Intellectual Property - In All Fairness!

[FirstAscent]

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

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[Rassah]

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

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.

[FirstAscent]

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.

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

[BitterTea]

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.

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

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?

[FirstAscent]

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.

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

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?

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

[Rassah]

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.

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

*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?

[MoonShadow]

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.

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

Are you serious?

[BitterTea]

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.

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

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?

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

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.

[FirstAscent]

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.

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

*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?

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

[FirstAscent]

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.

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

Are you serious?

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

[Rassah]

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.

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

*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?

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

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.

[FirstAscent]

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.

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/

Few hundred thousand > $10,000

Your lhs and rhs are both underestimated.

5 years of paying salaries and benefits > 6 to 12 months of paying salaries and benefits

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

[FirstAscent]

Well, to be technical, they could've waited and spent about $10,000...

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.

[BitterTea]

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.

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/

Few hundred thousand > $10,000

Your lhs and rhs are both underestimated.

5 years of paying salaries and benefits > 6 to 12 months of paying salaries and benefits

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

You got sucked in to his meaningless tangent. Back on topic...

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.

Do you have a response to this, FirstAscent? Why do you get to use violence against me for using my property (pen & paper, computer, etc) in a manner in which you disapprove and get to claim the moral high ground?

[FirstAscent]

You got sucked in to his meaningless tangent. Back on topic...

No, I created this tangent. You were the one who deemed it meaningless and tried to avoid getting sucked into it.

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.

Do you have a response to this, FirstAscent? Why do you get to use violence against me for using my property (pen & paper, computer, etc) in a manner in which you disapprove and get to claim the moral high ground?

One of the issues I believe are faults with most of those I argue with here is their preference for an extreme one size fits all philosophical statement about a world that is filled with very many things. Provide a concrete specific example regarding your grievance with IP laws.

[MoonShadow]

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.

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

Are you serious?

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

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_1995_Dec_4/ai_17812444/

It should be obvious that the cost savings of current hardware compared to a 100 node Sun workstation cluster would be significant, but also the vast amount of highly skilled labor required in both the construction of the cluster itself, and of the custom rendering software, would be entirely unnecessary today.  Sure, Renderman might not exist, but alternatives likely would, such as VALVe's own game rendering engine.  Renderman was created for that movie, and once created was available for all such followup CGI movies.  Yet, if the movie had not been made, CGI rendering software would likely still currently exist due to first person gaming.  So if the script had been shelved, and someone were to dust it off today, the production budget would be lower by an order of magnitude if the voice actors didn't have to be Tom Hanks and Tim Allen.   Granted, it still wouldn't be cheap, but it still would have been a winner on the direct-to-video path.

As noted, however, it still wouldn't have any bearing on the principles of the matter even if I'm completely full of bovine fecal matter.

[FirstAscent]

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_1995_Dec_4/ai_17812444/

It should be obvious that the cost savings of current hardware compared to a 100 node Sun workstation cluster would be significant, but also the vast amount of highly skilled labor required in both the construction of the cluster itself, and of the custom rendering software, would be entirely unnecessary today.  Sure, Renderman might not exist, but alternatives likely would, such as VALVe's own game rendering engine.  Renderman was created for that movie, and once created was available for all such followup CGI movies.  Yet, if the movie had not been made, CGI rendering software would likely still currently exist due to first person gaming.  So if the script had been shelved, and someone were to dust it off today, the production budget would be lower by an order of magnitude if the voice actors didn't have to be Tom Hanks and Tim Allen.   Granted, it still wouldn't be cheap, but it still would have been a winner on the direct-to-video path.

As noted, however, it still wouldn't have any bearing on the principles of the matter even if I'm completely full of bovine fecal matter.

I doubt you spent as much time as I did reading Siggraph papers in the late eighties and nineties. Today's rendering hardware and software algorithms largely exist due to the pioneering research done twenty plus years ago. VALVe's own game rendering engine is a byproduct of research which began at Utah, then extended to Cornell and other places, and then to private firms such as SGI and LucasFilm.

RenderMan was not created for that movie (Toy Story). It was created in the eighties to make movies (plural).

Once you remove the hardware technicians to create a network of rendering nodes, and remove the cost to pay for famous voice talent, what are you left with? Well, a lot. The first thing you need to understand is, first person gaming has benefited heavily from the research done over the past 50 years, of which the very talented team that ultimately became a part of Pixar are significantly responsible. That's the first thing you're ignoring. What else? Concept artists, storyboarders, modelers, riggers, shader writers, procedural geometry coders, texture artists, set designers, animators, lighters, directors, cinematographers, producers, on location research, general research and development, etc.

Take a look at the credits the next time you watch a Pixar movie. I honestly don't know if you're ignoring this out of genuine ignorance, of because it's convenient for you to do so. I made a post about animators. Care to address it?

[MoonShadow]

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_1995_Dec_4/ai_17812444/

It should be obvious that the cost savings of current hardware compared to a 100 node Sun workstation cluster would be significant, but also the vast amount of highly skilled labor required in both the construction of the cluster itself, and of the custom rendering software, would be entirely unnecessary today.  Sure, Renderman might not exist, but alternatives likely would, such as VALVe's own game rendering engine.  Renderman was created for that movie, and once created was available for all such followup CGI movies.  Yet, if the movie had not been made, CGI rendering software would likely still currently exist due to first person gaming.  So if the script had been shelved, and someone were to dust it off today, the production budget would be lower by an order of magnitude if the voice actors didn't have to be Tom Hanks and Tim Allen.   Granted, it still wouldn't be cheap, but it still would have been a winner on the direct-to-video path.

