>> ^LordOderus:
Awesome. This is actually the second mash up I've seen on the sift that is surprisingly awesome.
The other is Closer (NIN) and Come together (Beatles) and is located here:
http://www.videosift.com/video/Beatles-vs-Nine-Inch-Nails-Come-C
loser-Together


Dude EVERY SONG EVER MADE can be mashed together with Closer, it's like bacon.

http://www.videosift.com/video/NiN-vs-50-cent-Closer-in-tha-Club

Awesome. This is actually the second mash up I've seen on the sift that is surprisingly awesome.

The other is Closer (NIN) and Come together (Beatles) and is located here:

http://www.videosift.com/video/Beatles-vs-Nine-Inch-Nails-Come-Closer-Together

There are some really odd Nine Inch Nails parallels with this movie. Around the time of it's release With Teeth was still being called Bleedthrough and the NIN web site had quotes from the Lathe of Heaven (Bale's character works with a lathe in the movie).

With this next one I'm very anti-spoiler when it comes to movies so I don't want to say too much, but originally Bleedthrough would have been more of a concept album, and had themes very similar to the movie's. The last song on With Teeth is an example of a song that probably was left over from the original concept.

Also the main character's name, Trevor Reznik... similar to someone else's.

I've been a Weird Al fan ever since his first album and it never ceases to amaze me how he can capture the sound of a particular band so succinctly. Dog Eat Dog = Talking Heads, Germs = NIN, etc. And those aren't even parodies of existing songs.

I remember seeing an interview with Mark Mothersbaugh regarding Weird Al's Devo-esque "Dare to be Stupid". He summed it up with:

"I hate him..."

Porn. Trigger word for scanners.

I love how everyone tries to be Wallmart and regulate people's content regardless of the media platform it is on.

Sounds like the Apple / NIN fiasco.

Bioware's going with a mature theme with this RPG, and considering the pressure many games see to release it in the Teen rating area to maximize sales I'm rather happy about this (a PG-13 Terminator movie..... really?).

Since the game's gonna see an M rating, that means they can market it with a mature theme too, which I think is what the marketing team's probably enjoying in indulging in just for themselves here with this video.

I didn't exactly see it as a 300'ish video, minus the arrows raining from the sky part but hey. None of us where in the marketer's heads when this was made (Id take NIN over MM too, but I'm not complaining).

I'm looking forward to this game, and happy to see the naughty bits aren't being bleached out to reach the teens who are the one's most likely to not have much old school RPG experience, and I hope this game sparks a new Bioware RPG trilogy.

>> ^L0cky:
I agree entirely. I don't see a post here that doesn't.
There's a difference between being allowed to profit, and actually profiting. If your company doesn't offer a good product or service that can make a profit then it needs to change it's product or service into something that does.
However, what we have are a few business models that have grown with a century of abundant profit and have come to take it for granted. When the world around them starts to change and they start becoming less profitable; instead of changing their business model they have clung on and tried to force the world from changing instead.
Meanwhile, smarter people who treat their customers as the market dictators instead of either dumb consumer sheep or criminals are taking all the profit from them.



You mention earlier that NIN and Radiohead are leading the way in this new age.
However, these are established acts with money from the old system. How can an independent artist without any financial backing do the things that are required to keep up in the digital age?
What you propose would lead to a world without a lot of the music that could be created with financial backing. The only successful artists will be those who can hold down a full time job, and build an electronic distribution system that can be protected from piracy, and create the music, market it and sell it.
A lot of the musicians don't get into the game for money, but to do something they love for a living. As it is, it's simply more difficult to do that.
If you're saying the industries should adapt to protect themselves and their products and are expected to work within the bounds of the law to produce and protect their products, then I don't see how this court case is not them doing that.
If you're saying all businesses should also protect themselves against any violations of the law then I think you are expecting too much. Although Pirate Bay is not violating any laws, copying and distributing itself is, and so expecting businesses to adapt to protect against this kind of law breaking is far too much. You wouldn't expect a business to have its own army or police force to uphold the law, so why can the music business not expect to receive protection too?
But what exactly is a good way of distributing music that also prevents piracy?
I'm sure the music industry would be keen to hear any thoughts on this.
What is this magical business model that would allow artists to be paid for what they do, and also prevent people wanting to copy it?
I think the industry is doing it's best to protect itself and adapt to the challenges.

