Why? So Microsoft can profit at the expense of the education of our children? You absolute ****ing *i*si*ng i*i*tic bunch of *uc*ing a**eh*les! *an** *a*s*** of the *i*** *rd***! You ****p** **s** **e*s*s!!!
Call it a hunch, but I think your keyboard might be broken.
If I am a school, and someone donates a computer to me, I can do whatever the hell I want with it, no matter what contracts the prior owner may have entered into. I am free to set fire to the license and format the hard drive, and then put Linux on there if I feel like it. Since I have never agreed to any contract with Microsoft, there is no "legal requirement" for me to do ANYTHING with that OS/license. Microsoft might be able to go after the donor for violating the contract that the donor and MS have, but they could not go after me -- I had no contract with either Microsoft or the donor.
I can already hear the cries of "entrapment" about to spring up all over this article, so I'll point out this definition of entrapment, which would seem to indicate that this method (placing a "bait" car in likely spots) is NOT entrapment. I imagine that a court would actually need to rule on this (IANAL), but it's fairly clear-cut to me. Simply placing a car in an area where it is likely to get stolen would not, to any reasonable person, qualify as "government agents [persuading or talking] the person into committing the crime".
Thanks for the non-sequitur. You're talking about restricted media being advertised to minors. I'm talking about the restrictions themselves being actually enforced.
Like I said, the government does not enforce the MPAA's ratings. It is entirely voluntary on behalf of the theater chains. YES, the MPAA's rating system exists as a voluntary system so that the government doesn't start rating movies, but that has nothing to do with who actually enforces the system.
The government already enforces the age restrictions on rated "R" movies
It does no such thing. The MPAA ratings are voluntarily enforced by the theater chains (and not very stringently, either -- it's been better lately but it's still quite easy to get around the restrictions). The MPAA is a private organization to which most large movie studios belong voluntarily, and they agree to abide by its rules.
Okay, so the last ten years has seen a revolution in technology. Specifically, the ability to create, copy, and widely disseminate digital data -- be it music, movies, text, images, whatever.
One side effect of this is that it is now trivially easy for a sizable segment of the world's population (and an even larger proportion of the U.S.'s population) to violate copyright laws by (for example) purchasing music legally, making copies of that music, and disseminating it (illegally) for free to thousands of other people all over the world.
I argue that the primary purpose of law is to impose order upon a society, in a form of natural selection. Societies that lean toward laws and order are more likely to survive than societies that tend toward anarchy and chaos. Laws themselves tend to reflect the moral character of the times they are created in. Laws, like any moral system (or system of controlling behavior) are never absolute or inherent to the fabric of the universe (unless you believe that some god's laws are the "inherent morality" of the universe, but good luck getting me to believe that).
When laws conflict with reality, social stress results. There are those in society who hold the law as (almost?) sacred, and those who (in my opinion, more rightly) see the law as merely the current set of rules we must live under. (Tangent: I was dismayed to see a DEA official state that the DEA "does not want to encourage anything which might lead to a lessening of drug laws" (paraphrased) -- nevermind that the DEA, as a part of the Executive branch of our government, should not have any interest in WHAT the law is, merely in enforcing the CURRENT law, whatever it may be.)
This particular issue of stress has a particular set of industries on one side, and the bulk of the nation's citizens on the other. (I refuse to refer to people as "consumers"; it is demeaning.) Content creation industries -- music companies, film companies, publishing companies, and others who control large numbers of copyrights -- have historically based their entire business model on the idea of scarcity. They could charge money for good like music and books, because those goods could not be easily replicated by individuals. In this respect, books, music, and movies were much like any other product -- cars, power tools, furniture, or even food.
But with the dawn of the Internet and the abilities mentioned above, information like movies, music, and books can be endlessly replicated at almost zero cost by virtually any individual. Hence, the obvious conflict -- many people do not see such copying as "wrong". Why not?
The traditional view of "stealing" or "theft" involves taking an item from someone, such that the person no longer has that item. They have suffered a real, measurable loss in this instance. If I steal your car, your power tools, your furniture, or your food, you no longer have those things. Inversely, if you freely give me those things, you no longer have them to use. But information is different. Nowadays, I can freely give you a COPY of a piece of music, a book, or a movie, and still retain the original. Each of our two copies are indistinguishable -- they are identical and interchangable.