As noted, however, it still wouldn't have any bearing on the principles of the matter even if I'm completely full of bovine fecal matter.

I doubt you spent as much time as I did reading Siggraph papers in the late eighties and nineties. Today's rendering hardware and software algorithms largely exist due to the pioneering research done twenty plus years ago. VALVe's own game rendering engine is a byproduct of research which began at Utah, then extended to Cornell and other places, and then to private firms such as SGI and LucasFilm.

RenderMan was not created for that movie (Toy Story). It was created in the eighties to make movies (plural).

Once you remove the hardware technicians to create a network of rendering nodes, and remove the cost to pay for famous voice talent, what are you left with? Well, a lot. The first thing you need to understand is, first person gaming has benefited heavily from the research done over the past 50 years, of which the very talented team that ultimately became a part of Pixar are significantly responsible. That's the first thing you're ignoring. What else? Concept artists, storyboarders, modelers, riggers, shader writers, procedural geometry coders, texture artists, set designers, animators, lighters, directors, cinematographers, producers, on location research, general research and development, etc.

Take a look at the credits the next time you watch a Pixar movie. I honestly don't know if you're ignoring this out of genuine ignorance, of because it's convenient for you to do so. I made a post about animators. Care to address it?

No, I don't care to address it.  I'll assume that you are correct in whole, since you seem much more versed in this particular topic than I.  It's still irrelevent.  Even if Toy Story couldn't have ever been made, the pragmatic argument does not change the fact of the matter that IP is not property, and thus IP laws are violations of real property rights.  If you sell me a DVD of your latest work, and we do not have any agreement otherwise, you have no right to prevent me from doing whatever I wish to my property.  My property is the physical DVD, your animations are just data.  If we have an agreement that I won't buy the DVD and then share your data, I'm bound by different laws and different principles.  But there is no such thing as an agreement that I'm bound to simply reason of opening a package.

[BitterTea]

But there is no such thing as an agreement that I'm bound to simply reason of opening a package.

It's the shrink wrap contract, a fork of the social contract. 

[FirstAscent]

I doubt you spent as much time as I did reading Siggraph papers in the late eighties and nineties. Today's rendering hardware and software algorithms largely exist due to the pioneering research done twenty plus years ago. VALVe's own game rendering engine is a byproduct of research which began at Utah, then extended to Cornell and other places, and then to private firms such as SGI and LucasFilm.

RenderMan was not created for that movie (Toy Story). It was created in the eighties to make movies (plural).

Once you remove the hardware technicians to create a network of rendering nodes, and remove the cost to pay for famous voice talent, what are you left with? Well, a lot. The first thing you need to understand is, first person gaming has benefited heavily from the research done over the past 50 years, of which the very talented team that ultimately became a part of Pixar are significantly responsible. That's the first thing you're ignoring. What else? Concept artists, storyboarders, modelers, riggers, shader writers, procedural geometry coders, texture artists, set designers, animators, lighters, directors, cinematographers, producers, on location research, general research and development, etc.

Take a look at the credits the next time you watch a Pixar movie. I honestly don't know if you're ignoring this out of genuine ignorance, of because it's convenient for you to do so. I made a post about animators. Care to address it?

No, I don't care to address it.  I'll assume that you are correct in whole, since you seem much more versed in this particular topic than I.  It's still irrelevent.

It does not immediately become irrelevant because you wish to no longer address the cost of making a film, or the history that lies behind the cost of developing said technology. Also, you might want to note that the The Abyss, released in 1989, used RenderMan and the RenderMan Shading Language. Toy Story was released in 1995. Here is a very large list of films which used RenderMan:

https://renderman.pixar.com/products/whats_renderman/movies.html

The reason it is relevant is because the costs of creating something matter. Oh, and regarding the Pixar animators? Each animator may take more than a year to create two minutes of animation - and that footage may not even appear in the final film. Typically each animator gets assigned just a minute or two in a feature length film. That's just animating. That is not modeling, texturing, shader writing, rigging, lighting, directing, etc.

Think about that. A one minute sequence of Mr. Incredible engaging in some action (one minute!) may take half a year of tweaking by an animator to get the eye movements down, the finger movements, etc.

Even if Toy Story couldn't have ever been made, the pragmatic argument does not change the fact of the matter that IP is not property, and thus IP laws are violations of real property rights.  If you sell me a DVD of your latest work, and we do not have any agreement otherwise, you have no right to prevent me from doing whatever I wish to my property.  My property is the physical DVD, your animations are just data.  If we have an agreement that I won't buy the DVD and then share your data, I'm bound by different laws and different principles.  But there is no such thing as an agreement that I'm bound to simply reason of opening a package.

When you buy a DVD, you have entered into a contract. The intended use is clearly stated on the packaging, and you can make a choice then and there to either buy or not buy. Nobody is forcing you to buy.