Twilight: Eclipse looks like a bag of crap.
Why did I watch the teaser trailer for the new goddamn Twilight movie? Certainly it wasn’t because I expected to enjoy it, or for it to make me think that the movie might actually be good. Oh, I know, it’s because I wanted to see how many times this car crash was going to flip down the road before it settled in the ditch and awaited the Firemen with their jaws of life to pry out the lifeless bodies inside.
Ask and ye shall receive, bitches!
Seriously, what garbage is this? Does Stephanie Meyer (I don’t know or care if I’m spelling her last name wrong; she’s too crappy a writer for me to look it up) think that people actually say things like “I’m going to protect you until your heart stops beating?” Why do so many girls fall for this crap? Look, some blonde chick said something! Some pale asshole with a broken nose says something! Some underwear model has his shirt off! And some brown-haired chick is pretending she’s a good actor!
If anyone wonders what team I’m on, it’s neither Team Jacob nor Team Edward: I’m on Team Shoving My Goddamn Head in a Heated Oven Until the Stupid Goes Away.
Steve Jobs is a modern-day Thomas Edison.
And not in a good way, according to Whirling Dervish Merlin Mann, in a post on his big-man blog “kung fu grippe.” (It’s a tumblr blog, so you know he’s important!)
Merlin wrote a nice post about Thomas Edison and over-zealous patent-protection:
You a big fan of aggressive IP enforcement? Like to think a well-litigated market is a healthy market? Hate those little entrepreneurial nuisances like “competition from emerging media?”
Well, then, you would have loved the early 20th century.
Because you had to get Thomas Edison’s permission to make any movie. Then you had to pay him.
There’s a common thread with these turf wars, be it Edison, Apple, Disney, or anyone else: the upstart makes something and bucks a previous trend, revolutionizes something and revels in the ability to buck said trend. Said upstart becomes a new market leader, and fights like the Dickens (literally; Charles was a bruiser) to keep other upstarts from doing the same thing to him. They’re like the Sith in that way.
Thomas Edison, for a time, actually had patents on making movies. The whole goddamn process. He wanted to get money for any use of his technologies, because all of his ideas were his own, I’m sure, with zero influence from anyone or anything that came before him, and because his patents covered movie making (basically the concept, given the times) he could legally put the kibosh on the movie industry. Had he been successful, in fact, the industry — and perhaps the entire crapdamn world — would be completely different than it is today. But he wasn’t successful, which is good, because I knew Thomas and he was a dick. Seriously, Thomas Edison was a total douche. We had lunch a few times and every single time he’d get up “to use the bathroom” right before the bill came, then would climb out of the bathroom window and ride away on his mangey horse.
I got him back when I ran over his horse with my Model-T, but that’s a story for another time.
Anyway, filmmakers wanted to be filmmakers in a way they could afford, without paying crazy royalties. So they went from the East Coast to the West Coast, to get out of the range of Edison’s lawyers.
And they made Hollywood.
Ignoring American Idol and Arrested Development, I think we can agree that it was a good thing.
According to Merlin:
The end came with a federal court decision in United States v. Motion Picture Patents Co. on October 1, 1915, which ruled that the MPPC’s acts went “far beyond what was necessary to protect the use of patents or the monopoly which went with them” and was therefore an illegal restraint of trade under the Sherman Antitrust Act.
So overzealous protection of patents — at all costs by a douche — resulted in a functional nullification of said patents, with an empire in ruins, and all the rest.
Okay, Edison’s empire wasn’t in ruins, as he had other logs in the fire. I just wish it had destroyed him because as I said, he was a total douche, and one time he stole Amelia Earheart out from under my nose at a barn dance.
Anyway:
So, to summarize.
Early 1900s:
- Maniac entrepreneur creates monopolistic business models plus means for legally enforcing them.
- People balk, running away from the center of power in order to create a sunny, guerilla-run safe haven.
- Maniac gets all mad about his system breaking and sues/blames everybody he can find.
