steve

Machinima started in 2003? Really? Man, what was I watching in the mid-90s, with those Quake-based movies?

Lynda Carter is married to the head of Bethesda.

I had two 360s "go bad," but it turned out it was the hard drive that wend bad, not the units. (I kept the drive with me as I didn't want to lose my saved games, and kept plugging it back into the units.)

It's not a matter of if a hard drive will fail; it's when.

It makes you wonder if a guy with 11 failed units is sending everything, or just the main unit itself. After two, I might look to some of the other parts I didn't send back.

For people comparing something like Oblivion on the 360 to a PC, trying running all of your PC games at 1280x720 instead of 1280x1024 (30% more pixels) or 1680x1050 (almost double). In most cases, you're asking your PC to do a lot more work than an Xbox.

(Not to mention the detail levels on the PC version allow you to go way beyond what a 360 can handle, mostly due to RAM limitations on the latter.)

Most of the people bitching about the need to constantly upgrade are just getting all wrapped up in dick swinging contests. Everyone whips out the outliers to say, "LOL!!!1! PC games suxxorz!" Consider that there are 300+ other games released in a year that work fine.

But so what if the guy next to you can run at higher detail? A 3-4 year old PC will run the vast majority of games fine, with plenty of detail. And a $200 investment in a better videocard will make your 3-4 year old system fly because you still don't need much more than a 2GHz CPU for any game on the market.

I like my console, I like my PC. I play games on both platforms. I maintain my PC for a lot of uses beyond gaming, and every upgrade other than videocard gives me benefits elsewhere.

Since I need to maintain a PC, the only specific "PC gaming" cost I have is for a faster videocard. So if I spend $200-$300 every 2-3 years, I'm not that far behind what I spend on a new console.

Of course The Burning Crusade humbled any and all consoles games on that list. It sold as many copies in its first week as the Top 10 for the month did combined.

Imagine what it would have sold if PC games weren't dead.

"No, if you had written that song you would have been DEAD FOR THE PAST SIXTY YEARS."

If your argument is that copyright law is in need of reform or that the terms are too long, you'd get no argument for me.

Using the disagreements with those aspects as a rationalization for infringement is where I run into issues with people.

"Hey, who do you think caused the collapse of Enron? It was the guys at the top fucking over the wage slaves. That's the worst analogy ever."

That wasn't the point. Your point is that infringement hurts the company. The end game of everyone doing this is that the company will eventually cease to exist. Who's hurt most by any major public corporation's failure? The public, who are its employees and its owners via the stock market.

Those fat cat execs you hate so much already have their millions.

"The public domain was the wellspring of creativity and derivative works (and yes, I defend derivative works because they on occasion add something of value)."

Um, you have no idea what you're talking about. Again, when was this magical time when everything was public domain?

Almost every major work of classical music was commissioned by someone wealthy, for example. Shakespeare wasn't writing for free.

"Do you know why all the classics are so cheap? Because they're all in the public domain, different publishers are put into competition and it lowers the prices."

Are the classics cheap? If you're talking about books, the answer is no. They cost the same as, er, Narnia. (I guess.)

The Odyssey (Penguin Classics): $10 at Amazon.com
Chronicles of Narnia: $10 at Amazon.com

The market for books determine their price, and competition with other books and demand is what sets the market rate.

"How many great books of the last century will be lost because the publishing companies decided that it wasn't worth the cost to publish them?"

None? They don't just disappear into the vapor. There's this wonderful "digital" technology the kids rave about which virtually guarantees that the great books of the last century won't disappear.

Also, not every author signs the rights of their books to the publisher in perpetuity.

Another question is this: how many great books would be lost because the original manuscript was lost and no one published it in the first place?

"For you see, I could go online and download these episodes in all of their glory, but it would be illegal - illegal even though it's not hurting anyone."

