay money to get it.
But rather than the democratic ideal you'd rather go back to a system where a few mega-rich fat dudes literally decided what got made. You honestly think that would be an improvement? You know what - evenif the mega rich fat dudes were all my friends and made sure that all my favorite screamo bands and prog rock bands stuck around forever, I'd still be deeply troubled by the fact that in general people had to buy music that was decided for them by a few rich people.
Consumerism lets people vote with their wallets. The trouble is, as you've observed, they tend to make stupid decisions. Still, I'd rather take the stupid masses than a tyranny any day: even when it comes to music and not politics.
In fact that's where the money is supposed to be made, in the performance of work, not the distribution of reproductions.
So... how many novels have you seen performed? Not adaptations of novels, but actual novels? There's an argument to be made that copyright is less important for the performance arts, but in that case you're not merely selling the work, but the performance of the work. So it makes sense. But a lot of art is not performed. Just tough look to them? I suppose Terry Pratchett should just start writing novels live and charging $10 an hour to watch him work?
I don't care about publishers and distributors. They're just ripping off the creators like the railroad monopolies did to the farmers, and they can all rot.
They are *now*, but that's because now any 8 year old with a CD can make perfect digital copies of most forms of art. Music, video, or text. But publishing companies were invented when the means of publication and distribution were much, much more expensive. The plunge in the cost of publication and distribution is a relatively new thing, historically.
The publisher's teat is running dry. They are a fifth wheel trying to put more laws on the books to maintain the artists' dependence on them.
This is a drastic overstatement. One of the most important things publishers do is marketing. And as Google shows, that's still an industry that is thriving today. So publishers aren't dead yet. Furthermore, not all media is digital yet, and that means there's still a reason for publishers to exist. I want a hardback copy of Harry Potter and the Deahtly Hallows, not a.pdf.
Why should I subsidize a full time artist with corrupt law that only promotes hoarding and speculation?
This is just silly. Copyright law doesn't force you to subsidize anybody. If you don't want to subsidize J. K. Rowling, don't buy her book. That's fine with me. Find an author that is willing to give their work away. But I'm happy to give J. K. Rowling her money. And if she has worked out a deal with Scholastic to print the book, then I'm happy to give them their cut. And if Borders is kind enough to take shipment of the books and provide nice displays for me to peruse, than I'll gladly fork over some cash to them as well. Conveniently enough for me, all that money is bundled into one transaction.
Copyright doesn't force you to pay money at all. It just gives authors the right to set limitations on their work. If you don't like the price they set: don't pay. You don't have some inalienable right to enjoy art you didn't create for free.
There is no reason a reproduction of work already performed should fill your wallet. Make your contract, perform the work, get paid, and walk away. That's all you or anybody else is entitled to.
Did you really write this entire thing without ever once stopping to think that not all art is performance art?
Thousands of years without every man, woman and child owning a high speed "printing press" in their homes
This is actually a very historically apt example. From wikipedia:
Movable type
The printing press brought the possibility of compensation for literary labor. Very speedily, however, the unrestricted rivalry of printers brought into existence competing and unauthorized editions of various works, which diminished prospects of any payment, or even entailed loss, for the authors, editors, and printers of the original issue, and thus discouraged further undertaking. Any person with a press and some skills could use movable type to publish books and other items. Scribes and scriveners were no longer needed.
Protection for the authors and their representatives was sought through special privileges obtained for separate works as issued. According to Elizabeth Armstrong (whom the Curators of the Bodleian Library awarded the Gordon Duff Prize in 1965 for her essay on Printers' and authors' privileges in France and the Low Countries in the sixteenth century), "The republic of Venice granted its first privilege for a particular book in 1486. It was a special case, being the history of the city itself, the 'Rerum venetarum ab urbe condita opus' of Marcus Antonius Coccius Sabellicus" (page 03). [ Armstrong, Elizabeth. Before Copyright: the French book-privilege system 1498-1526. Cambridge University Press (Cambridge: 1990). ] "Venice began regularly granting privileges for particular books in 1492.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_ law#Earliest_copyright_disputations
As soon as the means for cheap reproduction existed, the need for copyright was seen. Copyright laws date back to the 15th century. I'm not sure what "greatest works of time" you were thinking of, but I'd wager at least some of them actually came into existence *after* the printing press (and therefore were probably copyrighted at the time) and in any case the point remains: before easy reproduction there was no need for copyright law, afterwards there was.
I get the impression that you don't understand what copyrights are. If you have a copyright to an idea you do not own that idea. Ideas can not be owned. Period. Copyright laws and patents do not contradict this common sense notion. A copyright law does not grant you ownership of an idea. It grants you ownership to exclusive rights to control the distribution of that idea for profit.
This isn't just a matter of pragmatics (although that comes into it to) but also of ethics. If it takes me 1,000 hours to write my novel is it fair that anyone else can come and copy it and sell it? I invested the work, but if there's no copyright law then they can reap the benefit. Most people agree that this is not fair. So artists deserve *some* rights.
On the other hand if I spend 1,000 hours writing a book does it makes sense that I can then sue someone for quoting a passage from my book? Or that I can stop people from reading my book if I don't want them to? Imagine an author wandering around a book store "I don't like the looks of you, give me that book back. Get out." So clearly giving artists *all* rights is also not fair.
Since both extremes - no rights and all rights - are not ethical than if you want to find the ethical then by definition you are looking for something in between. You are, as it were, attempting to strike a balance.
Do physical property laws "strike a balance"? No, what's mine is mine, and what's your is yours, period.
This is false. Both taxes and eminent domain demonstrate that we do, in fact, strike a balance in this case as well. If you own a house on land the country needs for a road, then you don't get to say "what's mine is mine". The gov't knocks your house down (and pays you for it).
I disagree. The total quantity of works produced might decrease, but I think the variety would actually increase.
