Does Superman Have Rights?

First published here.

Being a fan of the graphic novel medium, I always find it interesting to see how these stories transfer to the big screen. Some of the most visually inspired films of the last few years are based on comics and graphic novels, and considering some of the attributes of the medium, such as a pre-conceived "story board" it's not surprising that directors are keen to move these often striking static images to full motion films.

I've always wondered how the original artists feel about their work being transferred to different mediums though. Did Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell like the film version of From Hell, with Johnny Depp and Heather Graham?

Answer: No. Campbell said "anything that meant anything was ditched" from the film script.

Alan Moore's V for Vendetta has now just made it to the big screen, thanks to the Wachowski brothers.

Recently, Moore told The Independent, "All I'm asking [the producers] for is the same kind of deal that they had no problem extending to Siegel and Schuster (the creators of Superman). I want them to say, 'We're not going to give you any money for your work, you're not going to get any credit for it, and we're not going to put your name on it.' I don't see the problem."

Perhaps it's the previous butchering of his work that has led this great artist to shun any adaptations of it. It is certainly understandable that he wouldn't want his name on something he doesn't like.

With that in mind, perhaps now is a good time to take a retrospective look at revolutionary document that was published back in 1988 by veteran comic artist Scott McCloud:

A Bill of Rights for Comics Creators

For the survival and health of comics, we recognize that no single system of commerce and no single type of agreement between creator and publisher can or should be instituted. However, the rights and dignity of creators everywhere are equally vital.

Our rights, as we perceive them to be and intend to preserve them, are:

1. The right to full ownership of what we fully create.

2. The right to full control over the creative execution of that which we fully own.

3. The right of approval over the reproduction and format of our creative property.

4. The right of approval over the methods by which our creative property is distributed.

5. The right to free movement of ourselves and our creative property to and from publishers.

6. The right to employ legal counsel in any and all business transactions.

7. The right to offer a proposal to more than one publisher at a time.

8. The right to prompt payment of a fair and equitable share of profits derived from all of our creative work.

9. The right to full and accurate accounting of any and all income and disbursements relative to our work.

10. The right to prompt and complete return of our artwork in its original condition.

11. The right to full control over the licensing of our creative property.

12. The right to promote and the right of approval over any and all promotion of ourselves and our creative property.

McCloud says, "the Bill never generated much noise in the industry - and I wouldn't want to exaggerate its influence - but in looking over its articles more than a decade later, they provide an interesting snapshot of our attitudes at the time, and of the climate that was fueling self-publishers, progressive business people, and artists trying to reinvent the comics industry."

Perhaps now is a good time to take a look back and see if there's something in that document that's relevant for us today. I, for one, think there is.

Bush, Google and Porn

First published here.

In my mind, the most amusing aspect of the Bush administration's attempt to grab users' search information from Google is the reason they actually want the info in the first place.

The Bush administration claims it's trying to prove how easy it is for minors to come across pornographic content. They tried using the Internet Archive, but didn't get much. (So, in case anyone wanted to know whether archive.org is a kid-friendly, the US government says "yes!").

The really funny thing is that making the net safer for children could have been partially achieved by the creation of a .xxx Top Level Domain. Unfortunately, Bush's own Department of Commerce helped kill the idea - apparently, acknowledging the existence of pornography somehow legitimises it, perhaps in the same way that acknowledging the existence of HIV/AIDS means that risky sexual practices are suddenly okay. I don't know - false logic and backward thinking seems to be the hallmark of a functioning government these days.

As far as the Bush White House is concerned, forcing Google to hand over search data serves two functions:

1) They don't have to dip into the Republican war chest by doing the research themselves; and,

2) They get to establish a precendent that kills the 4th Amendment, in case they want to sponge info from other companies in the future.

US District Judge James Ware said he was reluctant to give the Justice Department everything it wanted because of the "perception by the public that this is subject to government scrutiny". Weeell, so long as the US government isn't getting everything it wanted, that's fine. If they're only handing over a little bit of private information, it'll be okay. Provided they're not violating the Constitution much, I'm sure the public will feel reassured.