This was vaguely recognized by the Founding Fathers when they wrote the Constitution -- they understood that works (mainly books, at that time) could be bootlegged and sold illegally. They believed that a goverment-granted, and government-enforced temporary monopoly on the right to make money from the production of easily reproducible works, would help the nation, its economy, and its citizens. By giving authors that temporary monopoly, the law would encourage authors to produce more without fear that their work would be profited upon by those who had contributed nothing to it.
This was a fair idea, at the time, and indeed it is still a fair idea today. Unfortunately, the content creation industry has made great efforts toward extending the length of copyright, and if current trends continue, we can expect that no copyright will ever again expire. This obviously goes against the original intent of the copyright provisions, which was to allow authors a chance at fair compensation for their works, in exchange for that work entering the public domain after a certain period. Technically, that is still true, but it is quite obvious that the content creation industry has no intention of letting it continue to be true.
Back to the issue of being able to cheaply replicate any data. The problem here is that since many people do not see copying as theft, they are inclined to believe that the law is wrong and can be ignored. There is obviously a wide variety of views on the subject; some citizens believe in sticking to the letter of the law, while others will do casual copying in certain circumstances, and yet others will massively and freely distribute copyrighted information to anyone who wants it. Even further along are commercial pirates, those who actually try to make money selling copies of copyrighted works.
The content creation industry is generally responding to this widespread "threat" by trying to purchase legislation that specifically preserves their business model. Either they do not want to embrace new technologies and figure out how to profit from them, or they are just lazy, or whatever... but the upshot is that they believe that they have a right to profit, and that it is moral to buy legislation in their favor. Some citizens and government officials believe this as well, and support such legislation, either because they REALLY believe it's wrong, or because they've been bought off by media companies.
Depending on your political views, you may or may not support the idea of direct interference in an industry by the government, for purposes of "saving" that industry. I personally believe the following: A free-market economy is generally a good thing, but if left completely unregulated, it will lead to severe abuse by the most powerful entities in the economy. Certain governmental measures are warranted, in order to prevent such abuse. Rescuing a faltering industry can be warranted, but it depends on the particular instance. If privately owned utility companies (power and water) are faltering and cannot easily be saved by the market, it is acceptable for the government to intervene -- if those companies disappear, millions of citizens may be left without water or power for extended periods of time, which is not acceptable.
However, the content creation industry is not so critical. For one thing, they do not have localized monopolies -- if I live in Westwood (a suburb of Los Angeles), I don't have any option for who provides my water and power. I get it from the City of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (yes, we make our own power, so no rolling blackouts for us!). If they go under and cannot provide power, then there is no way (aside from moving, which isn't feasible for hundreds of thousands of families to do at once) for me to get water and power until someone replaces the DWP. However, I can get music from numerous companies -- any of the big media conglomerates will have their music available for sale in numerous stores in the area, many of which are owned by different companies. If one (or five, or half) of the music companies goes out of business, I can still get music. Even if all music stores and companies went out of business simultaneously, I would still have all the music I had ALREADY purchased, and could listen to that while new music companies and stores were formed. (Unlike electricity, which you can't really store up in significant quantities.)
Essentially, industries which meet a certain limit of criticality are GENERALLY acceptable targets for government intervention when necessary, but of course that depends on exactly what the situation is. Trying to apply the same rules to everything, all the time, is stupid.
If the content industries can't hack it with their current business models, it will not significantly hurt anything for them to have to adapt -- even if some of them end up going out of business. It makes no sense to attempt to cripple the pace of technology and social development so that a few (relatively small) companies can survive. (By relatively small, I mean, for example, taht General Motors grosses more money in a year than all the music and film companies... COMBINED.)
Well, that's enough rambling for now. Hopefully this will inspire some creative thought in readers.:)
That makes me curious... if WE aren't sending out directed transmissions to other stars on the 21cm line, why do we think that alien civilizations would be?
Every month or two there's a "PC game reviews are all fixed and corrupt" story on Slashdot, and occasionally I see such stories other places as well. This one made me start thinking about other types of reviews, and whether they're subject to similar "corruption". The ones that come to mind quickest are movie reviews, of course.
