This is one of the things that bug me about the American political system; completely off-topic amendments.
In “Missouri Senator Tells California To Sit Down And Shut Up About Pollution”:http://www.plastic.com/article.html;sid=03/09/08/14590591 we learn that:
* California wants to add catalytic converters to small engines to reduce pollution
* Briggs & Stratton, the largest manufacturer of small engines in the US has two plants in Missouri
* Senator Chris ‘Kit’ Bond (R-Missouri) is chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
The result: Abusing his position, Bond inserts a provion into the 2004 federal spending bill that prevents states from enforcing small-engine emission regulations more stringent than the federal Clean Air Act.
bq. “I will use every legislative tool at my disposal to stop California bureaucrats from trying to solve their own air quality problems at the expense of almost 2,000 workers and their families in Poplar Bluff and Rolla,” he said.
What a crock…
It seems to me that these days, U.S. Federal spending bills have very little to do with spending, and instead are a catch-all for hundreds of little laws to appease special interest groups, many of which would never get passed if they were out in the open, subject to public scrutiny…
posted at 2:49 pm on Monday, September 08, 2003 in Current Events, Rants | Comments Off on American Politics again
The “official”:http://homepages.cquest.utoronto.ca/~cks/whitewolf.complaint.pdf “complaint”:http://www.mataglap.com/whitewolf.complaint.pdf is available on the Internet (what a surprise :-). Warining: it contains movie spoilers. “Bryant writes”:http://popone.innocence.com/archives/001145.html:
bq. There’s an extensive list of similarities between Underworld and various White Wolf titles. I have no doubt the similarities exist, but I think they’re on the same level as the similarities between L.A. Story and When Sally Met Harry. “Hey, the protagonists fell in love! And they live in major American cities!”
[…]
bq. There are more specific correspondences, but nothing that doesn’t exist in prior art. White Wolf just doesn’t have the copyright on “tall and lithe” vampire assassins. Even female ones with “a dusky, classical tone to her skin and black hair.”
After reading the complaint, I’m not so sure. Many of the claims _are_ ridiculous (“In The World of Darkness, wood does not kill vampires. In _Underworld_, the werewolves do not use wood to kill vampires, nor mention it as an option”. That’s stretching correspondences a bit…)
On the other hand, some of the complaints are about very specific events or parts of mythology shared between The World of Darkness and _Underworld_. Some of them I’ve seen before, but I haven’t seen them all together in two places like this. I guess a jury is going to have to decide whether this crosses the line between free expression of ideas (which cannot be copyright) and plagiarism of specific expression of those ideas. I don’t envy them…
The most interesting one for me is the impending release of two derived video games: “Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines” and “Underworld: Bloodlines”, both using Valve Software engines (although different ones). This isn’t the first time a gothic punk vampire movie has been released; could the video game issue be driving the lawsuit?
(via “Population: One”:http://popone.innocence.com/archives/001145.html).
posted at 8:53 am on Sunday, September 07, 2003 in Gaming | Comments (2)
“White Wolf is suing Sony Pictures”:http://www.white-wolf.com/News/underworldrelease.html, claiming that “Underworld”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0320691/ infringes on their intellectual property.
I haven’t read Nancy A. Collins’ story; I stopped reading her books when White Wolf started publishing them, although I’m pretty sure that’s just a coincidence. However, it’ll be hard to prove that the story isn’t just Romeo and Juliet retold in a vampires & werewolves mythos.
I suspect that this is going to end up like the current SCO vs. Linux suit. Specifically: the movie and white wolf’s products are both based on the same (public) mythology. After all, ideas cannot be protected by copyright (although many people would like it otherwise); only the specific expression of the idea.
On the one hand, I think they’re going to have a hard time proving their case. On the other hand, since White Wolf fans are also the most likely fans of this movie, Sony might settle the case to avoid a fan boycott of the movie…
On the gripping hand, I will go see it because of “Kate Beckinsale”:http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000295/.