Sarcasm aside for a minute, I wasn't aware you could do some thing that's "partially" unconstitutional. I always thought is was one of those binary states: constitutional or unconstitutional. Alive or dead. Pregnant or not pregnant. That was one of the things that made me feel really uncomfortable when I heard about it - so long as you compromise, you can can ask for the most ridiculous things. People will ignore the outlandish request and focus on how "reasonable" you can be in reaching a compromise:

Crazed Dictator: I want a hundred nuclear bombs! Muhahaha!

United Nations: No way! No nuclear bombs!

Crazed Dictator: Okay, ten bombs then!

US Court: We'd like to thank you for being so reasonable. Request for ten nuclear weapons granted.

In case you're still not convinced that this is simply the big government trying to beat big tech companies into submission, you might like to consider the fact that AOL, Yahoo and MSN have aready handed over their search data, exactly like the Department of Justice wanted in the first place.

In terms of raw data, any statistician would tell you they have more than enough to work out how much smut there is on the net. The only possible thing Google could help them with is determining whether it's a lot, or a hell of a lot.

To take this case as far as they have can only mean the Bush administration is more interested in proving they can get the data than doing anything useful with it...which they could have done to some extent by letting people put .xxx after the name of their raunchy web site anyway.

µTorrent Interview - March '06

First published here.

Alex H: Last time we spoke you guys had just released µTorrent 1.1.4. Now you've just released µTorrent 1.5. How far has µTorrent come with the 1.5 release? What's new?

Ludde: µTorrent 1.5 is a significant release that's a big milesone for us. The new major changes in 1.5 are support for Protocol Encryption (i.e. Message stream encryption) and Peer Exchange (a feature that lets peers interchange peers with each other, and reduces the need for a working tracker, it makes BitTorrent more distributed). A lot of work has also been spent on optimizing the downloading speeds, µTorrent should now download much more efficiently than before.

In combination with this, a new algorithm for optimized disk accesses has been implemented. Previous versions would hit the disk much more often, while the new automatic disk cache tries to minimize this.

The time between releases, a whopping 2 months, is the longest time ever in µTorrent's history. This shows that 1.5 is really a big change compared to 1.4 (The number of changes is well over a hundred), and we've worked to perfecting it down to the smallest detail.

Other notable things that have been added since 1.1.4 (when you last interviewed us) include:

* RSS Reader: Allows µTorrent to automatically fetch releases (such as TV-shows) as soon as they are released. This helps µTorrent to become a better content-on-demand platform, since it will automatically help users download the content they need. A nice RSS tutorial can be found on the webpage for the users that are unsure about how RSS works.

* Unicode support: The same executable can be used both in Unicode mode (windows 2000 or later) or in ANSI compability mode (windows ME or earlier). This is a quite unique feature for native Win32 programs. Unicode is a relatively new universal way of representing characters inside the computer, which means that µTorrent is compatible with foreign torrents (such as those with chinese filenames), while still being able to run properly on old platforms. Support for old platforms like Windows 95 is an important goal for us, not because the user base is there, but it shows that we care about how the application performs for all users.

* Mainline-DHT: This was added in µTorrent 1.2. It means Distributed Hash Table, and is a nice technology that really minimizes the dependency on the tracker. DHT allows µTorrent to receive peers through a distributed network of peers, so the tracker is not needed.

We've come a long way since 1.1.4, now µTorrent is really one of the serious contenders in the BitTorrent scene. We concentrate on adding mainstream features that are easy to use, and benefit the majority of the user base, and thus µTorrent is geared towards both normal users and "expert" users that know the inns and outs of their computer.

Alex H: Who makes up the µTorrent team now?

Ludde: The µTorrent team consists of:

• Ludvig Strigeus (ludde) - Sole µTorrent Developer
  
• And some of the most notable members of the µTorrent community:
  
• Giancarlo Martínez (Firon) - Support technician and my right hand.
  
