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Ownership is easy. It's the name on the deed.
But the name on the deed is the conglomerate. Want to buy my property? Join the conglomerate, pay me $300 million, do whatever you want with the property, and enjoy the same property taxes we've had since the conglomerate was formed in 1988.
Our cars come with all these different paint jobs:
How many more paint schemes do car manufacturers need to offer? Your complaints about our cars' appearances ring hollow. Quit your bitching!
(And why do people keep bringing up the fact that in 1997 we purchased a radical new law that no person is allowed to repaint their car, and that no person is allowed to manufacture or sell paint? WTF does that have to do with anything?)
I believe the number of people that want to "own" a movie constitute a small minority. Very small.
How small?
I mean, Walmart has a pretty big section of DVDs and Bluray movies for sale, and it seems like there's a pretty large number of people who collect movies.
Yes, the movies are available for rent for $1 at a Redbox, but people still spend $15 to buy the movie. While people who are willing to pay that much of a premium to "own" the movie probably are indeed a minority -- I don't think they're a "very small minority".
While you may not want to re-watch anything produced by Hollywood -- it seems that many do. And many others seem to keep buying movies but yet rarely watch what they own.
These mutjobs only provide the initial funding.
Of course, without those mutjobs (nutjobs?), there's no initial funding, and therefore no movie. Of course, you could always find other mutjobs to provide the initial funding -- but you've still got your mutjobs.
If you don't think capital is important
Given the box office bombs of So and so Carpenter and Battleship, both of which were QUARTER BILLION DOLLAR PRODUCTIONS. I have to ask: WHY IN THE FUCK DO WE NEED MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR FILMS?
"Need" is the wrong word. But obviously we "want" them.
Titanic, Avatar and Avengers each costed the better part of a quarter billion dollars to make as well, and yet they made massive profits for the companies making them. Whether you think they're good movies or not -- you can't argue with that being good business.
These major movies are a gamble -- sometimes they pay off, sometimes not.
Do the studios spend too much making them? Maybe. But as I said -- it's a gamble, and sometimes it pays off big -- and usually when it doesn't, it usually at least breaks even.
And even your examples aren't so great -- Battleship has already earned back it's production costs and a little more. I don't know what "So and so Carpenter" is. John Carter? It's another lackluster performer, but it's earned back it's production costs and a little more too. And neither has been released on DVD yet.
RIAA and the MPAA are middle men.
Not really. They're associations.
Middle men don't add value: They don't produce the product, and they don't use it. They're worthless. Fuck them.
The "middle men" you're referring to really aren't the RIAA or the MPAA -- they're the record producers and movie studios. The MPAA and RIAA are just trade associations -- they certainly aren't middle men.
Albums can be produced by a band on their own without a record producer, but to claim that the producer adds nothing is wrong. He does provide assistance of various sorts -- technical, capital, access to a distribution network, etc. There's a reason bands are looking for recording contracts -- because they provide at least the chance of success.
Now, these producers tend to rip off the artists much of the time, but to claim they don't add value is wrong.
As for movie studios, yes, somebody can make a home movie on their own. But to make a major movie requires a studio and massive amounts of money. The movie studio is a whole lot more than "middle men". It's not like you can throw a bunch of actors in a room and end up with "The Avengers".
Now, the distribution network -- those people really are middle men. But without them, the record or movie generally doesn't make any money. Yes, there's a few exceptions, especially with albums -- bands selling their music online, for example. But for now, finding the right middle men often means the difference between making no money and making a lot of money -- that certainly does add value if you're trying to make money.
If, for example, Disney isn't selling DVDs of a given movie and has no plans to within the next decade, then Disney makes no more money off me if I don't pirate than if I do. What's the sound public policy behind keeping such a work out of the public's hands if it isn't being distributed or even prepared for distribution?
Disney "puts movies back into the Disney vault" to create demand for them while the "vault" is open.
Your argument that "they make no more money off of you than if you don't pirate than if you do" really only makes sense if you'd never buy their movies to begin with. After all, you failed to buy their movie when it was "out of the vault", and even now you're failing to buy it on eBay or something similar. (Which means there's an additional copy of it for somebody else to buy.) And the "vault" will be opened again in the future, so it's not like you could never see the movie without pirating it.
Let's suppose you really want to see the Lion King, no matter what.
If you buy it from Disney, they get one sale.
If you buy it new on eBay, they got one sale. (Not directly from you, but it was on your behalf.)
If you pirate it, they get zero sales.
If you buy a used copy on eBay, they get zero (additional, just for you) sales (but they haven't found a legal means to stop this yet. Yet.)
If it's unavailable (new, from Disney) for a while
I'm not saying that this policy of theirs makes them more money (though I imagine they have worked out that it does or they wouldn't do it), serves the public good or is even moral -- but your claim is accurate only if you'd never buy the movie to begin with.
I've been running ZFS on FreeBSD for a few years and it's lived up to its promises, but I think I'll be migrating off of it. The problem is that I trusted Sun. They did some goofy things, but you knew where you stood with them. They release ZFS under an Open Source license? You could take them at face value and know that you were allowed to use it. But now that Oracle holds the reins, I have no desire to depend on any Sun-borne projects anymore. Yes, ZFS is Open Source. So was Java, and Google just spent roughly a bazillion dollars defending themselves for using something that looked like it. I can't afford to take on a case like that.
Other than the Oracle-owned btrfs, what ZFS alternatives are available and ready for use today?
They you are just making shit up, which is fine. More power to you but it's not based on anything.
That's not how evolution works. Evolution doesn't plan ahead and there is zero evidence of a helping hand.
There's also no scriptural basis to think this. None of the holy books say god helped us evolve from microscopic creatures over millions upon millions of years.
So you can think this but you're just making it up.
More telling, religions don't deal with formal proofs and require that you show your work.
That's not really true, but it's a risky proposition. I grew up in a religious family, and the last church I attended as an adult was wonderfully logic-driven. The preacher was fantastic, and he presented every sermon almost like a mathematical proof. He'd start with some basic axioms from the belief system ("the Bible is literally true", "Jesus is a real person and said everything credited to him exactly like the Bible says, barring negligible translation mismatches", etc.). Then he'd present a premise and build a formal proof for it based upon facts derived from those axioms. Sometimes he reached some surprising conclusions, but as in math class, if you accept the axioms then you can't really disagree with results that come from them.
But that works both ways. By presenting an effectively bulletproof belief framework, it's left open to disproof by formal methods. In my case, that was disproof by counterexample, where the premises were "the world is 6,000 years old" and "God loves us", and the counterexample was "there's a vast amount of hard evidence that the Earth and universe are billions of years old". Given that "the Earth is more than 6,000 years old" is roughly as demonstrable as "the sky is blue", that led to at least one of two conclusions: either God hates us and wants to trick us for some sociopathic reason known only to Him, or one of those axioms was invalid. And once you reach that point, what axiom do you throw out? "The Bible is literally true" is the obvious choice. But there's a huge amount of other conclusions predicated upon that axiom's validity, and once it disappears...
Ever had everything you know yanked out from under you in an instant? It sucks. But that's the risk of rigorous examination of religious beliefs. If you examine them closely enough to "prove" that your beliefs are true, then you run the very real risk of demonstrating that they're not.
In like a dimwit, out like a light. -- Pogo