(via “Population: One”:http://popone.innocence.com/archives/001140.html).
posted at 12:45 pm on Saturday, September 06, 2003 in Gaming | Comments (2)
Proving that you can do _anything_ simply by looking official, a couple of thieves “stole two mainframe computers”:http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/04/1062548967124.html from Sydney International Airport.
bq. They presented themselves to the security desk as technicians sent by Electronic Data Systems, the outsourced customs computer services provider which regularly sends people to work on computers after normal office hours.
bq. After supplying false names and signatures, they were given access to the top-security mainframe room. They knew the room’s location and no directions were needed.
bq. Inside, they spent two hours disconnecting two computers, which they put on trolleys and wheeled out of the room, past the security desk, into the lift and out of the building.
posted at 4:11 pm on Friday, September 05, 2003 in Security | Comments Off on Brazen Computer Theft
There was a huge rainbow in the sky last night, so I took “some pictures”:http://www.cfrq.net/gallery/rainbow.
The camera didn’t capture the true effect, but it did surprisingly well for an amateur-driven, consumer-grade digital.
posted at 9:31 am on Friday, September 05, 2003 in Personal | Comments Off on Rainbow Pictures
I was driving to my friends’ house on Monday, and I noticed that all of the stores on Kennedy Road were open. This was a surprise to me; Labour Day is the mother of all statutory holidays, after all.
Apparently this was another one of those “boost Toronto’s economy after SARS and the blackout” things.
I wonder how many of the people who walked into those stores on Monday were members of a union? Oh, the irony…
posted at 4:59 pm on Wednesday, September 03, 2003 in Rants | Comments Off on Labour Day Irony?
I’ve been idly considering switching to a Mac, now that the underlying OS is FreeBSD. It’s the best of all worlds for me: a UNIX system where I can do all of my system tweaks; a nice, easy-to-use GUI desktop; and support for most (useful) mainstream applications. And it’s not Windows :-)
I was reminded of this again when I tripped over two weblog entries: “James”:http://radio.weblogs.com/0112098/’ “On Becoming a Mac Lover”:http://radio.weblogs.com/0112098/2003/07/26.html#a395, and “Brad”:http://bradchoate.com/’s “Reasons for Sticking with Windows”:http://bradchoate.com/past/001672.php (the point of the second is that the list is very short :-).
On the other hand, I’m about to inherit my work desktop (a reasonably powerful PIII), and the new employer is giving me a work laptop, so I won’t be hauling my _own_ laptop around much anymore. So I don’t really have an _excuse_ to buy a Mac right now…
Update: here is another “pro mac rant”:http://www.rohdesign.com/weblog/archives/000174.html with some scary statistics; 50% of windows boxes are running software that the owner didn’t install? Wow…
posted at 4:55 pm on Wednesday, September 03, 2003 in Personal | Comments (1)
An article in a Dutch computer magazine shows that CD-Rs can degrade in as little as a few months; the article has been getting a lot of weblog and media attention; See, for example, “this Register article”:http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/32593.html.
Scary news, although I’ve seen somewhere a comment that the CD-R shown in the graphic pictures was from a bad manufacturing run that has been recalled.
I have several old CD-Rs that are still readable, but I only just acquired my own CD writer, so I’m somewhat nervous about reports like this one…
posted at 10:28 pm on Tuesday, September 02, 2003 in Science and Technology | Comments Off on CD-R reliability questioned
Way back in 1999, the 802.11 people added a new ‘flavour’ of wireless access: bridging via intermediate access points. Ths allows you to place several 802.11 access points in strategic locations without having to connect them all via wires. Manufacturers are apparently (finally?) adding support to their products; LinkSys and Apple have both done so; see this “O’Reilly Network article”:http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2003/08/28/wireless_bridging.html for more information.
At the same time, MIT is experimenting by building a _routed_ network using 802.11 access points and new routing algorithms that build an efficient topology across a cloud of wireless links; See “The Grid Ad Hoc Networking Project”:http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/grid/ for more information.
Interesting stuff; we may yet be able to get rid of wires and maintain high-speed connections…
posted at 10:13 pm on Tuesday, September 02, 2003 in Science and Technology | Comments Off on Wireless ad-hoc networking
Brandon Blackmoor 
Timothy 
WW sues Sony? Of course.