• Timothy Su (Ignorantcow) - Website designer
  
• Maciej Trebacz (mav) - In charge of translations
  
• Carsten Niebuhr (Directrix) - Working on the upcoming webinterface
  
• Ludovic Arnaud (Ashe) - Working with website efficiency/admin frontend
  

Then there are a bunch of other people hanging around in the IRC channels/Forums helping people and helping me.

Alex H: µTorrent worked with Azureus to develop the Message Stream Encryption specs. What does it do and how does it do it?

Ludde: It is basically an encrypted wrapper around the BitTorrent traffic. This makes it a lot harder for Internet Service Providers to block or throttle the BitTorrent traffic, as they can't determine as easily if the traffic really is BitTorrent. Blocking is obviously of interest to them, since it has been estimated that at least 30% of all Internet traffic is BitTorrent.

All data packets are encrypted with a key generated at run time, so there is no way for a 3rd party to observe what kind of files that are being transmitted by just analysing the packet stream. However, characteristics of the BitTorrent protocol, such as packet sizes, or the fact that a client connects to a large number of peers, can still be used to infer that BitTorrent activity is going on, so the encryption is not a universal solution.

Alex H: Can the PHE specifications work with other protocols, or is it a BitTorrent-only thing?

Ludde: It was designed to be as general as possible, and to not be dependent on BitTorrent, so it can (in theory) be used to encrypt other protocols. Just like SSL can be used to encrypt other things than HTTP.

Alex H: What was it like collaborating with rival developers? Was it just "Team µTorrent" and "Team Azureus", or were there other individuals involved too?

Ludde: We are not really "rival developers" even though we work on "competing" clients. I have a healthy relationship with the Azureus team and we're cooperating openly. My goal is not to destroy Azureus. I want to provide a lightweight alternative to Azureus for the people that believe that Azureus's requirements in terms of CPU/Memory are too high.

Alex H: Last week Slyck.com published a story that revealed a deal between a company called PeerFactor and Ludvig Strigeus, µTorrent's developer. How does µTorrent fit into this? Is Ludde working for the "dark side"? Have you sold out as some people are claiming?

Ludde: I can't believe how much this deal has been blown up. The whole hysteria started with the Slyck.com article saying that µTorrent is cooperating with RetSpan and working with Anti-P2P organizations. Later the article was updated because that statement was factually incorrect. Yet I believe a large number of users still have doubts about µTorrent's legitimacy.

The deal as such is not even about µTorrent. I will provide the company (PeerFactor, a startup company started in late 2005), with a small DLL-file that can be used for one thing only - Downloading files from BitTorrent network. The deal is not between µTorrent and PeerFactor, and it does not affect µTorrent. I'm just using some of my expertise to help them develop an application that webmasters can use to publish big content on their websites. I don't even give out any source code.

I can't show you our agreement, but µTorrent is not even mentioned in our deal. There are no mentions of any Anti-P2P ideas, and PeerFactor owns NO rights to the BitTorrent code. The deal is just between me (Ludvig Strigeus) as a developer and PeerFactor. It's not related to µTorrent at all. The license has no malicious intent towards P2P users, and it does not affect µTorrent in any way. The contract explicitly states that they can only use it for the designated purpose, and not for anything else such as monitoring P2P users.

Alex H: Who was at the meeting with PeerFactor?

Ludde: I have not even met anyone in person, I havn't even talked to them on the phone! All our communication has been on e-mails and IRC. This is not a big contract. It's just a small side project to try to get some payment for the effort involved in writing a Bittorrent protocol stack.

Alex H: What does this .dll file do exactly?

Ludde: The DLL file component that I have exports a few basic functionalities such as

* Start downloading a torrent
* Stop it
* Pause
* Remove it
* Determine how many % was downloaded.

It contains no functionality whatsoever for retreiving IP-addresses of peers.