Btw just for the record, although in general I am against copying software/music/films etc (unless there are alternative ways of the poorest and most innovative people getting paid but allowing copying) I personally think this particular case is bullshit. I don't believe they should be prosecuted as I can't see what laws have been broken.
If the interested parties want to protect their industries then I believe there should be some kind of change in the law, so at least sites like Pirate Bay can know they are breaking a law, as opposed to operating believing that they are not breaking the law.

Like all issues, Piracy is not black and white and I find that people arguing for either side are frustratingly dogmatic about pointing out arguments that only support their side. Ironically, the people that I've seen that argue from a wider perspective are the people that set up and run piratebay.

As an example, I often see people citing the following in favour of piracy:

1. 'Piracy' as try-before-you-buy to prevent getting defrauded by lying marketers.
2. Piracy allows people to make use of works where the user would otherwise be unable to pay for them.

On the first note, if you're being realistic it's a nice ideal but one that isn't representative of the whole truth. I have downloaded games from the piratebay and other sources; played them through to the end and thoroughly enjoyed them. Often, I have then not gone on to purchase them. I would imagine the same is true for many people who give this argument, as well as those who don't.

On the flip side, I have purchased said games where the game gives me a large amount of replayability and I continue to play it; or where the games has online functionality that requires a purchased key.

However, I should point out that I have also paid for shareware with the exact same reasoning. Software and games that are legal to copy, distribute and use freely where payment is optional, that I have then gone on to purchase.

On the second note, being 'unable' to pay for them is contextual. Like everyone else I have a budget (be it $40/£40 or a bazillion cash monies). For each individual, this budget is quantifiable and correlates to a specific amount of possible purchases and profit made. Being unable to pay for something may not mean that I literaly don't have the money to pay for game X, but that I don't have the money to pay for game X and movie Y and have chosen instead to pay for game X and pirate movie Y instead.

This leads to arguments against piracy:

1. Piracy is theft.
2. For each copy sold, an amount of profit has been taken away.
3. It's the people at the bottom of the industry chain that suffer the most.
4. If nobody paid for intellectual property, nobody would create it.

The first argument has been made many times, and countered with the fact that stealing results in somebody having less of something; which leads on to the second point.

However, as I pointed out, people have quantifiable budgets; and I believe that people spend their gaming / software / entertainment budgets (for that's what defines them). There's a mistake on the part of people who are against piracy in imagining that there is somehow an infinite consumer budget for their property. Meaning that for every copy of a $40 game pirated, they have lost $40. But if my budget allows for me to purchase two games, and I purchase two while pirating two then I have given my entire budget to the games industry. It's not possible for them to have received double my budget, therefore they have not lost half of it regardless of what I do.

I'll repeat the point: I have given my entire budget. What more could somebody who provides a service want? The fact that I gave that budget to person X and not person Y has no bearing on the effects of piracy and is more about the quality of the product which lead me to my purchasing decisions.

I can't imagine that all of the people downloading from piratebay are stockpiling their money into a giant vault with a 'Money we didn't use to pay for intellectual property' label on it.

Going back to points made by the guys who run piratebay themself, along with many individuals with their eye on modern forms of distribution; the above misconception and imaginary infinite budget comes from a dead capitalistic culture where distributors (agents, publishers, managers and other middlemen) have come to assume that payment for creativity is somehow a virtue and not a benefit to be grateful for.

By the same logic, I should start creating simple matchstick men; or drawing squares on paper and wonder why I can not sell them for money (although Martin Creed may beg to differ).

Making profit on something that you have created is a boon, and should not be taken for granted. If you fail to sell something in a world of digital distribution then you have to change either what you are creating or how you are distributing it.