One of my favorite sites is Rotten Tomatoes. Basically, they collect every movie review they can find about every movie that comes out, then rate each review on whether it is overall positive ("fresh") or overall negative ("rotten"). RT then gives the movie a rating representing the ratio of positive to negative reviews. So a movie that has 90% of the reviews marked as "fresh" gets a score of 90%. Movies that have a rating of 60% or higher are themselves declared "fresh", but 59% or below and they're "rotten". RT also takes a subset of the reviews for each movie, called the "Cream of the Crop," which represent reviews by "major" sources, like the LA Times, NY Times, Entertainment Weekly, CNN, USA Today, Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert), and so on, and calculates a rating for just those reviews. (The "other" reviews, which represent the bulk, tend to be from smaller, less well-known sources, and as such include people who are not necessarily career movie reviewers.) It's interesting to see the contrasts between the Overall rating and the Cream of the Crop rating.
I haven't done anything even remotely resembling a statistical analysis, but from my experience, the Overall ratings tend to be fairly well-distributed. I always see the claim that video game magazines tend to give better reviews because they fear that game companies won't advertise (or send them free games) if they don't give them good reviews (or at least if their reviews don't average up to "pretty good"), but since movie reviews tend to be in newspapers, AND since movie ads have the showtime listings attached to them, there's much less of a probability that "review well or we won't advertise" will happen.
As an example, there are 10 movies opening this week that have enough reviews for RT to give them an overall score (I believe that they don't rate a movie until they find 6 reviews for it). They are:
- Changing Lanes (75% Overall, 67% CotC) - Frailty (82%, 100%) - The Sweetest Thing (29%, 20%) - New Best Friend (7%, 0% - ouch) - Time Out (88%, 88%) - The Cat's Meow (79%, 86%) - Maryam (75%, 71%) - The Piano Teacher (74%, 86%) - Human Nature (29%, 29%) - The Other Side of Heaven (23%, 0%)
Some movies won't have enough reviews to be statistically significant, but most movies will have 30-60 reviews attached to them by the time people stop reviewing the movie. (The numbers above may change as more reviews are found and added to their database.)
I find it a fairly useful site, actually, and RT's "meta-reviewers" do a good job -- I rarely find myself disagreeing with their opinion of the tone of a review (i.e. whether a review is overall negative or positive about a movie).
Anyway, I'm babbling, but back to the original topic... I wonder if there's any site like Rotten Tomatoes that does the same for video game reviews? I know of PC Game Review, except that it consists entirely of contributed, player-written reviews, and not "professional" reviews collected for analysis.
A good way to remind yourself of how silly it is to compare copyright violations with robbery and murder is to say, (pirate voice) "Arrrr!" every time someone says the word "piracy" to mean "copyright violation".
Heh. The ESB-writer thing was a response to the Slashdot article header, which apparently YOU didn't read. I DID read the Salon article before posting, AND I read most of the threads before posting.
Also, in the Salon article, the writer quotes Dale Pollock's biography of Lucas, which claims that Lucas threw out Brackett's work -- and then the writer says that he doesn't believe this happened. The story submitter (mikelove) misunderstood the article.
The best part is, you posted as an AC, so everyone who reads this is going to be laughing at some cowardly TROLL (you) for not having his OWN facts straight. H4w!
I wouldn't call it a "martial arts movie". Yes, the master-student thing is a definite theme, but it vies with many other themes -- traditional heroism, becoming an adult, becoming a leader, etc. A "martial arts movie" is one where the master-student relationship is the PRIMARY theme or focus, which is definitely not the case in ANH. ESB comes closer, but again, it's only one aspect of the movie (Luke and Yoda).
I don't think any of the Star Wars movies can be so easily classified... even "Space Opera" is a simplification, referring to the overall genre.
Others have already noted the fact that SW wasn't "Episode IV" until the re-release (and the imminent release of ESB), so I won't belabor the point, although the "nine-movie-plan" does have a different origin.
After ANH came out, Lucas decided to continue the story (via sequels). At first, he had a plan for nine movies, but realized shortly thereafter that six movies would do it. The nine movies thing got perpetuated, however, and there are STILL people who think that after he finishes the Anakin trilogy, there will be three more movies.
