Wait, so when a judge uses copyright law to protect an artist from a company trying to rip off his work without any payment or acknowledgement, that's "why copyright is wrong"...? So I guess you think that if Sony or Universal decided to rip off some indie band's songs, put together an autotuned boy band to sing them, and then sell that version without any compensation or mention of the original authors, it would be "wrong" to sue them?

I have a feeling you didn't bother to read the actual verdict or understand what this case is about (but somehow still thought your opinion would be relevant). At least I hope you didn't, otherwise what you're saying is that there's no point in trying to make a living as an artist, because any company should be allowed to copy your work and keep all the profits.

No, clearly you didn't get it. Go read the actual verdict and stop making a public show of just how much you didn't get it.

Did you even bother to read the verdict? Nevermind, it was a rhetorical question (if you had, you would know that there no connection between this case and stock photography, because the basis of the verdict isn't even the photo itself, it's mainly the artistic work done on the photo, and the events that led to the creation of the "knock-off" image).

1. Company X was using artist A's image commercially (on its products' packaging) without giving credit or paying royalties.
2. (2011 verdict) Court ordered company X to pay the artist.
3. Company X director decided to create a similar image, to avoid paying the author.
4. Company X director wasn't even able to take a similar enough photo so he photoshopped elements from an image bank plus some of his photographs (and removed people, erased the sky, etc.) to create something similar to the work of artist A, and used it in his company's packaging instead of the original.
5. (this verdict) Court rules that company X is still trying to profit from artist A's work and must compensate him.

Which part of this do you have a problem with, exactly? How do you expect "society" to punish company X through "good taste" ? How are the people buying company X's products even supposed to know that their packaging uses a knock-off version of someone else's art? Do you think Microsoft or Zynga should be allowed to copy any independent game they come across without any compensation or acknowledgement of the original authors' work?

What planet do you live on? Is this some sort of Hyacinth Bucket form of free capitalism? "Oh, dumping all those chemicals into that river was in such poor taste. No, Richard, don't sue the factory, let's just glare at them disapprovingly, I'm sure the people buying their products on the other side of the world will vote with their wallets and everything will magically fix itself."

Laws exist for a reason, and, if anything, this case shows that (occasionally) copyright law can still be used to protect the actual artists. I'd expect Slashdot's readers to praise the judge, but of course, for that they would have to actually read the verdict, which I guess is asking too much. It's so much easier to post self-important rants about how clueless judges are and how any verdict spells doom for mankind due to [insert totally unrelated comparison].

If they can develop cheaper sources, they will develop them anyway. The incentive is the fact that they are cheaper (and therefore more profitable to the company); you as a consumer will not have to pay more.

There is no such thing as "clean watts". By the time it arrives at your sockets, electricity tastes the same, no matter how it was produced. Without legal consequences, they'll tell you that "your" electricity is coming from their single solar plant, while spending your money on marketing or on new coal plants (or whatever kind of plant gives them the higher profit margin).

The only things that will make companies invest in less profitable power sources are:

a) Fear of running out of their primary resource. This will make them diversify a bit, but does not make clean sources more appealing than dirty ones.

b) Legislation that actually makes them pay the full cost of their current operation (including the damage they cause to the environment and people's health). This effectively makes dirty sources less profitable than clean ones, in the long run.

Extra "green fees" charged to consumers are a scam (not just in electricity, several other industries have been profiting from similar marketing tricks).

I work in post-production, and while some of the stereo-handling algorithms are impressive from a technical point of view (like the stuff in Eyeon Dimension and The Foundry's Ocula), and while I think stereo 3D is here to stay for video games (at least after consoles add some improvements to head tracking), I doubt it will be more than a passing fad for movies. It's simply not compatible enough with human vision, even when done properly (head movements spoil the effect, the difference between convergence point and focus plane puts stress on your eyes, etc.; it's as if someone nailed your head to the cameras). When I'm watching a movie, I'm a spectator, I don't feel any need to be "in" the movie; I'm fine with being an infinite distance way. Anything that makes watching the movie less comfortable is going to detract from the experience.