It's called the tragedy of the commons. If everyone can profit from an copying from an invention as much as from inventing the invention, then everyone has the incentive *not* to be the one that does the hard work of inventing. This is a more fundamental law than your liking for indie music. Why should there be a larger variety of music if people are being paid less to make it? It's not as though anyone is forcing people who are willing to make music for free not to make it now. So right now everyone that is willing to make money for free makes it, and also people who need or want to get paid make it. You take away the option to get paid, and only the people willing to make music for free will make it. How are fewer artists "more variety"?
The real problem with copyright law is that large corporations are allowed to possess them.
In short, why is a company that has not produced anything creative allowed to take advantage of a legal right that was supposedly enacted to protect creativity?
A couple things to note. First of all it's interesting that you qualify corporations with "large". I take it you understand why corporations are so important to modern business. What they do is limit the risk of any investor to only their investment. In other words if you put $1,000 into a corporation and the corporation gets sued and loses all it's assets and still owes money, the creditors can't come to you for more cash. Without this guarantee of safety, investing in corporations would be even more risky, and only the rich could do it (only they could run the risk). So it's actually a powerful democratization effect to have corporations exist as legal entities because it protects their investors.
However you're right that when corporations get really big it's hard to make sure that the people running the corporation have the interests of the stakeholders at heart. In fact, it's hard to even define who the stake holders are. In America the stakeholders are the shareholders. In Europe the stakeholders are also the company employees (even if they don't own stock). In Japan it's company employees and also other businesses (because in Japan companies own each other's stocks at a much higher rate). In none of these cases is the stakeholder the general public. So trying to figure out how the general public can none the less impose some penalties on corporation decision makers for bad decisions is an extremely, extremely tricky problem.
I agree with you in principle that it's a problem, but I think the real fundamental problem isn't about copyright, it's about how to design corporate governance structure so that the individual decision makers in corporations are responsible for the decisions the corporations make. This is harder to do than it sounds.
Plus have you ever read fan art? That stuff is awful. The people writing fan art are the ones who can't actually get their works published.
It's also worth pointing out that one difference between fan art and professional art is probably the amount of time that goes into professional art. Writing a book, for most people, takes a huge investment. If you're getting paid to write the book, that's great. But if you also have to work a full time job to get by and write the book in your spare time, well, it will either suck or take you a very long, long time to complete.
nformation is nothing but a different 'type' of object, and there's no reason there should't be ownership laws involved.
This is silly. There's a very fundamental difference between tangible goods and ideas. If you take my car, I have no car anymore. If you take my song, I still have it. So you have not deprived me of the song.
You can not deprive people of ideas by "stealing" them, and thus stealing an idea is different than stealing a tangible object.
So the reason that people can't take my TV is quite simply that then I will no longer have a TV. But if I start whistling my own invented melody and someone hears me and starts whistling it too, I haven't lost the melody. The wife example is silly. If my wife wants to have sex with some dude - much as that would suck for me - then I can't stop her. If she doesn't want to, then it's rape. Are you now trying to say that rape and theft are the same thing?
What's the difference between a TV rolling off an assembly line, and a novel written by some guy in his basement? None. Both were produced by hard working people (and some robots in the case of TVs).
Books, as in the physical objects, are not copyrighted. It is the contents of those books - which are intangible - that are copyrighted. I suggest you do some reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property
But crying for the complete abolishment of copyright is sheer stupidity and insanity all rolled into one.
You want to *abolish* copyright law? See, now I think that that is somewhat less than sane. Picture this scenario: J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter is picked up by a small publisher and they sell a few hundred thousand copies. This gets the attention of a giant publishing house, which quickly rushes out millions of copies of the book and refuses to pay Rowling anything.
So now what? Does she write book 2 knowing that if she publishes it she'll only sell a few hundred thousand copies before stores are swamped with the (now legal) copies from the major publisher? Or does she just quit writing.
If there's no copyright, than it makes a lot more sense for media publishing companies to quit paying artists, and specialize in leeching off of small publishers. Which in turn means the small publishers will increasingly make no money for actually paying the media creators, which means the media creators eventually go back to flipping burgers.
In short: abolishing copyright entirely completely eradicates the financial incentive to pay artists to make work. I'm sure some will do it anyway, but most people have to make a living, so there will be virtually no professional, full-time artists of any kind ever again. That, to me, is insane.
Seriously, that is ownage like I've never seen between large corporations before.
It looks like Google did in fact know exactly what they were doing when they bought YouTube. Right now Viacom looks pretty much like they just stepped on head of a rake and got whacked in the face.
If there's one thing you can say for Google, they know how to stand up for sane copyright law.
Come on, look at the competition. Sony? Sony doesn't just spurn their customers, they hunt down their few remaining fanbois and rip out their eyes. Sony has done a lot to ensure that even if MS sold empty Elite cases they would *still* not look like the bad guys in the market.
I mean really, compared to Sony there's not much MS can do to look bad.
Because if they did, they might notice that blog post talks more about Dolphin than anything else, and has virtually nothing to say about whether or not KDE 4.0 is the Holy Grail of desktops.
Hope they get some click-throughs from the traffic though.
What does it take to get people to RTFA? All of this is discussed in the article, including every single one of those movies by name.
Besides, the real point (I think) of the article is not the simplistic "every sci-fi movie made is space opera" but the slightly more nuanced "the power of space operas to attract funding has taken away from the ability to make more serious sci fi". The serious stuff still gets made from time to time, but frequently on a more shoe-string budget (check Equilibrium). Meanwhile a lot of really good sci fi gets completely destroyed by the gravitational pull of Star Wars. Take a look at "I, Robot" as one example. (The article lists others).
The fact that some movies make it through as more serious sci fi (the article was written about "Children of Men" for crying out loud!) doesn't nullify the proposition that serious sci fi has suffered because of the space opera effect.