What is it about Salon and this gigantic anti-Star Wars bent? David Brin's article from a couple years ago was seething with resentment -- he was clearly REALLY annoyed that Star Wars, which is space opera (not hard SF) was so insanely popular. "True SF is the only way to salvation, not this populist trash! Curse Lucas for his success!" He went off on a rant about how Lucas's morality was going to destroy Western civilization or something.
Now we've got another guy ranting about Star Wars's faults.
Hey, dickhead -- it's a MOVIE. Sit back and enjoy it -- it's not worth having an embolism over.
Incidentally, Lucas and Kasdan DIDN'T write ESB -- but this is not news. Kasdan and Leigh Brackett did. Lucas had the story credit, but Kasdan and Brackett were the WRITERS. Who's claiming that Lucas co-wrote ESB?
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
DON'T LIVE NEXT TO RIVERS THAT FLOOD EVERY YEAR, OR COASTLINES THAT GET HIT BY HURRICANES ALL THE TIME!
Okay, where's my reward for saving thousands of lives? (My point is left as an exercise to the reader.)
Incidentally, the/. lameness filter is retarded. Just let the mod system do its own thing -- if I don't want to see someone yelling, I'll mod them down. First time I've run into the filter, actually, and yes, it's stupid.
Well... I was under the impression that production crew are typically people who work at the recording studio, and are salaried. They get paid a fixed amount pretty much no matter how much money the band is or is not getting. I could be wrong; I'm not privy to the inner workings of the recording industry, but this is correct as far as I know.
Absent superior methods of fair distribution, I would either mail the money to one of the band members and hope s/he distributed it fairly, or address the check to the band and mail it to the band, rather than to one of the group members.
As far as anonymity and proof of purchase... yeah, those would be nice as well, although I don't know if we will need to worry about such things until the RIAA actually CAN storm your house and search for "illegal" recordings. With any luck, if that starts happening, the public backlash will vaporize the RIAA into its constituent molecules.
One way to circumvent the RIAA is to go to Kazaa or Morpheus or wherever and download music from your favorite artist... and then mail the artist an anonymous money order for $1.00 for each song you download. Download an entire 12-track album, send 'em $12. You'll be saving money over buying albums in stores, and the artist will see a lot more green.
Heck, $0.50 per song would still be ten times what the artists get now.
Slashdot Mirror
If I am a school, and someone donates a computer to me, I can do whatever the hell I want with it, no matter what contracts the prior owner may have entered into. I am free to set fire to the license and format the hard drive, and then put Linux on there if I feel like it. Since I have never agreed to any contract with Microsoft, there is no "legal requirement" for me to do ANYTHING with that OS/license. Microsoft might be able to go after the donor for violating the contract that the donor and MS have, but they could not go after me -- I had no contract with either Microsoft or the donor.
I can already hear the cries of "entrapment" about to spring up all over this article, so I'll point out this definition of entrapment, which would seem to indicate that this method (placing a "bait" car in likely spots) is NOT entrapment. I imagine that a court would actually need to rule on this (IANAL), but it's fairly clear-cut to me. Simply placing a car in an area where it is likely to get stolen would not, to any reasonable person, qualify as "government agents [persuading or talking] the person into committing the crime".
Thanks for the non-sequitur. You're talking about restricted media being advertised to minors. I'm talking about the restrictions themselves being actually enforced.
Like I said, the government does not enforce the MPAA's ratings. It is entirely voluntary on behalf of the theater chains. YES, the MPAA's rating system exists as a voluntary system so that the government doesn't start rating movies, but that has nothing to do with who actually enforces the system.
Okay, so the last ten years has seen a revolution in technology. Specifically, the ability to create, copy, and widely disseminate digital data -- be it music, movies, text, images, whatever.
:)
One side effect of this is that it is now trivially easy for a sizable segment of the world's population (and an even larger proportion of the U.S.'s population) to violate copyright laws by (for example) purchasing music legally, making copies of that music, and disseminating it (illegally) for free to thousands of other people all over the world.
I argue that the primary purpose of law is to impose order upon a society, in a form of natural selection. Societies that lean toward laws and order are more likely to survive than societies that tend toward anarchy and chaos. Laws themselves tend to reflect the moral character of the times they are created in. Laws, like any moral system (or system of controlling behavior) are never absolute or inherent to the fabric of the universe (unless you believe that some god's laws are the "inherent morality" of the universe, but good luck getting me to believe that).
