Hollywood can do anything it wants. When you have millions of dollars, you are powerful in a way an indie can never be. Just the cameras alone are beyond the reach of normal people, and the film, and lights, and casts, and effects... But like you say, this is good..! We wouldn't _want our film-makers to be economically crippled... We are _glad they're multi-millionaires..! In "capitalism", who tends to succeed? -- > The best and the brightest. It's "social darwinism".. Yes, it's exclusive... A lot of wealth is inherited. But you have to be damn smart to hold on to your riches... Avatar had the best battle scene ever seen by mankind, and there have been a lot of battle scenes..!

They actually refer to self-publishing, when books are concerned, as "vanity publishing"... But I think the net has opened this up a bit. In the past, writers had to _beg for their readerships. They had to pander to the reading public. No more. You can get your crap out there, and truly let it spread. Call this "vanity" -- or call it freedom? Publishers, like Harvard, have an interest in business-as-usual. A revolutionary author shouldn't get swept up in that.

I'm talking open source. What I mean by that, is that additional dialogue recording, music (and rights), alt cuts of scenes, raw footage, would all be available. It's a matter of link speed. If we could all have megabit links, downloading this stuff would be no problem. We could then mix and mash to our hearts' content... Down to the granularity of Pro Tools sessions all tracked out... Total control, total freedom. What if you had all the alt takes to The Matrix? Don't tell me it would add up to a Muppets effort. IF it did, it would be your directorial skills to blame...

Open-source is where it's at... Who's to say a _film couldn't be open-sourced? The initial developer would post digital of her cut, maybe even zip archives of scenes, sound effects, and alt versions -- then secondary directors could "have at it"..! But it would be like the GNU license -- if you screw with this free, raw film, you have to make _your version free also..! Basically, I'm thinking that the whole "copyright/piracy" system is dead in the water. With the Earth on the brink of being destroyed by humanity, we rebellious elements of this humanity need _lots of freedom -- both like beer, and like speech -- if anyone will have a chance to change anything!

Aren't JavaScript and HTML5 kind of open-source philosophy? While .NET is apparently very proprietary... I think if you truly appreciate the world community of intelligent developers, we as a group will "naturally" move to more open practices... With a large group experimenting with code, how can any one corporation hope to match the bug-catching, the innovation?

On my website, I often look at the Webalyzer site stats -- and the "referrers" section is kind of interesting... Right now there are about 300 sites that (apparently) link to my own site. Now, the stats are password protected, but what if I were to copy/paste them into my index/landing-page? What if I by doing this, am publishing a list with some potentially nefarious/evil URL's, and in a sense, poisoning my site? If I reference a site, am I guilty of what they're guilty of? Google's site admin guidelines recommend only a "reasonable" number of links on your index page... Is 400 reasonable? More specifically, I think this proposed legislation is nugatory, and I agree with those of you who think someone must indeed be _convicted_ of a crime before it is just/fair to de-allow their site's existence. Additionally, we are at a strange cusp of world history, with the internet. Artists no longer have to pander to audiences/publishers. If you want to write something, the world will have a chance to see. In a way, this is the first time anything significant has become possible in terms of the aesthetics/politics nexus. You can actually write the truth! Now, I agree -- going after "pirates" really probably means going after "thought crime" and "questionable strangeness"/"odd philosophies"... You've seen what the gov is capable of. Just read Zinn's "People's History of the US"... Too much to contemplate, too much to bear... We have to take a step back. The world is degenerate, with permanent revolution... The survival of the biosphere is at stake... This world could last _thousands_, _millions of more years! And we're tarring and feathering it! I mention this, because web publishers / information architects deserve / need to have a fairly _large amount of personal power, if anything _radical is going to change about the world... Reproducing copyrighted material will be a modality of this power. It is necessary.... http://251frankjazz.com/political_philosophy_nozick.htm is a poly phil paper I wrote at University of Pittsburgh... I got a D+ on it... That about says it all!