The DLL file wasn't written specifically for PeerFactor. It's a generic download DLL with a small size/footprint that I have developed as a separate project. I just made some minor adjustments so it would meet PeerFactor's requirements.

Alex H: Do you know, or can you speculate on what PeerFactor plans to do with the .dll?

Ludde: The goal is to use unused bandwidth of Internet users to distribute big files, like trial games, free trial music and trailers. It is not related to fake files.

Alex H: How is the deal structured? Is it a straight sale or a lease? Is there some kind of royalty payment to Ludde?

Ludde: It's a 6-month lease. PeerFactor will evaluate if the DLL fits with their requirements. No source is involved, and all ownership to the code belongs to me. I have not been paid anything, but if the service turns out to work, I will get some form of payment. I don't have an employment contract with PeerFactor. I do not work for them, and they do not have control over any decisions I make related to µTorrent.

Alex H: PeerFactor has ties to French anti-P2P company RetSpan. Is there still a relationship there?

Ludde: No, the person I've been in contact with has assured me that there is no relationship at all between PeerFactor and RetSpan. I trust him, and if it turns out that there is a connection, I will not work with them.

Alex H: The µTorrent website was put on a block list a few days ago. How did it happen? Is there anything on the µTorrent website that is a security risk for users?

Ludde: These blocklists are created by a bunch of over-paranoid people (Bluetack). The software PeerGuardian has temporarily handed over list creation to Bluetack, and Bluetack prefers to be better safe than sorry. Their decision was based on incorrect facts, and it will take some time before the block gets removed.

Alex H: There is a certain level of mistrust directed at closed source applications like µTorrent. Why is the µTorrent source code not available? Will µTorrent ever be open source?

Ludde: There are no plans to make µTorrent open source. If µTorrent becomes open source, it will result in hacked clients, or companies modifying the code and creating malware clients. If µTorrent is closed source, I can make sure that the quality of µTorrent stays high and that it doesn't become a bloated client. Further, it makes sure that the source code is not used by dubious companies or for dubious purposes.

Alex H: Is there anything in the µTorrent source code that would be considered a security risk to users, such as a "phone home" component or something that builds up a profile of the user?

Ludde: Not at all, µTorrent has an optional feature (enabled by default) that sends a unique random ID number when checking for new updates. This is used solely for the purpose of computing how many users that are actively using µTorrent. Azureus does the same thing, so it's nothing special really. A lot of internet-enabled programs do this without even telling the user. With µTorrent you have the option to turn it off if it's of concern to you.

Alex H: µTorrent is free, but donations are accepted. What other kinds of work have you done to make ends meet? Is there anyone you would refuse to work for?

Ludde: Working with an Anti-P2P company is certainly not a good idea, considering my interests in making the best BitTorrent client. I would not do that. Apart from that, I don't know. I will have to evaluate any possible offers and see if they match with what I think is fair and makes sense.

Alex H: I asked a similar question to this in our previous interview: How do you see BitTorrent developing over say, the next three years?

Ludde: This is a very hard question to answer. I definitely believe P2P is here to stay. I think ISPs will get a bigger role and start developing solutions to help P2P instead of working against it, for example cache mechanisms. I like the new law in France that legalizes P2P, and I hope that more countries will follow.

I think we'll start seeing BitTorrent more in embedded devices, such as set-top boxes. More services will be developed around BitTorrent to distribute legal content, and subscription based services such as high quality movies-on-demand instead of renting DVDs in the rental store.

Alex H: Thanks for your time, and good luck for the future.

Ludde: Thanks.

µTorrent Interview - October '05

First published here.

Alex H: Who makes up the µTorrent team?

µTorrent: Ludvig Strigeus (Ludde; Swedish) is the author and programmer of µTorrent. Serge Paquet (Vurlix; Canadian) has the project leader role, by coordinating releases, maintaining the website/forum, helps with debugging and helps the translators.

Alex H: With so many other BitTorrent clients out there, why did you guys decide to build another one?

