Topic: Intellectual Property - In All Fairness! - page 29. (Read 105893 times)

Oh, by the way, the reason today's graphics hardware supports shaders is because Pixar developed the RenderMan Shading Language for the purpose of making CG animated films (with the intent of making money on them) back in the eighties. Behind my on my bookshelf is the first book ever written on shading languages, "The RenderMan Companion" by Steve Upstill, copyright 1990, which I purchased in 1990.

They could've waited? Why? Anyway, have you ever worked with RenderMan and RenderMan shaders? And rendered out super sampled images with jitter, motion blur, featuring many 1,000s of shaders, subsurface scattering, procedurally generated geometry pushing nearly one terabyte of data (or more) per frame at 5k resolution? If you want to try it, download a production ready RenderMan compliant renderer for free here: http://www.3delight.com/en/


Your lhs and rhs are both underestimated.


Do you know how many days an animator typically spends on one minute of footage?

Well, to be technical, they could've waited and spent about $10,000 on four computers with lots of ram and either single Quadro cards, or SLI mode Nvidia or ATI cards, then used a slew of rendering engines, such as the Unreal engine or VALVe's engine, and rendered the movie in near real-time, spending very little on employment for designers and rendering staff, since they would only need them for maybe 6 month to a year,  instead of about 5 years on very slow rendering machines that cost a few hundred thousand to a few million to build and operate.

Few hundred thousand > $10,000
5 years of paying salaries and benefits > 6 to 12 months of paying salaries and benefits.

Hope that was technical enough.

Of course I'm serious. Don't you want to just answer the question?

No. I'm asking how it will radically reduce the cost of production of a CG animated film. And if you wish to get technical with me, feel free, because back in the late eighties, I was reading the Siggraph papers authored by the founders of Pixar on such topics as stochastic sampling, etc., and I was implementing ray tracing software in C from what I learned in those papers - back when the Pixar team was doing their rendering on a VAX.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Taq9LFbcvxE

Your question is irrelevant and a straw man. You picked a single sentence from MoonShadow's extensive post and asked a question which is not relevant to any argument we are making.

Let me state this for you clearly: no perceived or actual benefits of intellectual property law negate the question of morality. In this exact same way, no perceived or actual benefits of slavery negated the question of its morality.

Are you serious?

*twitch*


Um... are you asking how using four home consumer level desktops, instead of a CGI supercomputing renderring cluster from IBM or Silicon Graphics, will save money?

My question is the question I asked. I'm looking for an answer to it.

That's not the question. Ending slavery increased the cost of picking cotton. Would keeping cotton picking costs down have been a valid argument for continuing slavery?

And how does this radically reduce the cost of production of a CG animated film?

When grandma downloads 2,500 songs illegally, the RIAA breaks down her door, she is taken to court, and is fined $250,000. Since grandma obviously doesn't have that kind of cash, she is taken to jail instead, where she is forced to work off her "debt to society" by either picking up litter off the side of the roads, or by breaking rocks with sledgehammers.
Slavery.

Not clear on something - how exactly does the enforcement of IP rights lead to slavery?

Well, that's not entirely true, as the best flicks retain their "suggested retail price" point pretty well while the mediocre flicks start off in the 20% discount section and fall from there.  But a lot of that is that IP laws actually function as price support that decends with time since release.  You can see this in how movies move from the first run theater, to the discount theater, to DVD release, to group
DVD's (the package deals that you can get more than one movie in a single retail package, either on the same disk or more than one disk in a single case/package) a few years down the line.  Fallacies aside, if IP laws are repealed this process (that the market value of information tends towards zero) would proceed much faster than it does at present.

Btw, anyone else find it strange that, whether it is an explosion and special effects spectacular, a horror movie, a slapstick comedy, a romantic comedy, a general foreign flick, or a documentary, the price for the movie is exactly the same, both theater ticket and DVD wise? What's with that?

It would appear that Steam has plans to make a movie or two using their rendering engine....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Fortress_2#Marketing

"The "Meet the Team" videos are based on the audition scripts used for the voice actors for each of the classes; the "Meet the Heavy" scripts is nearly word-for-word a copy of the Heavy's script. More recent videos, such as "Meet the Sniper", contain more original material.[86] The videos have been used by Valve to help improve the technology for the game, specifically improving the facial animations, as well as a source of new gameplay elements, such as the Heavy's "Sandvich" or the Sniper's "Jarate".[86] Newell has stated that Valve is using the "Meet the Team" shorts as a means of exploring the possibilities of making feature film movies themselves. Newell believed that only game developers themselves have the ability to bring the interesting parts of a game to a film, and suggested that this would be the only manner through which a Half-Life-based movie would be made."

(Emphasis mine)

So, will it take millions to make a movie from a VALVe game?  Will fans of the game pay to see it?  I understand that this doesn't actually contradict your claim that IP laws are necessary, but it does put the error to your claim that major motion pictures must continue to be produced in the manner that presently dominates.  Nor must they cost a fortune to be truely entertaining.  As an aside, when the original Toy Story was produced, it required a custom built Belwolf cluster to render the CGI graphics.  Today VALVe's rendering engine produces comparable quality CGI video, in real time, on a not-too-recent home PC or iMac.  And it does this while connected to a game server across the Internet which manages the interaction of up to 36 rendering engines at the same time.

If Toy Story hadn't already been produced, the exact same movie could have been produced by a creative team using three or four consumer desktops networked together.

Just because you can't (or we can't) imagine how such entertainment would be produced sans IP; or even what form that it would take, it doesn't logically follow that such entertainment will not be produced nor that the market will fail to fund it's production.  VAVLe apparently understands this, regardless of their view on IP laws in general.  Their management and marketing team does not depend upon the continuing enforcablity of copyright laws (or even licensing contracts, for that matter) in order to create great art that a great many people are willing to contribute money for.  Hell, they still make money off of a free-to-play game such as TF2 by selling virtual hats inside the game.

And it's an awesome game.  I heard about it on this very forum last year or so, and downloaded it a couple of weeks ago for free.  It's also free to join most game host servers, although they will tend to advertise to you or solicit donations.  Steam (whatever that program actually is) logs my game time, and I've burned over 60 hours of time.  At tjhe original sale price that would already be less than a dollar per hour, which is way better entertainment value that a two hour movie at the movie theater.

Here's a simple way of looking at it,

If you take your property/materials that are currently in your possession (involving no other person) and make an exact replica of somebody else's stuff, and no one (other than yourself) could ever become aware of that act, you have committed no unlawful crime.

To wit, how could anybody commit a crime in solitude, but then become criminal via mere public exposure?

Knowledge is a dangerous thing I guess.

So what is the point of having a law that does not affect him, anyway, and that he likely isn't even aware of breaking (such as by letting a friend borrow a game/movie, or installing the same software on both the parents' and the kids' computer)? Is it just so that the government can throw its weight around ust in case it wants to? The most dangerous type of law is one that doesn't make sense from a basic moral sense, that gives governments a secret unexpected power. Both, because it gives governments arbitrary powers, and because it makes other laws also questionable.

There have always been some that express the idea that slavery is immoral, just as there have always been some that express the idea that statism is immoral and intellectual property is immoral. You do realize also that the idea of intellectual property is only a couple of hundred years old, right?

This is another example of the distortion of history presented by the public school system. The fundamental issue underlying the civil war was not slavery, but the right of states to secede from the union of states.

source

Your version of history does not mesh with the fact that the Union granted border states the right to own slaves in exchange for their support.