…but it isn’t okay for *you* to steal I.P.
December 18th, 2005
Yesterday Lindsay and I finished the last of our Christmas shopping. Our last top was at CD Plus to grab some DVDs and we found some pretty good ones in the bargain bin. Encino Man, Clue, Run Lola Run and a movie I have wanted on DVD for some time. See if you can identify it…
The overall story is that the world is not really the world. It is an intricately designed simulation of the world in which people are held captive. In this fake world there is one man who becomes aware of the truth, a man with the power to manipulate this simulated world in the same manner as the evil ones who created it. The first scene of the movie is in an old hotel. When the evil ones first come for the hero of the story, they arrive in an elevator and the hero just narrowly escapes them.
Sound familiar? The Matrix, right? Wrong. It was Dark City, released a full year before The Matrix. I’ll admit that beyond these similarities the two movies are quite different, but I could easily see Dark City being the inspiration behind the other. This brings up an interesting question. Why is it okay for movies to basically rehash the same stories over and over, stealing, borrowing or corrupting so-called "intellectual property" from each other, but we are not allowed to watch DVDs we buy on computers running Linux? We can’t copy our DVDs to our computers – even if we just want to watch the movies and have no intention of sharing them.
Balls, I say. Balls.