I would argue - independently of what I read in the article - that this problem is compounded by the fact that space opera has frequently failed. So people associate star wars with space opera, pour money into space operas, have those movies utterly fail (Wing Commander?) and then are shy of investing in sci fi at all.
Of course it's a larger problem with the fact that Hollywood is fundamentally an investment market. You invest millions in a movie, and the point is to maximize return on investment. I'm sure that's not what all actors, directors, and screen writers want to do but it *is* what the financeers want to do and they well, do the financing. Star Wars just added to this to make it really hard for serious sci fi to get funding.
im not a star wars fan, but boy, star wars contain heaploads of stuff for "human condition" than any of the sci-fi stuff this guy is talking about - its about humane fears, good and evil, greed, comradeship, high ideals and lowly cravings
Clearly you haven't seen episodes I - III.
On a more serious note, I don't think the point of the article was necessarily that Lucas made a superficial movie, but that he provided an shining example of sci fi that was financially successful (and that determines what gets made in Hollywood - financing movies is 100% business even if making them is sometimes art) and that example was imitated. Because his movie included space ships, fuzzy aliens, and an extremely simplistic plot that's what followed. This doesn't mean every movie with space ships, fuzzy aliens, and starkly delineated good and evil is bad - just that the superficial aspects of Lucas' film were glommed onto in the past and that making *only* movies with space ships, fuzzy aliens, and starkly delineated good and evil rules out most of the significant literary achievements of sci fi.
Star Wars may have been very much about the human condition, but it has little or nothing intellectual to say about it. There's nothing in Star Wars that seeks to postulate a premise in which questions of the human condition can be analyzed and *that* is the real halmark of Star Wars from Dune to Left Hand of Darkness to Ender's Game. What sci fi does, more than anything else, is use imagination to construct worlds where we can pose questions about sexuality, religion, faith, politics, family, etc. in ways that are more clear than a story set in more conventional reality.
Star Wars did none of that, and thus - while it may have been a good movie - it had nothing in common with the heritage of sci fi.
In the following years, as many filmmakers tried to outdo "Star Wars" in terms of spectacle, more cerebral sci-fi outings fell by the wayside. They're considered classics now, but "Blade Runner" (from a Dick novel) and "The Thing" (less a remake of the 1951 original than a return to the original John W. Campbell Jr. story, "Who Goes There?") were box-office failures when first released. Despite the star power of Harrison Ford in the former and the shocking monster effects of the latter, both were bleak portrayals of dehumanization that couldn't compete that same year with the childlike innocence of Steven Spielberg's "E.T." With only a few exceptions, like 1980's "Altered States," 1984's "The Terminator" and the subversive films of David Cronenberg (whose "Scanners," "Videodrome" and inspired remake of "The Fly" were among the best sci-fi movies of the decade), the '80s were mostly dominated by "Star Wars," "Star Trek" and "Superman" installments. One major adaptation of a classic science-fiction novel, David Lynch's "Dune," was a colossal disaster.
I'm not saying everything in the article is gospel truth, but it's frustrating to me that something I care a lot about (sci-fi) is hard to discuss because everyone is more interested in mouthing off their own opinions before they even read more than a one paragraph description of the article.
This is actually an interesting article people. Let's go read it and *then* talk about it.
Depends on what you mean by "that way". Yeah - Hollywood is risk averse and therefore prone to sequal, remakes, and imitations. This is not due to a lack of creative juices but to the way movies are funded. It comes down to investment. $100 million to make a movie has to come from somewhere, and the people writing the fat checks frequently 1 - know little about art 2 - care little about art compared to getting a return on their investment.
But the fact remains that the success of Star Wars is directly responsible for eclipsing the chances of other sci fi movies by providing the ultimate example of the kind of sci-fi that made a ton of money: space opera. The tendency to look for safe investments would have been just as strong without Star Wars, but there would have been no shining example of superficial sci-fi to emulate, and so less superficial sci-fi may have had a better chance.
The conservatism (financial, not political) of Hollywood is never going to go away. That's what happens when you're dealing with 9-figure investments. The point of the article is that Star Wars gave that conservatism something to glom on to. For that we *can* thank George Lucas and Star Wars.
After the serials of the '40s and the atomic monster movies of the '50s, science-fiction cinema seemed to grow up right alongside the literature itself in the '60s, culminating in the ultimate marriage of the two: "2001: A Space Odyssey." Director Stanley Kubrick went right to the source for his visionary classic, enlisting Arthur C. Clarke to write the screenplay with him and presenting perhaps the most serious, adult treatment of science-fiction themes to that date. Other literary adaptations followed. Kubrick did it again in 1971 with "A Clockwork Orange," while "Logan's Run," the remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," "Soylent Green" and the cult favorite, "A Boy and His Dog," all brought real science-fiction novels or novellas to the screen with varying degrees of success. Even nonliterary offerings such as "Silent Running" and Lucas' own "THX 1138" made sobering statements. But "Star Wars" effectively ended all that, substituting space battles, nonstop special effects and simple good-versus-evil archetypes for the more complex shadings and themes that marked science fiction to that point.
Seriously - this would be an interesting article to discuss if people actually read the article instead of treating this as another opportunity to publicly flaunt their indie cred. "Wath me list of sci-fi movies that show I'm so hardcore sci fi."
There goes any hope for an interesting discussion.../me cranks up "indier than thou"
Slashdot Mirror
More importantly - who steals USB drives from bathrooms?
You should at least try to understand the viewpoint before you dismiss it. I mean - have you ever even taken an econ course in college?
Free markets may have a place, but either it is a small place or there needs to be mechanisms that deal with the concentrating of wealth that is the end product of free markets and the effect they have on small communities.