Such are the terms dictated to you by the creator of a work. I'm under no obligation to provide you with my works in perpetuity. If I made Manimal and I'd rather that work never appear on DVD, why wouldn't I get to control this?

By always turning this into a "big corporations vs. me" argument, you're forgetting that everything a corporation can do is available to any individual as well.

"If and when it is fixed and the public domain is resurrected, then hey, I might still steal things, but at least I won't feel good about it."

You rock! Stick it to the man!

Here's a better question about what you stand for: Do you pirate anonymously? If so, you're just looking to mooch free stuff. If you really want to take on copyright, be willing to do it in a very public way so you can get yourself arrested.

Civil disobedience isn't posting on forums under pseudonyms; it's believing enough in your cause to put your life and liberty on the line for it.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say copyright isn't quite that important in the overall scheme of things.

37. "Go right ahead, you'd be doing no different than Google News"

Google News doesn't duplicate the articles in their entirety without permission.

33. Or alternatively, it's populated by creative types who can see the benefit to copyright. (Which doesn't mean it's been perverted by corporations; just to repeat this again, it protests my works as much as it protects Mickey Mouse for Disney.)

Or maybe we're all just MPAA and RIAA stooges.

Here's a thought: I'll setup a website that yanks down all of the content on Joystiq and posts it on my own site. It's not theft. It's not depriving anyone of seeing the content on this URL. So it'd be totally kosher to many of the people in this thread. And it'd only be hurting the big corp AOL.

25. "And since you mention "Happy Birthday", that's a perfect example of how broken the system is; it's a song that's so enmeshed into our society as to be part of every person's yearly ritual, and yet no one can sing it anywhere in the media without paying for it. That doesn't seem even a little fucked up to you?"

Sure, it seems silly. But if I'd written that song, I might feel differently. I also wouldn't be too happy if people were re-recording my song and making money from it.

"2) If someone puts an unknown on the net, chances are that it'll boost their popularity - and you'd better believe that people will buy stuff from unknowns just to support them."

My own personal experience says otherwise. Most people, when given a choice between "free" and "pay," go with "free." Once they're conditioned to believe everything should be free, it's harder to get a penny out of them.

"The lesson here is that if you're not making money one way, then seek alternative revenue streams."

It's one thing to say, "Your art is crap; no one wants to buy it." But when it's obvious people dig it but just don't feel like spending a couple of bucks to buy it, the problem lies with the mindset of buyer, not the artist. This is an issue of morality in addition to a legal one.

But here's one example of alternative revenue stream: Advertising. What's the first thing people do when faced with ads? Bitch about them, and then find ways to avoid/block them.

"have you ever considered that maybe some people will write a poem because they want people to hear it, not because they want to make money off of it?"

There's nothing about copyright laws that prevents people from doing this.

What it does protect you from is some corporation or individual taking your poem which you offered to the world for free and re-selling it for profit. It's easy to forget this, but copyright protects both individuals and corporations.

20. When was this magical time when people made high-quality music and games for fun instead of profit?

"The purpose of copyright was to promote creativity, not to stifle it, and it's been warped into this giant, ugly thing that's controlled by corporations."

There's nothing inherent about the idea of copyright that stifles the creativity of those who wish to create original works.

It does, however, hamper those who want to profit from derivative works. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing; without copyright, those corporations you hate so much could steal your ideas and you'd have no recourse.

"That's another thing - who am I really hurting when I steal IP? The short answer - a corporation."

You do realize that most corporations are public companies, and that public companies issues shares to the public, right? Most corporations are owned by people like you and me.

Or to put it another way, who do you think was hurt most by Enron's collapse? Here's a hint: It wasn't the high-level executives. It's was the low-level employees, shareholders, and people whose 401Ks included Enron stock.

So by all means rail against the might corporation. While it's true that all of those rich executives will no longer be able to afford a second Lear jet, you'll also be taking down the guys in the mail room and the average Joes who put their retirement hopes in the hands of their 401K.