Anyway, although there are ways to extract 3D information from 2D image sequences (not from individual images), as done by camera trackers such as SynthEyes, PFTrack, etc., the result is a very low resolution point cloud, which is really only useful to calculate the camera position and / or track some scene features, not to create a usable stereoscopic image pair.

The only vaguely acceptable way to get stereo is to project the frames onto a (simplified) hand-made 3D model of the shot (typically a grid deformed by a displacement map), and then render it from two virtual cameras. This can take ages (to set up; rendering is quick) and is generally the kind of work you offload to some intern you don't like much. Even then, the results are generally less pleasant to watch than the original (mono) footage. If you're interested in seeing how this is done, search for "Stereo Conversion NAB" on YouTube, and you should find a few examples.

There is no way to convert individual frames from 2D to 3D in real time for the same reason that "digital zoom" can't show you text that was smaller than the sensor's pixels; the information is simply not there. You can, obviously, write an algorithm that adds made-up depth information to any image, just as you can write an algorithm that adds random text to zoomed images, but I doubt that would improve your movies in any way.

What makes you think you would be "supporting their wind power" ? It's the same company. Unless there is some (effectively enforced) legal requirement or incentive (ex., a pollution tax) for them to phase out coal and build more wind farms (or nuclear reactors, or whatever), they'll continue to spend the money you pay them on whichever solution is more profitable to them. And if that incentive exists, then you should never have to pay more based on what kind of energy source you "prefer". Higher "environmental rates" are a scam.

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Shakespeare was one of the most respected actors, playwrights and poets of his time (although he also wrote a lot of crap; a bard has to pay the bills). Harry Potter is simplistic and highly derivative fantasy for young children. I doubt anyone will be talking about it in ten years (unless the publishers totally run out of ideas and need to revive it), let alone one hundred. The same goes for "Twilight" and other recent fads. They contain no "ideas", obscure or otherwise, nor do they need to; they're entertainment.

Your idea that Nobel prizes should be awarded based on "how many people read this author" is like suggesting that the physics Nobel should be based on "how many people are familiar with this theory" or that culinary prizes should be awarded based on "how many people eat this dish" (I guess Plain Rice would win every year, possibly followed by the Big Mac). I can't tell if that was just a really bad argument of if you completely missed the point of what Nobel prizes (and merit awards in general) are.

Your last sentence is just weird. First, because nearly every book is available instantly via the internet now (and will continue to be forever). Surely you are aware of that, no...? And second because Nobel prizes aren't awarded to books, they're awarded to authors (for the sum of their work), so the only place where you might be able to find "a dusty copy of this year's Nobel winner" is in some sort of human clone bank.

So did Ed Wood. Hardly a sign of quality.

Tolkien was a competent writer, but not an exceptional one. His real strength was in creating worlds, not in writing about them.

On the contrary; Saw arguably pushes some boundaries (though they're pretty easy boundaries to push, which makes the effort rather pointless). Harry Potter does not. It's just cliché linear plots (much like an old video game - run through level after level, with a boss at the end) with a universe that is mainly a ripped-off (and dumbed-down) Unseen University, from Pratchett's Discworld series. It was cleverly marketed, and it's competently written, but it doesn't really explore any new avenues, either in terms of style or theme. The same can be said about the fad that replaced it (teenage emo vampires, as seen in the "Twilight" series and its derivatives). And the same can preemptively be said about whatever literary fast food the publishers decide to put their marketing weight behind after the teenage model vampires have been milked.

Dan Brown is simply one of the worst writers ever to get published, and certainly the worst ever to receive that amount of advertising. This is just a small sample of his "skills". He does, arguably, come up with "interesting" plots, but those plots only work if the reader is a) able to ignore the atrocious writing and b) as ignorant about history, science and geography as Dan Brown himself, since he can't even place rivers in the correct continents (let alone establish credible connections to real historical facts, as he pretends to).

He doesn't have an argument. First because he never read those authors. Second because the point of the Nobel prizes is not to distinguish the average or popular; it's to distinguish the exceptional (which is even more important when they are not widely known or easily accessible).

J. K. Rowling's and Dan Brown's "award" is their bank account. Just because their books are profitable (much like McDonalds' "food" is profitable) that doesn't mean they've contributed much (if at all) to the progress of human society, or that we should give them literary awards. Books and literature aren't exactly the same thing.