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Nothing could be farther from the truth. I suggest you do some research into the economic theories of Hernando de Soto and "(poor) people's capitalism".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hernando_de_Soto_(ec
http://members.forbes.com/global/2002/1223/070.ht
http://www.peoplescapitalism.org/PeoplesCapitalis
Capitalism empowers the poor, and the fundamental reason for poverty is that there's not enough capitalism. The poor of the world have an estimated 9.3 billion in assets that they can do *nothing* with because of a lack of legal infrastructure. Ensuring that people can transfer, sell, lease, and borrow against their property is the fundamental problem of world poverty.
The funny thing in this is that you and I want the same thing - more individual liberty.
Yes, but you consider the works of artists to be "commons", and I do not. One a person writes a novel it is inherently a private creation. They don't have to share it. You believe that if they publicize it at all they must immediately, completely and forever abdicate *all* rights despite the fact that they are the ones who spend untold hours creating this work. The morality of this position seems patently flawed. You believe that artists and creators deserve no rights no whatsoever despite their hard work - their own creations must be secret or no longer belong to them.
I'm confident that not only is this not morally defensible, but that you will never convince the majority of artists that they can have *no* power over their own creations.
Odd that you should argue for limited government and copyright in the same breath.
Not at all. The old big gov't liberal vs. small gov't conservative dichotomy is what is odd. Why big for its own sake? Why small for its own sake? My conception of government is that it exists to secure individual liberties and ensure a free market. Powerful government is required to break up monopolies, mediate labor disputes, etc. There's a lot of work for government to do.
I consider copyright law - not as it exists today but as it was originally intended - to be both a matter of individual rights and of the free market.
It's more government, and less individual liberty - so that a few "creators" can profit.
"Rights" are not the same as "benefit". Simply because more people would benefit does not mean indvidiaul rights would be served. Those who do not create a work have no "right" to it. You do not have a right to demand that your buddy let you read his novel. That is no more a question of individual liberty than saying that anyone with a salary over $200,000 a year can no longer be the target of robbery (meaning: it's not a crime to rob them) would be an expression of individual liberty. Sure, the masses could profit at the expense of the few, but it is not theft: not a right.
RIAA, MPAA, DRM and so on and so forth all demonstrate that copyright is actually antithetical to the very values you claim to support.
No, they are all examples of how copyright has been twisted from it's original intentions. If you knew me at all, you'd know the level of hatred I have for all three of those acronyms. Browse the contents of my blog if you like, I probably dedicate more time to criticizing the **AA and DRM than any other topic on my blog.
Many different organizations would simply go away - like companies that hold on to patents solely to sue other companies.
Wait - you want to get rid of copyright *and* patents? This is worse than I thought. Without patents there would be no computers today. There might be in another couple hundred years or so, but private invention would barely eek along without patent law.
Look, I'm not going to keep going into this. I don't think we're really being productive here. This is my final position. Patents and copyrights allow creators to get a return on their investment. Without them, there is *no* financial incentive to create. In fact, there's a heavy financial penalty for creation, since you still need to make a living and every hour you spend writing your novel or perfecting your cotton gin is an hour you get paid $0 for.
You are depending on nothing but sheer goodwill to power an economy - literally. It's like communism, but even *less* realistic.
Current patent and copyright laws stifle creativity and innovation because they have gone too far. Our IP laws must be simplified and more room carved out for fair use. Old business models like MPAA and RIAA will die out - as they should. But the core principles behind copyright are even more necessary than they were when they were first invented (which was right after the printing press.)
I don't think we can reliably predict what will happen if we abolish copyright.
On the contrary, I think that basic economic principles tell us exactly what will happen. If a work can be freely copied without restriction the price you can charge for that work drops to 0. So the value of all electronic media would quickly drop to 0. This is, in fact, exactly what the advocates for dispelling all copyright want to have happen. Since all electronic media would be literally worthless, there would be no financial incentive to make any.
The suggested solutions include some type of mass patronage or charity. Ya'll just need to listen to MC Frontalot sing about that in "Charity Case" to see how that is working. Including such lines as "now I'm down on my knees begging ya'll to believe my cd isn't free". I don't know why I even have to say this, but *ANY* economic plan that relies on the good will of people is doomed to failure. I don't know how many failed utopian schemes we have to go through before people realize that.
In the example I was talking about it's a little different because there's the cost of actually printing the books. The value of the content is 0, but the books still need to be printed, bound, shipped, stored, and sold. This means that whoever can do that cheapest sells the books. If you pay an artist any significant amount of money - upfront or royalty it doesn't matter - you put yourself at a financial disadvantage against your competitors who can print the books cheaper and sell them cheaper.
This means that no large publishing company (who would focus on economies of sale) would pay an artist anything ever. They would merely wait for a book to be published, and then race to flood the market with cheap copies. So the only companies who would pay artists would be tiny boutique shops that would have to try and eek out a living on the sales of books in the tiny frame of time between when a book gets popular and when the major publishing houses get their copies on the market.
It's the basic prisoner's dilemma. The best solution is for all parties to cooperate, but form the perspective of each of the parties, it's too dangerous to cooperate, and so everyone would act defensively.
But it really comes down to what I already said: any economic plan that depends on the good will of people to work is doomed to fail.
The copyright law was designed to allow an author to fairly profit from their work and then get it into the public domain where others' could extend it and alter it, and publish it.
I agree 100%. I've been arguing in favor of copyright law at all, not copyright law as we have it in America now.
Patents and copyrights are fundamentally different. They may similar in the sense of the amount of work involved and that it is a temporary monopoly.
Right, which was all that I was talking about. We can quibble about whether the differences are significant or not, but we've established what is similar and what is different. Let's move on.
The minute the rights of a "creator" are such that it negatively impacts society and the ability of others to create - those rights that get in the way need to be abolished.
So much for individual rights. I think this is an extremely bad conception of the relationship between individual rights and society. I think the emphasis should be on individual rights, not societal welfare. It sounds like you are describing a rather tyrannical opposition to the classical western liberalism on which our nation is founded. You know - bill of rights, limited gov't and all that.