Serge: There are three reasons that lead to the development of µTorrent. First, I got sick of large, slow and inefficient applications hogging all my resources so I wanted to build something tiny and powerful. Second, I was interested in the BitTorrent protocol, because it is simple, effective and relatively well documented (and I also downloaded a lot using it). Making an efficient BitTorrent client seemed like a good place to start. Finally, Ludde was looking for a project to work on and liked the idea. µTorrent was born.

Ludde: I'm somewhat obsessed by making tiny and resource friendly programs, and when Serge brought up the idea I thought sounded really interesting. I didn't plan to make a full featured client at that point, I just wanted to learn about the protocol and it seemed like a fun and challenging task to make a resource friendly BitTorrent client. I worked on it for a month or two and then I stopped developing it. Then I didn't work on it for a year, and now like a month ago I finished the remaining pieces and released version 1.0.

Alex H: What are some of the biggest changes between 1.1.3 and 1.1.4?

µTorrent: The network subsystem was partly rebuilt to a different model to accomodate the many faulty antivirus/firewall software in use today. The change even seems to have lowered resource usage slightly. Also new is better handling of skipped files within a torrent.

Alex H: µTorrent is REALLY small (1.1.4 is 91KB) how did you manage to squeeze so much code into one .exe file? What can you tell us about the development process?

µTorrent: µTorrent was built to be as tiny as possible from the very beginning. To achieve this, we avoided the use of many heavy libraries (notably C++ standard Library, stream facilities in particular) and put together our own substitutes. Finally, the executable was compressed to half its size.

Alex H: How does µTorrent, compared to other BitTorrent clients?

µTorrent: µTorrent performs extremely well. It is unrivaled in CPU/Memory usage and very high transfer speeds have been achieved. At this rate, the competition will soon be left in the dust.

Alex H: What are some of the goals you've set for the next version? How about the version after that?

µTorrent: Currently we're working on internationalization (unicode) to enable more people to use utorrent. We're also working towards DHT (decentralized mode) to help downloads where trackers die or go offline. We try to listen as much as possible to the quickly growing userbase, and by being active in the forums, we get a good idea of what users want.

Alex H: How do you see the BitTorrent protocol developing over, say the next three years?

µTorrent: BitTorrent's strength comes from many peers downloading the same (ideally few) torrents at the same time, exchanging pieces and increasing the swarm's efficiency. The more peers (the more popular) the torrent, the higher the swarm's overall throughput. The difference between BitTorrent and file sharing networks is that the distribution is focused. With the introduction of unattended downloading (usually through RSS), it's become possible to quickly distribute very large volumes of data as it is made available. It is the process of efficiently streaming (focusing) this growing volume of organised data that is becoming an active area of development.

Alex H: Has there been any contact between you guys and Bram Cohen?

µTorrent: Not yet. Perhaps we will get in touch when we reach the stage of improving BitTorrent itself.

Alex H: There is a lot of positive feedback on the µTorrent forums. What's your reaction been to the feedback?

µTorrent: The feedback is overwhelming. It seems that we hit a soft spot; an efficient BitTorrent client has been coveted by many users who were previously subjected to the higher CPU usage of python, memory usage of Java's VM, or their client's bad behaviour. µTorrent offers an attractive solution to many users.

Alex H: As a P2P application developer, are you concerned about any legal action against µTorrent?

µTorrent: Not really. Like the original BitTorrent client, µTorrent is a tool that helps download large files and reduce server load: nothing more, nothing less. µTorrent does its job, and it does it well, regardless of the use people have for it.

Alex H: What do you think file sharing applications actually accomplish?

µTorrent: File sharing applications accomplish many things. They lower distribution costs. They increase the availability of content. They help distribute that content faster. And it's all made easy and accessible. But more importantly, it sends a message: the information super highway is finally living up to its name.

Alex H: Thanks for talking to us, and good luck with the project.

Childhood Memories: Locked Away

First published here.

