More debate on the Cleanflicks lawsuits and counter-suits with the Directors Guild of America. For those who haven't heard of the issue, it concerns the right of companies to sell edited versions of Hollywood pictures on moral grounds.
Brad Siberling (Dir. City of Angels) was quoted as saying.
"All that any filmmaker can hope for is that the viewer at least has an opportunity to take in the intended storytelling experience," he says. "If people restructure your film for the hell of it, that tends to get in the way. I mean, if you own a copy of a film it should be yours to do with what you want. But for a company to externally distribute a whole set of editorial choices, well, that runs counter to the whole creative process."
FYI the Hollywood directors lost their case, as reported earlier by Phillip Noyce (one of the 16).
A more recent public thread on the issue and why fighting this kind of thing may be counterproductive.
http://www.tacitus.org/story/2005/4/25/15102/5464
Caught out yesterday. I was loudly proclaiming that no video game allows you to simply treat its material as a non-interactive linear experience when it was pointed out that The Sims 2 does just that. Anyone in the team a fan?
MOD Films has been awarded a £10K business development grant from West Focus to refine the proposition into a 30 second demo and update our market research. Thanks to John Howkins for recommending the project and making the case for funding.
Laetitia is leaving to take up a Producer job at The Mill. On behalf of everyone I'd like to thank her for her work on the project and wish her all the best in what will no doubt be an exciting gig.
From UI brief
Troopers use this to locate activists hiding in bush; floating arrow indicates the direction in which movement was detected. Additional information appears alongside arrow - approx distance, camera network ID
Two new designs - comments in forum
http://modfilms.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=563#563
Federal Agent (original)
CD (customised dude)
Today started so good. I finally felt like I was coming to grips with the codebase. Funny how you spend years writing a spec for a system and then by the time it's half-written, you finally get a chance to look at it. Lucky python was chosen because I counted about three comments.
I spent the afternoon and most of the evening trying to reconnect my laptop, sim to the LAN. After an incredibly painful dive into the ugliness of Samba config I managed to get the thing up again. Learning lots about pdbedit database backends in the process. None of which helps with the organic development of cinema. Or does it?
Watched the end of Christine just now. Watched a machine trash itself and its owner was a lot more visual than a hundred or so Windows boot screens. But just as horrific. We're missing something with all this IT shit. I sat back down at my machines for one last crack at the problem. Which means that this crash course in python is paying off. I'm getting my head around the tech again. Midnight on a steamy Friday night and I'm back at the box. But I got in. Which reminded me why I'm doing this project in the first place. Trying to tell a story about dodgy boxes and dodgy people using them hasn't been told from the programmer's perspective before. Anyone can break a computer. Breaking the Net is more interesting and on the cards. The systems are constantly getting in the way of the story, the whole story, and I guess it's time to put that in perspective. This project was always going to be about going uphill and it's time for a pitstop. Time to start documenting the code and let CD out of the box.
It's probably not news to the nerds out there but why does this come as such a surprise? I guess because along with half the Net I succumb to the marketing messages being put on DRM. But then again I had no idea that the whole history of Microsoft was so blatantly based on ripped-off software code. I wonder when gag orders expire?
1982: Digital Research sued Microsoft and IBM over copyright infringement. Gary Kildall sat down at a fresh IBM PC, typed a few keystrokes and poped up a Digital Research copyright notice. This impressed the Judge. DR won the case, monetary damages, and the right to clone MS-DOS. Microsoft won a gag order to make sure the public never heard about this case.
More:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0100258/categories/faceTheMusic/
You have to find it ironic, that the entire Bill Gates empire is based on one thing: Intellectual Property theft.
You may have heard the story of how Gary Kidall's ex-wife, and business partner threw out the IBM suits over their request that she sign a (then rare, now common) non-disclosure agreement. IBM went back to Bill Gates and asked him if he had an OS they could use, he said yes even though he didn't (you have to love the audacity of Gates to lie to IBM). So Bill went off and bought QDOS from Seattle Computer Products. Where did SCP get the software from? They claimed that one of their employees, Tim Paterson, wrote it. In six weeks...
That's pretty amazing considering that it took Kidall three years to write CP/M! For proof of the fact that Peterson stole the code look no further then the fact that the first 36 DOS system calls mirror the original CP/M calls EXACTLY. Nearly 20 years after the fact, Caldera (the last owner of CP/M) won an out of court settlement from Microsoft over that theft, too little, too late.
"Ask Bill (Gates) why the string in function 9 (in DOS) is terminated by a dollar sign. Ask him, because he can't answer. Only I know that".
-- Gary Kildall (1942-1994)
Kidall died in a seedy bar on July 8, 1994 of a massive heart attack. He died a broken man, still believing that his ex-wife and Gates had denied him his destiny..