Another point that is often unmentioned is that; in terms of intellectual property (rather than a physical manifestation of work) your sale is based entirely on limitation and restriction, rather than production. You are taking profit on providing the service of not stopping somebody from making a copy of your work; rather than taking profit for creating a copy of your work. This is what licensing, patenting and copyright is all about.

For those who say that it's the people at the bottom of the industry that are hurt the most from copyright infringement (the people who actually do the work), I propose that this isn't a symptom of piracy at all and is entirely about how companies own, sell and trade intellectual property, and how corporation and public companies obey their bottom line. If their sales are hurting, they recoup their costs by hitting the people at the bottom while protecting the incomes of those at the top. This is an entirely different subject of wrong that would take us way off topic and is in no way limited to the effects of piracy.

However, to say that entire industries will die if people stopped paying for them is, in fact valid. So lets imagine for a moment that we live in a world where there is no copyright law; no intellectual property or patents. Is this a world without music? A world without movies or games? In that world, the first thing that would happen is that people will start paying other people to make these things; and that might just be a world where people pay other people for creating something that they want, rather than paying a middleman who takes the largest cut of profit using a retroactive 'license' for some sub par product that they bought from someone else and then marketed as good.

In a world without the expensive middleman, artists can take more risks; independants who work for pleasure rather than profit can thrive; and the enthusiast can sell without trying to satisfy a middleman's arbitrary bar of statistical sellability for a publishing deal.

With Radiohead, NIN, iTunes, netflix, steam and the slow rolling back of DRM, it's a world that we are heading towards; and a world that the piratebays and napsters helped to create.

Awesome. This is the song that seriously got me into NIN.

That was great.

I also like his cover of NIN's "Hurt" very much.

Guess I'll leave it as-is for now, then. The previous embed was blocked in the US.

In reply to this comment by dag:
You can use *unblocked, but it should only be used if you know for sure that it's not blocked. That link you provided, for example, is most definitely region blocked for me here in Australia.

In reply to this comment by xxovercastxx:
So, how do I remove a *blocked flag?

http://www.videosift.com/video/NIN-The-Hand-That-Feeds

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

You can use *unblocked, but it should only be used if you know for sure that it's not blocked. That link you provided, for example, is most definitely region blocked for me here in Australia.

In reply to this comment by xxovercastxx:
So, how do I remove a *blocked flag?

http://www.videosift.com/video/NIN-The-Hand-That-Feeds

So, how do I remove a *blocked flag?

http://www.videosift.com/video/NIN-The-Hand-That-Feeds

I didn't read Gatsby until I was about 37 years old and was very surprised. Good story, but great writing. Poetic.

I flipped through that Bair bio of Anais and I'm really sorry to say that it made my hair stand on end with anger. She took a lot of really cheap shots and the whole thing seemed like some sort of personal vendetta, as if Nin had snubbed Bair at some time and Bair never forgave her.

I'm a writer/poet myself, and...I know there are two sides to every story, but Bair took the most negative slant she could about everything that Anais did and it flat out pissed me off.

Millions of people will be Anais Nin fans for generations to come.

Nobody's going to remember who the hell Bair was.

Ah, that's off my chest.

Thanks for touching base and for starting that thread. It's always fun to see what everybody else is reading.

Caio.

In reply to this comment by blahpook:
I'm glad you like Gatsby - the first time I read it was for school, the second time for pleasure, and wow is it well-written and oh so damn clever. If you like Anais, Deidre Bair wrote a huge and scintillating biography on her that I could not put down.

In reply to this comment by rougy:
1. Lolita
2. Tropic of Cancer
3. On the Road
4. Anais Nin's Diary, Vol II
5. Tales of the South Pacific
6. Sophie's Choice
7. The Spy Who Loved Me
8. The Great Gatsby
9. Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s
10. To Kill a Mockingbird

*****

I really liked The Hobbit, too.

1. Lolita
2. Tropic of Cancer
3. On the Road
4. Anais Nin's Diary, Vol II
5. Tales of the South Pacific
6. Sophie's Choice
7. The Spy Who Loved Me
8. The Great Gatsby
9. Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s
10. To Kill a Mockingbird

*****

I really liked The Hobbit, too.