All law is a not a matter of ethics. Counter-example: Restaurant inspections. It's a matter of hygiene, not ethics.
Your counterexample fails with one simple question: why should the government have a say in hygiene? You'll reply "for the benefit of the people" or something similar. And I'll ask "but why should government be for the benefit of the people?". And so on. But the point is that ethics are normative. Whenever you invoke a "should" in this sense, you're invoking ethics. You're never going to be able to get the "should" from a purely objective beginning. At least, no philosopher in the history of moral philosophy has ever succeeded, but feel free to give it the old college try.
I don't see the flaw in my counter-example. Everyone who cares about the Beatles or music in general being available is a listener. If it is freely available, there is no incentive for anyone to "steal" it
Yeah, and there's no way to make money off of it either. Which means the Beatles all have to have day jobs. Do you really think we'll have art of the quality that we do today (not that it's *all* good quality) if there's no money in it? Who will pay for the instruments? Who will pay for publicity? How are we going to make movies without money? You just took *all* money out of art - and you don't see a problem with that?
What's the first thing an artist does when they manage to get money from their art: quit their day job to take the art more seriously. You're taking away that possibility and you see *no* negative implications?
Even here, you still can capitalize on performance with readings, speeches and discussion groups.
Right, charity. I think that's both a bad idea and morally wrong. When someone is paid for a reading, they are being paid for the reading. This means they are still uncompensated for the work itself. This is wrong, in my opinion.
Furthermore, you're not taking some money out of the system, you're taking virtually *all* money out of the system. If J. K. Rowling had not been able to secure compensation for book 1, we'd never have had book 7.
The focus should be on creativeity - not making money, because making money is not the point. It may be necessary to live - but there needs to be a way to meet that need without making it the focus.
This just smacks of utopian wishful thinking. Your ideas sound about as practical as communism.
I think that you, unfortunately, misunderstand the difference between stakeholders and stockholders.
Actually I'm painfully clear on it. As a systems engineer "determine the stakeholders" is one of the foundational elements of our general methodology. My point was to distinguish between stakeholders and stockholders. In American business theory, the stockholders are considered the stakeholders. That's just the way business works in America. Not that it has always been this way or will always be this way, but the current mantra, for at least the last 2 decades, is that the point of a business is to "maximize stockholder value". So clearly stockholders = stakeholders.
As I pointed out, this is not the case in Europe or Japan, where employees, management, and other companies are also considered stakeholders. In the case of Japan the other companies are considered stakeholders based on the fact that they are stockholders. That's due to American influence. But Japanesee companies are also extremely paternalistic and treat employees as stakeholders even when they own no stock. German companies work the same way: employees are considered stakeholders. This is based more on liberal philosophy than on paternalism.
In any case, I really do understand the difference between stakeholders and stockholders.
For one, you are confusing patents and copyrights
No, I'm not. I'm speaking in general terms about intellectual property - both patents and copyrights (throw in service marks and trademarks if you like, but I think those are kind of a different idea). Patents and copyrights, however, are essentially the same thing. You work hard to create something intangible. I said "idea". You could substitute "invention" for patent "work" for copyright: but the principle is the same. Provide a temporary monopoly so that the creator can recoup costs and make a profit. For copyright on a song or patent on a new drug it's the same general concept.
You don't have to be a lawyer to understand the general law. In fact, I'd suggest that a philosopher is probably better at the generalities.
Copyright law is not a matter of ethics
On the contrary, all law is ultimately a matter of ethics. I encourage you to try and show me otherwise. But if you don't believe me (and I'm sure you don't) try answering the question "why should we have laws" without recourse to ethical values: implicitly or explicitly.
Tragedy of the commons is actually based on scarcity.
You are correct. I referenced the wrong economic concept. My mistake. The actual problem I referred to, however, is dead on. The example is more clear with patents, but the idea is the same. It takes a lot of money to research new drugs. It's extremely cheap to actually manufacture a lot of them. So if companies A, B, and C are pondering whether or not to design drug X, each has to weigh whether or not they can recoup their investment.
In a world with no patent law each benefits the most if someone else does the research, and loses the most if they do the research and everyone else copies. So it's more like the prisoner's dilemma than the tragedy of the commons. (Again, my mistake for citing the wrong example.) So less research would get done.
Does this work for music, novels, and other works of art that can be digitally reproduced as well? Of course it does. You incur a cost to create the work - anyone else can copy the work for free.
You see that's the flaw in your counterexample. Everyone in your hypothetical scenario is an artist or a listener. You've got the Beatles, and you've got other artists who might want to use their stuff to make more art, and you've got listeners. So you're not really talking about the possibility that someone might take every single song the Beatles published, stick it on a CD, and sell it themselves.
Of course the Beatles would probably be immune to such an attack, but any smaller musician who wants to make money by distributing their work is vulnerable to a larger company with far greater resources swooping in and making exact and entire copies of the music.
So there are only two possibilities. Either no one makes any money from music (in which case there's no motivation for such predatory copying) or the only people who make money from music are not creators of music but distributors who now have to incur no cost to copy and sell music from artists.
If you really think a world where artists can get by on donations and charity is a good idea, I can't argue against you. I just don't think putting all artists on public welfare is a good idea. Failing that, copyright law of some sort is essential to enable them to recoup costs from creating these works. And these rights must be transferable in order to have genuine worth.
Keep in mind that I'm not arguing in favor of current copyright law. It's too strict. We need to allow for more reuse in the form of sampling to create new works. And I'm *certainly* not arguing in favor of DRM. There's a distinction between saying "we should have some copyright law" and saying "we can use DRM to enforce that copyright law". How you enforce a law is not the same question as what law to have.
Also as most musicians know, your money comes from touring - which isn't about copyright
Maybe if every teeny bopper whore who wants to pout at a camera, sing to an over-produced track and get paid millions for it suddenly can't make money because the artificial monopoly supporting such a business model vanishes, we wouldn't be innundated with mindless crap. Maybe we would all be better off if the only people who made art were the ones that were passionate enough to make it without thought of getting paid.