Everyone has at least one story they remember from their childhood, maybe from a picture or comic book, a television series or a movie. In later life we look back fondly on those stories, thinking "Wow! I remember that!" as we see them sitting on the shelves of a bookshop or a video store or increasingly online, where we suddenly find there are thousands of other people who remember those stories and who congregate in message boards or newsites dedicated solely to keeping them alive.

My little ball of childhood glee is Wind In The Willows, made by the legendary British studio Cosgrove Hall.

Continuing on from their 1983 movie of Kenneth Grahame's classic childrens book, Cosgrove Hall developed Wind In The Willows into a highly successful and award winning stop motion series (stop motion animation? Think Wallace & Gromit). In fact they made, five 13-episode series out of it, plus another full length movie. Cosgrove Hall managed to do the seemingly impossible: take a much loved classic and do a screen version that was faithful to the book. It won awards. It was lauded in the press. Princess Margaret turned up for the premiere.

I remember my mother liking it too because it was one of the few shows on television that was guaranteed to contain absolutely no swearing, violence, dangerous stunts or anything else that might influence a young mind for the worse.

She (illegally) made compilation tapes of the series as they aired on TV and I'd watch them over and over again. Over the years, those old VHS tapes degraded or were accidentally taped over and now I only have four and a half barely watchable episodes out of the sixty five that were made.

Now, after more than 20 years, thousands of production hours and millions of happy children, you'd think you'd be able to buy Wind In The Willows on DVD, wouldn't you?

Well, you can't. The original movie was released in 2004 by A&E Home Video. Series 1 was only released on DVD less than a year ago. Series 2 made it a few months later. A&E plan on releasing the second movie in a few weeks time but, get this, don't really feel like releasing series 3, 4 or 5. Oh, and any/all DVDs released will be Region 1 encoded, with no plans to even distribute them outside of North America and Canada.

This is why I hate media producers with a passion. To a Wind In The Willows fan like myself, this is akin to only releasing the first two Lord of the Rings movies on DVD, or George Lucas deciding that he's not going to release The Empire Strikes Back in a Collector's Edition Star Wars boxed set. Over the years various companies have taken Wind In The Willows and done the usual release-three-random-episodes-and-forget-about-it routine, but this is the first time anyone has released entire seasons at a time. Now they don't think the "demand" will remain steady.

Well, considering the fact you can convert anything from analogue to digital with less than $500 worth of equipment and software, what is the damned problem here? Hell, give the master tapes to me and I'll do it for free. If you can't be bothered making pretty packaging and sending out stock to hundreds of shops, why not make an .iso file and release the content via BitTorrent? I gather there are a number of torrent sites around who'd just love to distribute legal content, even if few people in the media business actually care about it.

Content producers are so blasé about their damned important intellectual property it never fails to astound me.

Take the BBC as a prime example.

During the 60s and 70s they managed to wipe thousands of programmes by taping over them. Tape was expensive and, well, nobody really wanted to watch this stuff again, did they?

To this day, there are huge holes in the BBC archives where episodes Dr Who, Z-Cars and Dad's Army should be, but aren't because nobody could be bothered storing them. Well guess what? People do want to watch this stuff again.

People buy boxed sets of TV shows. People buy boxed sets of old TV shows. People dedicate hours and hours of their free time trying to track down missing episodes of progammes like The Goon Show in some strange kind of modern day media treasure hunt.

We don't need great catastrophies like nuclear war or global warming to destroy our culture. All we need to do is let the media companies store it for us and everything will be gone in a few decades.

Salary Caps For Actors?

First published here.

One of the problems with using a "Shock and Awe" strategy in battle is that you can never tell if it works. Imagine Mel Gibson's William Wallace in Braveheart announcing to his small army of Scotsmen, "Aye, the only reason we beat the fooken English is because we lifted our kilts and waved our genitals aroond". A blood spattered Celtic warrior turns and replies, "Nah, fightin' for our homes and families gave us the courage to defeat them".

"It was the cock-waving I tell yer!" screams Wallace.