One hundred ten years later:
- Maniacs still try to imitate and enforce Edison-like, legally-enforced monopolies.
- People still balk and run away from the center of power to create sunny, guerilla-run safe havens.
- Maniacs still get all mad about their system breaking and still sue/blame everybody they can find.
Yep. Even today, the maniacs win for a while. But those safe havens have gotten surprisingly mobile, and increasingly difficult to un-safen. Funny how that works.
The media landscape is the way it is because patent enforcement was thwarted. And as much as I love Steve and want to have his manbabies, the world is better for that failure of enforcement, goddamn it.
God, it’s so weird disagreeing with something Steve’s done. It feels wrong, but I can’t help it.
Make the pain stop!
Anyway. Steve himself benefited from Edison’s inability to enforce his patents, and from the inability of innumerable other people to keep their products proprietary. The proper way to spread culture is to let ideas out, let people remix them and make them bigger and better.
Oh, God, I think I’m going to throw up.
Apple benefitted from using other people’s ideas, and Steve even acknowledged that at one point explicitly, saying “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” The value of that theft, Steve — I’m so sorry! — the value of that theft isn’t any less just because you’re the one being stolen from.
And, anyway, Steve — I love you! — it’s not like you have anything to worry about, because you’re Steve goddamn Jobs, and you’ve got the most fertile, supple, kissable brain in the world; you can rebuild any industry over breakfast!
Shut up.
(Not you, Steve. Everyone else.)
Is Jonathan Schwartz a filthy scum liar?
Without any concrete evidence, I’m going to say that, yes, the former CEO of Sun is a filthy scum liar.
Why do I say this? Because when talking about a conversation he supposedly had with my close, personal friend Steve Jobs back in 2003 about Sun’s “Project Looking Glass” ripping off Apple’s IP, Schwartz claims he got the upper hand on Steve in a verbal battle of wits:
My response was simple. “Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence – do you own that IP?” Concurrence was a presentation product built by Lighthouse Design, a company I’d help to found and which Sun acquired in 1996. Lighthouse built applications for NeXTSTEP, the Unix based operating system whose core would become the foundation for all Mac products after Apple acquired NeXT in 1996. Steve had used Concurrence for years, and as Apple built their own presentation tool, it was obvious where they’d found inspiration. “And last I checked, MacOS is now built on Unix. I think Sun has a few OS patents, too.” Steve was silent.
Since everybody know that Steve would never let himself get pushed around like that, we can safely assume that Jonathan Schwartz is a filthy scum liar. Also he probably lied about the Concurrence/Keynote thing, and Sun having any patents at all, because there’s no way that Steve would ever be so colossally short-sighted to threaten to sue someone who could immediate sue him back, or to hold such an egregious double-standard. Obviously. Steve’s a super-genius who doesn’t need to steal anyone else’s great ideas because he’s got so crapdamn many of his own.
Google is evil!
You’re wrong, Techcrunch!
Suck it, Arrrrrington, you just got owned by Tynt Insight. They’re calling you out on a recent post you made, citing Gigya numbers that place Facebook as the largest single source of sharing traffic online. But these people at Tynt say that you were wrong! Boom!
The fundamental breakdown is that the TechCrunch numbers don’t account for sharing by email, or sharing in other online areas like discussion forums, both of which are very significant.
How does that make you feel, Arrington? It feels like defeat to me. Time to fire Sarah Lacy, MG Siegler, and all those interns, and shutter the site.
Oh, god, this is so amazing. I need a cigarette.
Apple’s unskippable ads.
As you all know, I’m not a big fan of patents — they need to shut up — even though I am a massive fan of Apple, and of my close, personal friend Steve Jobs. These two views make me feel conflicted about who to root for when Steve does silly things like trying to sue HTC out of existence for, basically, making the best phones they can. On the one hand, Steve has the legal right to do this, but on the other soft, never spoiled by a day of physical labor hand it’s kind of a dick move.