This strikes me as really funny. Like it or not, the reason that pop songs like this keep getting made is because people by them. It's actually relatively democratic. I mean, you might not like the music. I certainly don't care for it. But you can't argue with the fact that a lot of people like the music enough to pay money to get it.
But rather than the democratic ideal you'd rather go back to a system where a few mega-rich fat dudes literally decided what got made. You honestly think that would be an improvement? You know what - evenif the mega rich fat dudes were all my friends and made sure that all my favorite screamo bands and prog rock bands stuck around forever, I'd still be deeply troubled by the fact that in general people had to buy music that was decided for them by a few rich people.
Consumerism lets people vote with their wallets. The trouble is, as you've observed, they tend to make stupid decisions. Still, I'd rather take the stupid masses than a tyranny any day: even when it comes to music and not politics.
In fact that's where the money is supposed to be made, in the performance of work, not the distribution of reproductions.
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So... how many novels have you seen performed? Not adaptations of novels, but actual novels? There's an argument to be made that copyright is less important for the performance arts, but in that case you're not merely selling the work, but the performance of the work. So it makes sense. But a lot of art is not performed. Just tough look to them? I suppose Terry Pratchett should just start writing novels live and charging $10 an hour to watch him work?
I don't care about publishers and distributors. They're just ripping off the creators like the railroad monopolies did to the farmers, and they can all rot.
They are *now*, but that's because now any 8 year old with a CD can make perfect digital copies of most forms of art. Music, video, or text. But publishing companies were invented when the means of publication and distribution were much, much more expensive. The plunge in the cost of publication and distribution is a relatively new thing, historically.
The publisher's teat is running dry. They are a fifth wheel trying to put more laws on the books to maintain the artists' dependence on them.
This is a drastic overstatement. One of the most important things publishers do is marketing. And as Google shows, that's still an industry that is thriving today. So publishers aren't dead yet. Furthermore, not all media is digital yet, and that means there's still a reason for publishers to exist. I want a hardback copy of Harry Potter and the Deahtly Hallows, not a
Why should I subsidize a full time artist with corrupt law that only promotes hoarding and speculation?
This is just silly. Copyright law doesn't force you to subsidize anybody. If you don't want to subsidize J. K. Rowling, don't buy her book. That's fine with me. Find an author that is willing to give their work away. But I'm happy to give J. K. Rowling her money. And if she has worked out a deal with Scholastic to print the book, then I'm happy to give them their cut. And if Borders is kind enough to take shipment of the books and provide nice displays for me to peruse, than I'll gladly fork over some cash to them as well. Conveniently enough for me, all that money is bundled into one transaction.
Copyright doesn't force you to pay money at all. It just gives authors the right to set limitations on their work. If you don't like the price they set: don't pay. You don't have some inalienable right to enjoy art you didn't create for free.
There is no reason a reproduction of work already performed should fill your wallet. Make your contract, perform the work, get paid, and walk away. That's all you or anybody else is entitled to.
Did you really write this entire thing without ever once stopping to think that not all art is performance art?
Thousands of years without every man, woman and child owning a high speed "printing press" in their homes
_ law#Earliest_copyright_disputations
This is actually a very historically apt example. From wikipedia:
Movable type
The printing press brought the possibility of compensation for literary labor. Very speedily, however, the unrestricted rivalry of printers brought into existence competing and unauthorized editions of various works, which diminished prospects of any payment, or even entailed loss, for the authors, editors, and printers of the original issue, and thus discouraged further undertaking. Any person with a press and some skills could use movable type to publish books and other items. Scribes and scriveners were no longer needed.
Protection for the authors and their representatives was sought through special privileges obtained for separate works as issued. According to Elizabeth Armstrong (whom the Curators of the Bodleian Library awarded the Gordon Duff Prize in 1965 for her essay on Printers' and authors' privileges in France and the Low Countries in the sixteenth century), "The republic of Venice granted its first privilege for a particular book in 1486. It was a special case, being the history of the city itself, the 'Rerum venetarum ab urbe condita opus' of Marcus Antonius Coccius Sabellicus" (page 03). [ Armstrong, Elizabeth. Before Copyright: the French book-privilege system 1498-1526. Cambridge University Press (Cambridge: 1990). ] "Venice began regularly granting privileges for particular books in 1492. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright
As soon as the means for cheap reproduction existed, the need for copyright was seen. Copyright laws date back to the 15th century. I'm not sure what "greatest works of time" you were thinking of, but I'd wager at least some of them actually came into existence *after* the printing press (and therefore were probably copyrighted at the time) and in any case the point remains: before easy reproduction there was no need for copyright law, afterwards there was.
Why must we "strike a balance" in copyright law?
I get the impression that you don't understand what copyrights are. If you have a copyright to an idea you do not own that idea. Ideas can not be owned. Period. Copyright laws and patents do not contradict this common sense notion. A copyright law does not grant you ownership of an idea. It grants you ownership to exclusive rights to control the distribution of that idea for profit.
This isn't just a matter of pragmatics (although that comes into it to) but also of ethics. If it takes me 1,000 hours to write my novel is it fair that anyone else can come and copy it and sell it? I invested the work, but if there's no copyright law then they can reap the benefit. Most people agree that this is not fair. So artists deserve *some* rights.
On the other hand if I spend 1,000 hours writing a book does it makes sense that I can then sue someone for quoting a passage from my book? Or that I can stop people from reading my book if I don't want them to? Imagine an author wandering around a book store "I don't like the looks of you, give me that book back. Get out." So clearly giving artists *all* rights is also not fair.
Since both extremes - no rights and all rights - are not ethical than if you want to find the ethical then by definition you are looking for something in between. You are, as it were, attempting to strike a balance.
