> (like 'phone company project' timelines)

You may want to get yourself a stiff drink and sit down before reading this: I once worked for a startup (Americast) that was a joint venture of Disney and five phone companies. I worked there for a bit less than two years, and in the process gained about half of my personal store of tech industry horror/humor stories. We were designing a hybrid analog-digital cable box in the late 90s, so everything was new, with little off-the-shelf hardware or software to build on. Every single decision point developed in one or both of two ways:
  1. Disney would demand something physically or operationally impossible, and refuse to budge. This reached levels I would categorize as parody if I hadn't been the one sitting across the table from them. My favorite example: Very early on, everyone ruled out having multiple tuners in the box to reduce the unit price, but months later, Disney made a non-negotiable demand that we implement picture-in-picture, while also refusing to revisit the hardware specs. When I explained that this was absolutely impossible on the face of it, their project manager looked at me with a level, slightly threatening stare and replied "This is Disney's project. We get what we want."
  2. One or more of the phone companies would refuse to sign off on some inconsequential detail. I'm talking about "exact shade of grey used in interstitial backgrounds" or "scroll speed of channel guide" level details. They would stall for weeks, sometimes months, telling us about hours-long meetings they'd had, VP approvals being required, attorney consultations, coordination with five other project managers...and meanwhile we'd slap some reasonable design together and pray it would be relatively easy to tweak it as required when the phone companies finally managed to make an actual decision on anything.
I hadn't thought about it this way previously, but now that I'm writing this on a Traveller list, I realize that Disney are Solomani, and phone companies are Vilani. :)

On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 2:14 PM <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
A small company I worked with developed a rather cutting edge 3D application in the space that spanned (movies, books, fanclub, video games, other promotional items) for a fairly high value franchise (Name JK Rowlings hold any meaning?). We showed our wonderful 3D hogwarts to her where you could create yourself a 3D avatar and interact with other internet visitors as well as bots and things in the environment (including previews of upcoming tangible products) and the coolest thing of all was being able to play 3D Quidditch. Ms. Rowlings liked it, but by this point, she had no control - EA owned video games, Disney I think owned movies, someone else owned the fan club, and somebody else the books).

Instead of sanely recognizing a big potential for cross promotion and the chance to be in on some pretty cutting edge 3D portal stuff (1999 time frame), the companies and their lawyers were just unable to figure out how to structure the paperwork to allow everyone to get a cut and how much that cut should be (which, given we weren't planning on delivering any online sales at that time, would have been percentages of nothing... at least at first).... so much so that the little startup I worked for failed while trying to wait out the big players.

We had similar other projects with Disney and they took forever (like 'phone company project' timelines). For them, getting something done 4 months later more or less... nothing. For us, it was go broke or not.

Ironically, after all but the owners were left (necessary layoffs, but they had to keep the company limping along for a few extra months not to loose their houses), about 3 months later they did about $2M US in pent-up sales. <rolls eyes>

And then there's the fact that copyright might have been 10 years, then 15, then 25, then the life of the author, then the life of the author plus 25 years... etc. up until now US copyright is likely author's life plus 75 years. Do you know the major driver for those extensions? Lobbying! And lots of it. By whom? DISNEY!.... Why? Because the extensions happened around the time the copyrights on the elder characters (the mouse himself, his dog buddy, etc) were coming to expiry.

I love some of their work product, but I cannot abide their attitude to IP.

On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 2:36 PM Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at yahoo.com (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
Heck, we can already beat that.

Disney has basically been granted 'forever' rights on a lot of their IP.

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On Wednesday, July 8, 2020, 02:12:18 AM MST, <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:


More particularly, there may not currently be a way to remove Amazon's kindle crypto since an update in 2019 I think. I'm not positive, but I recall reading that.

Me, I just refuse to buy the books from sellers that cruft them with DRM. And I'll tell any author that. I've been an avid reader of some authors and I've stopped buying their books because of how they are electronically distributed/enrcypted/managed. Vendor lock-in is a very bad idea. Several very rich folks have had shots at Apple over that issue related to music libraries and not being able to transfer them to their kids.

With a real book, I can give it away, I can sell it, I can share it. But I wouldn't with authors I buy and read because I want them to be encouraged to write more. The most I'd ever do is lend one to someone so they can see how the writer writes and then most of the time, I create a new reader who will buy their products by doing that. Smart authors know that.

Somehow I can equate platform and hardware lock in with a Vilani way of doing things. I'll bet the Vilani have IP laws that are good for 1 Imperium + 75 years...


On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 4:49 AM Jeff Zeitlin <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, 8 Jul 2020 09:23:54 +0100, xxxxxx@tractare.co.uk wrote:

>On the Zahn books - Amazon.co.uk said not available, but the series showed as available on amazon.com...

Amazon doesn't speak ePub. Unless the publisher is Tor (I know it's
not Baen), there may not be a legal-in-the-US way to convert them from
Amazon's format to ePub.

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