The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has favoured the cock-waving approach in its battle against its perceived enemy (its owners' customers). The plan is to sue large numbers of people and publicize the actions in the hope everyone will be too scared to oppose them and, after years of using this tactic it seems to be failing.

Patti Santangelo is the most recognisable person to stand up and fight the RIAA's accusations in court, and just when things seemed to be going the RIAA's way, too!

The MPAA (Motion Picture Associatioin of America) on the other hand has tried the "surgical strike" method, and has been having much more sucess. Their actions last week against a number of Torrent and Newsgroup sites have already seen a number of those targeted close shop. More will probably capitulate as the MPAA drags out the court procedings and stretches the indexing sites' legal budgets to zero.

The RIAA and MPAA have so far been reactionary in their dealings with new p2p technology. Little, if any, effort has been made by them to address the root cause of their problems - perceived loss of income.

The typical tech company approach to this kind of problem is to get a bunch of smart guys, stick them in a room with tens of millions of dollars worth of cool toys and tell them to come up with something brilliant. It works more often than not, as well. Simultaneously, company executives sit down and work out how to fight a holding action against their competitor. How long can they maintain their current profit margins? How can they reduce overheads? How much coffee to the engineers need before the "something brilliant" is ready for market?

This is NOT something the movie studios and record companies are doing. There is, however, one tried and true way of reducing costs during tough times: salary caps.

I don't know about you, but whenever I see some actor receiving a $25 million dollar payment for doing a movie I get really worried for the movie studio. Don't they know they're being decimated by file sharing? Haven't they heard that their entire industry is poised on the edge of bankruptcy? How can they possibly afford to fork out twenty five million bucks and continue saying that I am the f*cking problem to their bottom line?!?!?

Unfortunately, the entertainment industry isn't run along the lines of a free market and even "free" markets are regulated to make sure they stay free. If there weren't regulations in place, they'd be called "anarchic markets" and there'd be thriving, legal industries producing and selling everything from nuclear bombs to organs harvested from African children.

So No. You can't do whatever the hell you feel like in a free market. We came out of the trees, got civilized and made rules which can be changed as and when they need to be to ensure there's some level of fairness in the world.

Salary caps were introduced to professional sports to maintain the competetive environment, otherwise a rich team would simply buy all the best players and win every game. As you can guess, this would be pretty damned boring to the fans who'd quickly lose interest. As people stop going to games, less money comes in. When income drops to a certain level, the game goes bankrupt.

It's well worth noting as well that salary caps were partly introduced to professional sports to keep the fans happy. I imagine it would be very difficult to watch a player earing $20 million a year screw up and continue believing they were worth $20 million a year. Anger towards the player for dropping the ball, anger towards the team for overpaying someone who drops the ball, anger towards the league for crying hardship this season and putting up ticket prices...

Until the MPAA starts being proactive and sorting out the problems in their own back yard, I'm not going to feel guilty for sneaking into a ball game...er...downloading a movie.


Special Competition!

Pick the three things you'd most like to be enforced on the MPAA's member studios:

1. Half of all actor salaries over $10 million dollars must be given to charity.

2. No actor or director may recieve more than $20 million for their work on a film.

3. 20% of all profits over $100 million made on any movie must be used to fund projects by emerging directors.

4. All sequals must contain 90% of the "stars" that appeared in the first (sucessful) movie.

5. People or companies with a financial interests in a film must be disclosed in the credits.

6. Songs appearing in a film's "official soundtrack" must be audible for at least 20 seconds during the film.

7. Any actor nominated for an Oscar must have performed in at least one stage production during the previous year.

8. No studio executive may receive more than $5 million dollars in salary or benefits while their employer is engaged in legal action against individual file sharers.

9. All studios must give 5% of their after tax profits to an independent organization for the purposes of commercializing p2p technologies.

10. Any person working for an MPAA member studio must take a short course in alternative licensing, such as the Creative Commons.

Answers on a postcard please. Or better yet, send them directly to the MPAA (and you never know, they might send you a poster or something).

Office of the Chairman and CEO
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