Do physical property laws "strike a balance"? No, what's mine is mine, and what's your is yours, period.
This is false. Both taxes and eminent domain demonstrate that we do, in fact, strike a balance in this case as well. If you own a house on land the country needs for a road, then you don't get to say "what's mine is mine". The gov't knocks your house down (and pays you for it).
I disagree. The total quantity of works produced might decrease, but I think the variety would actually increase.
It's called the tragedy of the commons. If everyone can profit from an copying from an invention as much as from inventing the invention, then everyone has the incentive *not* to be the one that does the hard work of inventing. This is a more fundamental law than your liking for indie music. Why should there be a larger variety of music if people are being paid less to make it? It's not as though anyone is forcing people who are willing to make music for free not to make it now. So right now everyone that is willing to make money for free makes it, and also people who need or want to get paid make it. You take away the option to get paid, and only the people willing to make music for free will make it. How are fewer artists "more variety"?
The real problem with copyright law is that large corporations are allowed to possess them.
In short, why is a company that has not produced anything creative allowed to take advantage of a legal right that was supposedly enacted to protect creativity?
A couple things to note. First of all it's interesting that you qualify corporations with "large". I take it you understand why corporations are so important to modern business. What they do is limit the risk of any investor to only their investment. In other words if you put $1,000 into a corporation and the corporation gets sued and loses all it's assets and still owes money, the creditors can't come to you for more cash. Without this guarantee of safety, investing in corporations would be even more risky, and only the rich could do it (only they could run the risk). So it's actually a powerful democratization effect to have corporations exist as legal entities because it protects their investors.
However you're right that when corporations get really big it's hard to make sure that the people running the corporation have the interests of the stakeholders at heart. In fact, it's hard to even define who the stake holders are. In America the stakeholders are the shareholders. In Europe the stakeholders are also the company employees (even if they don't own stock). In Japan it's company employees and also other businesses (because in Japan companies own each other's stocks at a much higher rate). In none of these cases is the stakeholder the general public. So trying to figure out how the general public can none the less impose some penalties on corporation decision makers for bad decisions is an extremely, extremely tricky problem.
I agree with you in principle that it's a problem, but I think the real fundamental problem isn't about copyright, it's about how to design corporate governance structure so that the individual decision makers in corporations are responsible for the decisions the corporations make. This is harder to do than it sounds.
Plus have you ever read fan art? That stuff is awful. The people writing fan art are the ones who can't actually get their works published.
It's also worth pointing out that one difference between fan art and professional art is probably the amount of time that goes into professional art. Writing a book, for most people, takes a huge investment. If you're getting paid to write the book, that's great. But if you also have to work a full time job to get by and write the book in your spare time, well, it will either suck or take you a very long, long time to complete.
nformation is nothing but a different 'type' of object, and there's no reason there should't be ownership laws involved.
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This is silly. There's a very fundamental difference between tangible goods and ideas. If you take my car, I have no car anymore. If you take my song, I still have it. So you have not deprived me of the song.
You can not deprive people of ideas by "stealing" them, and thus stealing an idea is different than stealing a tangible object.
So the reason that people can't take my TV is quite simply that then I will no longer have a TV. But if I start whistling my own invented melody and someone hears me and starts whistling it too, I haven't lost the melody. The wife example is silly. If my wife wants to have sex with some dude - much as that would suck for me - then I can't stop her. If she doesn't want to, then it's rape. Are you now trying to say that rape and theft are the same thing?
What's the difference between a TV rolling off an assembly line, and a novel written by some guy in his basement? None. Both were produced by hard working people (and some robots in the case of TVs).
Books, as in the physical objects, are not copyrighted. It is the contents of those books - which are intangible - that are copyrighted. I suggest you do some reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_propert
But crying for the complete abolishment of copyright is sheer stupidity and insanity all rolled into one.
It saddens me that I agree with you on anything.
You want to *abolish* copyright law? See, now I think that that is somewhat less than sane. Picture this scenario: J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter is picked up by a small publisher and they sell a few hundred thousand copies. This gets the attention of a giant publishing house, which quickly rushes out millions of copies of the book and refuses to pay Rowling anything.
So now what? Does she write book 2 knowing that if she publishes it she'll only sell a few hundred thousand copies before stores are swamped with the (now legal) copies from the major publisher? Or does she just quit writing.
If there's no copyright, than it makes a lot more sense for media publishing companies to quit paying artists, and specialize in leeching off of small publishers. Which in turn means the small publishers will increasingly make no money for actually paying the media creators, which means the media creators eventually go back to flipping burgers.
In short: abolishing copyright entirely completely eradicates the financial incentive to pay artists to make work. I'm sure some will do it anyway, but most people have to make a living, so there will be virtually no professional, full-time artists of any kind ever again. That, to me, is insane.
Seriously, that is ownage like I've never seen between large corporations before.
It looks like Google did in fact know exactly what they were doing when they bought YouTube. Right now Viacom looks pretty much like they just stepped on head of a rake and got whacked in the face.
If there's one thing you can say for Google, they know how to stand up for sane copyright law.
Come on, look at the competition. Sony? Sony doesn't just spurn their customers, they hunt down their few remaining fanbois and rip out their eyes. Sony has done a lot to ensure that even if MS sold empty Elite cases they would *still* not look like the bad guys in the market.
I mean really, compared to Sony there's not much MS can do to look bad.
Because if they did, they might notice that blog post talks more about Dolphin than anything else, and has virtually nothing to say about whether or not KDE 4.0 is the Holy Grail of desktops.
Hope they get some click-throughs from the traffic though.
What does it take to get people to RTFA? All of this is discussed in the article, including every single one of those movies by name.