It’s like this:
There isn’t a big budget flick that comes out that doesn’t draw some parasite to it claiming original authorship. There are attornies who specialize in this sort of thing. The cases are almost universally settled by the studios because it’s easier to just throw a little money at an asshole than to actually have to go to the trouble of dealing with him.
WW knows this. They might win, valid case or not, simply because Sony doesn’t want to bother.
WW also knows the value of publicity. There’s a reason they actually issued a press release about the suit. In basic terms, why is it essential that the press get hold of the story? Certainly not from a legal standpoint. Publicity. Say it again, with the iron tang of drool in your mouth: publicity. People who might never have heard of WW otherwise will because of this.
More importantly, WW also wins by associating their games with the movie, whether they win the case or settle or not. People who see the movie and want to play a RPG that gives them the same feel are being told, in bright press release letters, “OUR GAMES ARE LIKE THIS!” If the movie is a hit, and people associate it, rightly or wrongly, with their games, they be mucho happies.
The timing of the case indicates they wanted the news to hit just as the flick came out, thereby seeking synergy that’ll further the association.
The case itself looks spurious. If I were on the defensive team, I’d make part of the case on the fact that nearly everything WW has done is in some way derivative (note I did say nearly). They’ve generally taken the raw matter of other people’s tropes and mixed them into a complex, interesting, fun brew. Any gamer with some sense of cultural history and the ability to do research could mine tons of derivation out of WW’s games, much of it starker and more blatant than that they’re accusing Sony of.
WW doesn’t generally have a care about other people’s IP either. I can think of several instances where the company has used nearly identical pastiche art of other people’s previous work, whether it be the Corax in RAGE who looks pretty much 101% like the Crow, or, worse, the Arcadia or Rage card (can’t recall which, think it was Rage) that used Klempt’s “Kiss,” known from college dorm walls all over the land, attributed to some lazy ass artist who ripped off Klempt and got a check from WW. There’s a pic in the first edition of Mage of a guy in a hotel room, floating at the ceiling with his head breaking through it like it’s the surface of water and he’s submerged. This was nearly a stroke by stroke rip off of a painting (a cool painting) that was used both on a Scorpions album cover and on a Mongo mystery novel by George Chesbro. There’s been a lot of this stuff over the years, and I actually talked to Rich Thomas, the art boss at WW, about this very thing once. He’s not a stupid man, he knows art, and he knows when they use something like this. His whole attitude was that he really didn’t give a shit.
And how about song quotes? Sure, you can quote a bit of text from a fictional work within the boundaries of fair use, but songs are diferent. If you use a bit of published song in your published work, you are supposed to seek clearance from and pay a fee to the entity owning the rights to that song. Take a look in the front of Cujo by Steve King some time: there’s a huge list of song clearances for the quotes used in that book, and not only are the rights holders acknowledged, they were paid.
WW just puts quotes in and that’s that. They’re lucky they haven’t been kicked in the nuts by ASCAP.
If they settle or win, WW gets a boost to their profits (just like those parasites suing in Hollywood) and maybe even gets a nod in the revised credits of the film, bringing us back to association. If they lose, they still managed to get some publicity and associate what may be a hit movie with their games.
I don’t think they’re worried about losing. I think they figure Sony will settle, and they’re probably right.
There are 17 counts of copyright infringement on the docket, and while a few of the examples are stretched a bit, it’s obvious that White Wolf’s original material has been infringed upon in more than a coincidental fashion. Upon seeing the (non-spoiling) trailers I wondered if White Wolf had been involved in the writing. If just seeing the trailer can make me think that, it leads me to belive that White Wolf (who’s been on the bad end of a copyright suit themselves — i.e., AEon/Trinity) isn’t just barking up a tree.
And while Vampire is based largely on historic refernce, they’ve COPYRIGHTED IT. Just like AOL Time/Warner owns the copyright to “Happy Birthday To You”. Making money off it and not expecting them to sue isn’t a wise decision.