When laws conflict with reality, social stress results. There are those in society who hold the law as (almost?) sacred, and those who (in my opinion, more rightly) see the law as merely the current set of rules we must live under. (Tangent: I was dismayed to see a DEA official state that the DEA "does not want to encourage anything which might lead to a lessening of drug laws" (paraphrased) -- nevermind that the DEA, as a part of the Executive branch of our government, should not have any interest in WHAT the law is, merely in enforcing the CURRENT law, whatever it may be.)
This particular issue of stress has a particular set of industries on one side, and the bulk of the nation's citizens on the other. (I refuse to refer to people as "consumers"; it is demeaning.) Content creation industries -- music companies, film companies, publishing companies, and others who control large numbers of copyrights -- have historically based their entire business model on the idea of scarcity. They could charge money for good like music and books, because those goods could not be easily replicated by individuals. In this respect, books, music, and movies were much like any other product -- cars, power tools, furniture, or even food.
But with the dawn of the Internet and the abilities mentioned above, information like movies, music, and books can be endlessly replicated at almost zero cost by virtually any individual. Hence, the obvious conflict -- many people do not see such copying as "wrong". Why not?
The traditional view of "stealing" or "theft" involves taking an item from someone, such that the person no longer has that item. They have suffered a real, measurable loss in this instance. If I steal your car, your power tools, your furniture, or your food, you no longer have those things. Inversely, if you freely give me those things, you no longer have them to use. But information is different. Nowadays, I can freely give you a COPY of a piece of music, a book, or a movie, and still retain the original. Each of our two copies are indistinguishable -- they are identical and interchangable.
This was vaguely recognized by the Founding Fathers when they wrote the Constitution -- they understood that works (mainly books, at that time) could be bootlegged and sold illegally. They believed that a goverment-granted, and government-enforced temporary monopoly on the right to make money from the production of easily reproducible works, would help the nation, its economy, and its citizens. By giving authors that temporary monopoly, the law would encourage authors to produce more without fear that their work would be profited upon by those who had contributed nothing to it.
This was a fair idea, at the time, and indeed it is still a fair idea today. Unfortunately, the content creation industry has made great efforts toward extending the length of copyright, and if current trends continue, we can expect that no copyright will ever again expire. This obviously goes against the original intent of the copyright provisions, which was to allow authors a chance at fair compensation for their works, in exchange for that work entering the public domain after a certain period. Technically, that is still true, but it is quite obvious that the content creation industry has no intention of letting it continue to be true.
Back to the issue of being able to cheaply replicate any data. The problem here is that since many people do not see copying as theft, they are inclined to believe that the law is wrong and can be ignored. There is obviously a wide variety of views on the subject; some citizens believe in sticking to the letter of the law, while others will do casual copying in certain circumstances, and yet others will massively and freely distribute copyrighted information to anyone who wants it. Even further along are commercial pirates, those who actually try to make money selling copies of copyrighted works.
The content creation industry is generally responding to this widespread "threat" by trying to purchase legislation that specifically preserves their business model. Either they do not want to embrace new technologies and figure out how to profit from them, or they are just lazy, or whatever... but the upshot is that they believe that they have a right to profit, and that it is moral to buy legislation in their favor. Some citizens and government officials believe this as well, and support such legislation, either because they REALLY believe it's wrong, or because they've been bought off by media companies.
Depending on your political views, you may or may not support the idea of direct interference in an industry by the government, for purposes of "saving" that industry. I personally believe the following: A free-market economy is generally a good thing, but if left completely unregulated, it will lead to severe abuse by the most powerful entities in the economy. Certain governmental measures are warranted, in order to prevent such abuse. Rescuing a faltering industry can be warranted, but it depends on the particular instance. If privately owned utility companies (power and water) are faltering and cannot easily be saved by the market, it is acceptable for the government to intervene -- if those companies disappear, millions of citizens may be left without water or power for extended periods of time, which is not acceptable.