Besides, the real point (I think) of the article is not the simplistic "every sci-fi movie made is space opera" but the slightly more nuanced "the power of space operas to attract funding has taken away from the ability to make more serious sci fi". The serious stuff still gets made from time to time, but frequently on a more shoe-string budget (check Equilibrium). Meanwhile a lot of really good sci fi gets completely destroyed by the gravitational pull of Star Wars. Take a look at "I, Robot" as one example. (The article lists others).
The fact that some movies make it through as more serious sci fi (the article was written about "Children of Men" for crying out loud!) doesn't nullify the proposition that serious sci fi has suffered because of the space opera effect.
I would argue - independently of what I read in the article - that this problem is compounded by the fact that space opera has frequently failed. So people associate star wars with space opera, pour money into space operas, have those movies utterly fail (Wing Commander?) and then are shy of investing in sci fi at all.
Of course it's a larger problem with the fact that Hollywood is fundamentally an investment market. You invest millions in a movie, and the point is to maximize return on investment. I'm sure that's not what all actors, directors, and screen writers want to do but it *is* what the financeers want to do and they well, do the financing. Star Wars just added to this to make it really hard for serious sci fi to get funding.
im not a star wars fan, but boy, star wars contain heaploads of stuff for "human condition" than any of the sci-fi stuff this guy is talking about - its about humane fears, good and evil, greed, comradeship, high ideals and lowly cravings
Clearly you haven't seen episodes I - III.
On a more serious note, I don't think the point of the article was necessarily that Lucas made a superficial movie, but that he provided an shining example of sci fi that was financially successful (and that determines what gets made in Hollywood - financing movies is 100% business even if making them is sometimes art) and that example was imitated. Because his movie included space ships, fuzzy aliens, and an extremely simplistic plot that's what followed. This doesn't mean every movie with space ships, fuzzy aliens, and starkly delineated good and evil is bad - just that the superficial aspects of Lucas' film were glommed onto in the past and that making *only* movies with space ships, fuzzy aliens, and starkly delineated good and evil rules out most of the significant literary achievements of sci fi.
Star Wars may have been very much about the human condition, but it has little or nothing intellectual to say about it. There's nothing in Star Wars that seeks to postulate a premise in which questions of the human condition can be analyzed and *that* is the real halmark of Star Wars from Dune to Left Hand of Darkness to Ender's Game. What sci fi does, more than anything else, is use imagination to construct worlds where we can pose questions about sexuality, religion, faith, politics, family, etc. in ways that are more clear than a story set in more conventional reality.
Star Wars did none of that, and thus - while it may have been a good movie - it had nothing in common with the heritage of sci fi.
another one who likes to talk before they RTFA:
In the following years, as many filmmakers tried to outdo "Star Wars" in terms of spectacle, more cerebral sci-fi outings fell by the wayside. They're considered classics now, but "Blade Runner" (from a Dick novel) and "The Thing" (less a remake of the 1951 original than a return to the original John W. Campbell Jr. story, "Who Goes There?") were box-office failures when first released. Despite the star power of Harrison Ford in the former and the shocking monster effects of the latter, both were bleak portrayals of dehumanization that couldn't compete that same year with the childlike innocence of Steven Spielberg's "E.T." With only a few exceptions, like 1980's "Altered States," 1984's "The Terminator" and the subversive films of David Cronenberg (whose "Scanners," "Videodrome" and inspired remake of "The Fly" were among the best sci-fi movies of the decade), the '80s were mostly dominated by "Star Wars," "Star Trek" and "Superman" installments. One major adaptation of a classic science-fiction novel, David Lynch's "Dune," was a colossal disaster.
I'm not saying everything in the article is gospel truth, but it's frustrating to me that something I care a lot about (sci-fi) is hard to discuss because everyone is more interested in mouthing off their own opinions before they even read more than a one paragraph description of the article.
This is actually an interesting article people. Let's go read it and *then* talk about it.
-stormin
He didn't make hollywood that way.
Depends on what you mean by "that way". Yeah - Hollywood is risk averse and therefore prone to sequal, remakes, and imitations. This is not due to a lack of creative juices but to the way movies are funded. It comes down to investment. $100 million to make a movie has to come from somewhere, and the people writing the fat checks frequently 1 - know little about art 2 - care little about art compared to getting a return on their investment.
But the fact remains that the success of Star Wars is directly responsible for eclipsing the chances of other sci fi movies by providing the ultimate example of the kind of sci-fi that made a ton of money: space opera. The tendency to look for safe investments would have been just as strong without Star Wars, but there would have been no shining example of superficial sci-fi to emulate, and so less superficial sci-fi may have had a better chance.
The conservatism (financial, not political) of Hollywood is never going to go away. That's what happens when you're dealing with 9-figure investments. The point of the article is that Star Wars gave that conservatism something to glom on to. For that we *can* thank George Lucas and Star Wars.
How about you RTFA?
/me cranks up "indier than thou"
After the serials of the '40s and the atomic monster movies of the '50s, science-fiction cinema seemed to grow up right alongside the literature itself in the '60s, culminating in the ultimate marriage of the two: "2001: A Space Odyssey." Director Stanley Kubrick went right to the source for his visionary classic, enlisting Arthur C. Clarke to write the screenplay with him and presenting perhaps the most serious, adult treatment of science-fiction themes to that date. Other literary adaptations followed. Kubrick did it again in 1971 with "A Clockwork Orange," while "Logan's Run," the remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," "Soylent Green" and the cult favorite, "A Boy and His Dog," all brought real science-fiction novels or novellas to the screen with varying degrees of success. Even nonliterary offerings such as "Silent Running" and Lucas' own "THX 1138" made sobering statements. But "Star Wars" effectively ended all that, substituting space battles, nonstop special effects and simple good-versus-evil archetypes for the more complex shadings and themes that marked science fiction to that point.
Seriously - this would be an interesting article to discuss if people actually read the article instead of treating this as another opportunity to publicly flaunt their indie cred. "Wath me list of sci-fi movies that show I'm so hardcore sci fi."
There goes any hope for an interesting discussion...