I’m sorry, Steve, I’m not calling you a dick — I think you’re amazing. I just think it’s a dick move. You understand.
Anyway, my personal view is to let the goddamn market decide, and let things like the fact that Apple just makes the best phone and is clearly still gaining marketshare, despite what some recent asshole reports have said — lying scum! — be the big thing. I mean, really, does Steve view HTC as a threat? I haven’t asked him about this specifically, because when I was about to my wife said she needed the phone to call her divorce attorney for some reason, but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t see them as a threat. Why would he? It’s HTC, for crap’s sake.
Patently Advertising
A blog called Patently Apple, whose entire existence is devoted to analyzing Apple’s patent filings, posted a write-up a while ago about an advertising system that Apple applied for a patent for which included integrating an unskippable advertising system into their OS. This caused a lot of goddamn furor because apparently people have enough of a time putting up with watching ads when they’re using their browser, let alone when they’re trying to launch it. It certainly would be revolutionary if it happened. Anyway, now Patently Apple is talking about a new patent by Apple for a new system to make unskippable-unless-you-pay-extra ads for videos you watch on your iPhone, iPod, or revolutionary new iPad. The full details are pretty long, but you should read them. They’re interesting terrifying.
Basically, the ad system would automatically insert commercial breaks at points in the video timeline. You could either sit through them like a good consumer or, if you preferred, you could pay money to skip them, also like a good consumer. The ads must be addressed either by viewing or goddamn paying in order to unlock the next section of content. The kicker? This unlocking could be temporary, so you could conceivably have to pay multiple times to watch the content you’ve possibly already purchased to get on your device in the first place.
Crap.
Several things strike me as wrong with this:
- Prior art – I’m pretty sure I’ve seen ads like this online. A lot. Like, everywhere, and for years. Maybe it rates a different goddamn patent if it relates to downloadable media? But I’ve seen ads in video podcasts I watch. Hmm.
- It’s a software patent – and Software patents, as discussed before, are dirty scum.
- It’s evil – No doubt about it, the consumer’s getting screwed in this deal. Whatever happened to owning content? Oh, right, Steve told me once that we never buy video, we just rent it.
I know I’m the main Apple fanboy, and I love Steve so much I’d actually jump on a live Steve Ballmer just to save him from the bald explosion, but this is wrong. All this elaborate work to squeeze more revenue out of loyal customers? How could you do that, Steve? Your customers adore you, they look at you, rightly so, as a crapdamn God, and stuff like this makes it seem like you hate them, or are at least indifferent toward them. Even the bastards over at Google aren’t trying to push through anything as invasive as this. Why do you and Apple keep filing such absurd pa – Oh, wait, I get it! Apple’s making a joke! Steve’s creating all of these bizarre patents to parody to the patent system, to show how ludicrous it is! Ha ha! Good one, Steve, you hilarious, sexy bastard!
Genius!
Victor Champ needs to shut up.
That furry jackass Victor Champ is at it again, going on and on and on about how the new screenshots of Courier that Microsoft released show that Microsoft gets the future in a way that Apple doesn’t. Can you believe that? This is the height of his lunacy:
This is Microsoft firing on all cylinders, taking the time to consider how a handheld device could be used to make something, not just to passively surf through the iTunes store and buy movies.
Oh, you smug brown son of a bitch, I will destroy you. Do you hear me?
iPad: The future starts April 3rd.
As reported by almost every human being on the planet, Apple has announced the street date of the iPad: It’s coming April 3rd, with preorders starting March 12th. The future’s coming soon, bitches!
I know I already reviewed the iPad, but that was the super-special Mossberg edition; maybe I should review the version that all of you plebes will be getting. Hmm.
Anyway, I’m super-excited about this: even though I have dozens of prototypes I’m going to buy four of the commercial-release versions of the iPad, because if I do, maybe my close, personal friend Steve Jobs will finally start to love me. Hell, I’m already in line to preorder!
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