However, the content creation industry is not so critical. For one thing, they do not have localized monopolies -- if I live in Westwood (a suburb of Los Angeles), I don't have any option for who provides my water and power. I get it from the City of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (yes, we make our own power, so no rolling blackouts for us!). If they go under and cannot provide power, then there is no way (aside from moving, which isn't feasible for hundreds of thousands of families to do at once) for me to get water and power until someone replaces the DWP. However, I can get music from numerous companies -- any of the big media conglomerates will have their music available for sale in numerous stores in the area, many of which are owned by different companies. If one (or five, or half) of the music companies goes out of business, I can still get music. Even if all music stores and companies went out of business simultaneously, I would still have all the music I had ALREADY purchased, and could listen to that while new music companies and stores were formed. (Unlike electricity, which you can't really store up in significant quantities.)
Essentially, industries which meet a certain limit of criticality are GENERALLY acceptable targets for government intervention when necessary, but of course that depends on exactly what the situation is. Trying to apply the same rules to everything, all the time, is stupid.
If the content industries can't hack it with their current business models, it will not significantly hurt anything for them to have to adapt -- even if some of them end up going out of business. It makes no sense to attempt to cripple the pace of technology and social development so that a few (relatively small) companies can survive. (By relatively small, I mean, for example, taht General Motors grosses more money in a year than all the music and film companies... COMBINED.)
Well, that's enough rambling for now. Hopefully this will inspire some creative thought in readers.
Pfttt, who needs payola? You were quoted in the ad. :)
That makes me curious... if WE aren't sending out directed transmissions to other stars on the 21cm line, why do we think that alien civilizations would be?
Every month or two there's a "PC game reviews are all fixed and corrupt" story on Slashdot, and occasionally I see such stories other places as well. This one made me start thinking about other types of reviews, and whether they're subject to similar "corruption". The ones that come to mind quickest are movie reviews, of course.
One of my favorite sites is Rotten Tomatoes. Basically, they collect every movie review they can find about every movie that comes out, then rate each review on whether it is overall positive ("fresh") or overall negative ("rotten"). RT then gives the movie a rating representing the ratio of positive to negative reviews. So a movie that has 90% of the reviews marked as "fresh" gets a score of 90%. Movies that have a rating of 60% or higher are themselves declared "fresh", but 59% or below and they're "rotten". RT also takes a subset of the reviews for each movie, called the "Cream of the Crop," which represent reviews by "major" sources, like the LA Times, NY Times, Entertainment Weekly, CNN, USA Today, Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert), and so on, and calculates a rating for just those reviews. (The "other" reviews, which represent the bulk, tend to be from smaller, less well-known sources, and as such include people who are not necessarily career movie reviewers.) It's interesting to see the contrasts between the Overall rating and the Cream of the Crop rating.
I haven't done anything even remotely resembling a statistical analysis, but from my experience, the Overall ratings tend to be fairly well-distributed. I always see the claim that video game magazines tend to give better reviews because they fear that game companies won't advertise (or send them free games) if they don't give them good reviews (or at least if their reviews don't average up to "pretty good"), but since movie reviews tend to be in newspapers, AND since movie ads have the showtime listings attached to them, there's much less of a probability that "review well or we won't advertise" will happen.
As an example, there are 10 movies opening this week that have enough reviews for RT to give them an overall score (I believe that they don't rate a movie until they find 6 reviews for it). They are:
- Changing Lanes (75% Overall, 67% CotC)
- Frailty (82%, 100%)
- The Sweetest Thing (29%, 20%)
- New Best Friend (7%, 0% - ouch)
- Time Out (88%, 88%)
- The Cat's Meow (79%, 86%)
- Maryam (75%, 71%)
- The Piano Teacher (74%, 86%)
- Human Nature (29%, 29%)
- The Other Side of Heaven (23%, 0%)
Some movies won't have enough reviews to be statistically significant, but most movies will have 30-60 reviews attached to them by the time people stop reviewing the movie. (The numbers above may change as more reviews are found and added to their database.)
I find it a fairly useful site, actually, and RT's "meta-reviewers" do a good job -- I rarely find myself disagreeing with their opinion of the tone of a review (i.e. whether a review is overall negative or positive about a movie).
Anyway, I'm babbling, but back to the original topic... I wonder if there's any site like Rotten Tomatoes that does the same for video game reviews? I know of PC Game Review, except that it consists entirely of contributed, player-written reviews, and not "professional" reviews collected for analysis.
Oddly, OLURMATOWIRM is easier to remember and pronounce than CBDTPA!
A good way to remind yourself of how silly it is to compare copyright violations with robbery and murder is to say, (pirate voice) "Arrrr!" every time someone says the word "piracy" to mean "copyright violation".
I'd much rather prefer to see Man-Eating Cow attacking the CBDTPA.
Actually, I'd rather see Man-Eating Cow eating Fritz Hollings.
A salmon, silly! :)
Heh. The ESB-writer thing was a response to the Slashdot article header, which apparently YOU didn't read. I DID read the Salon article before posting, AND I read most of the threads before posting.
Also, in the Salon article, the writer quotes Dale Pollock's biography of Lucas, which claims that Lucas threw out Brackett's work -- and then the writer says that he doesn't believe this happened. The story submitter (mikelove) misunderstood the article.
The best part is, you posted as an AC, so everyone who reads this is going to be laughing at some cowardly TROLL (you) for not having his OWN facts straight. H4w!
I wouldn't call it a "martial arts movie". Yes, the master-student thing is a definite theme, but it vies with many other themes -- traditional heroism, becoming an adult, becoming a leader, etc. A "martial arts movie" is one where the master-student relationship is the PRIMARY theme or focus, which is definitely not the case in ANH. ESB comes closer, but again, it's only one aspect of the movie (Luke and Yoda).
I don't think any of the Star Wars movies can be so easily classified... even "Space Opera" is a simplification, referring to the overall genre.
Others have already noted the fact that SW wasn't "Episode IV" until the re-release (and the imminent release of ESB), so I won't belabor the point, although the "nine-movie-plan" does have a different origin.
After ANH came out, Lucas decided to continue the story (via sequels). At first, he had a plan for nine movies, but realized shortly thereafter that six movies would do it. The nine movies thing got perpetuated, however, and there are STILL people who think that after he finishes the Anakin trilogy, there will be three more movies.
Ain't gonna happen.
What is it about Salon and this gigantic anti-Star Wars bent? David Brin's article from a couple years ago was seething with resentment -- he was clearly REALLY annoyed that Star Wars, which is space opera (not hard SF) was so insanely popular. "True SF is the only way to salvation, not this populist trash! Curse Lucas for his success!" He went off on a rant about how Lucas's morality was going to destroy Western civilization or something.
Now we've got another guy ranting about Star Wars's faults.
Hey, dickhead -- it's a MOVIE. Sit back and enjoy it -- it's not worth having an embolism over.
Incidentally, Lucas and Kasdan DIDN'T write ESB -- but this is not news. Kasdan and Leigh Brackett did. Lucas had the story credit, but Kasdan and Brackett were the WRITERS. Who's claiming that Lucas co-wrote ESB?
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Ha ha!
</NELSON>
Hell, I can save thousands of lives right now:
/. lameness filter is retarded. Just let the mod system do its own thing -- if I don't want to see someone yelling, I'll mod them down. First time I've run into the filter, actually, and yes, it's stupid.
DON'T LIVE NEXT TO RIVERS THAT FLOOD EVERY YEAR, OR COASTLINES THAT GET HIT BY HURRICANES ALL THE TIME!
Okay, where's my reward for saving thousands of lives? (My point is left as an exercise to the reader.)
Incidentally, the
Well... I was under the impression that production crew are typically people who work at the recording studio, and are salaried. They get paid a fixed amount pretty much no matter how much money the band is or is not getting. I could be wrong; I'm not privy to the inner workings of the recording industry, but this is correct as far as I know.
Absent superior methods of fair distribution, I would either mail the money to one of the band members and hope s/he distributed it fairly, or address the check to the band and mail it to the band, rather than to one of the group members.
As far as anonymity and proof of purchase... yeah, those would be nice as well, although I don't know if we will need to worry about such things until the RIAA actually CAN storm your house and search for "illegal" recordings. With any luck, if that starts happening, the public backlash will vaporize the RIAA into its constituent molecules.
That's like Isaac Hayes getting free publicity at a Klan rally. Why would he want it? :)
How did you know it was Whitney Houston? :)
One way to circumvent the RIAA is to go to Kazaa or Morpheus or wherever and download music from your favorite artist... and then mail the artist an anonymous money order for $1.00 for each song you download. Download an entire 12-track album, send 'em $12. You'll be saving money over buying albums in stores, and the artist will see a lot more green.
Heck, $0.50 per song would still be ten times what the artists get now.