A quick correction on some thoughts I had re: Dom's comment about Cameron's ex-wife selling the Terminator rights...
So, in doing even more research, I see a second reason where this might have come from. It turns out that James Cameron sold the rights to The Terminator to producer Gale Anne Hurd for a dollar during the initial writing process under the promise that she could only produce it if he was director. Hurd, acting as producer, was able to secure financing for the film by selling the rights to the financier, Hemdale Film Corp, in 1982 or '83. In 1985, Cameron and Hurd married, so technically she did sell the rights to the franchise, but she had done so BEFORE she was his wife and she didn't do so out of malice but acting properly to secure the independent film's production. Hemdale later struggled and Carolco made a large bid to buy the rights in order to make T2, and after that everything else in the mix here lines back up. So it seems the rights have changed hands every single time it's made a film, and every company that's owned it has ended up screwed despite their film's success - The Terminator seems to be cursed.
Onslaught Six wrote:JT wrote:The IP Owners agreed with Ellison while the actual Creator of the franchise didn't. How do we put them into the mix, do we abide by the IP owners or do we abide by the Creator of the franchise?
It's a sticky situation, and it depends on how and what you're discussing. The courts ruled that Terminator is based on two Ellison stories. The guy who wrote (and directed, and produced) it says otherwise. Cameron has never really given me a reason to believe he is lying. Ellison has, by being a scheistery prick who will sue anyone who has a vaguely similar idea to one of his. (Plagiarism and IP law is stupid like this.)
Exactly! It's a fundamental flaw with the way IP rights can be transferred. As for Ellison, he's a very talented writer and an absolute prick, a reactionary who uses teeth, but he actually has retracted a lawsuit recently when he examined the so-called offending material more carefully. So I think he believes in his Terminator suit, I don't think he's intentionally trying to game anything. And when you look at The Terminator on its own, outside its sequel, there are similarities to both stories (although I think Ellison only claims it's one), so without Cameron speaking as the true IP creator thanks to those same stupid laws, you have a studio who knows nothing having the power to make claims as being the IP rightsholder. It's ass-backwards the way that system works.
XYZ Studio may have bought the rights contractually, but we all know they didn't create anything. Are we really going to expect contract law to guide us in this matter, those with the most cash win the rights to reshape our view of what James Cameron originally wrote and intended? They can change the future, but they can't change the past. Your example of the Charlton characters proves that: the original Charlton comics stories aren't different just because DC retcons them.
Except that is technically the very definition of a retcon.
Let's take Ben Reily as an example! Ben Reily began life as a Peter Parker/Spiderman clone that got shoved into a smokestack and died. That's how his original story ended--the clone is dead and Peter Parker is alive. (There may have been a question of whether or not the living Parker was originally the clone or not, but that's part of the trope of this story.)
Then the Clone Saga stuff begins and it's revealed that the clone was really alive this whole time, and has been wandering America using the name Ben Reily. That's a retcon. That's a story element, usually done by a different writer, of a story that says, "What happened before isn't what really happened. This is how it really happened." Marvel is allowed to say that. But, the writer of the original clone story may not have intended the clone to survive.
The difference with the Clone Saga is that it's all done in-house, there's no one single creator of a universe making those decisions and retcons, the house began life creating that universe and hiring writers intentionally to make those changes to that universe. Charlton didn't hire anybody at Marvel to do that, they simply went out of business and had their rights gobbled up so they could be usurped by a different house.
It's important to note that any later story will inherently change the way you view the original film. Prometheus changes everything about the Space Jockey and, possibly, the Xenomorphs as we see them in the film Alien. And if you're discussing Alien, it's important to note from what context you're discussing it from. It is entirely possible to discuss Alien from the viewpoint that it does not exist in a universe where Prometheus does--and that all the "revelations" of that film are bunk and don't count. This is especially important if you are discussing virtually any element of the Alien franchise that came out before 2012.
I mean, from a legal and "legitimate" standpoint, Prometheus overrules all existing contradictory continuity by virtue of being produced by the original director, and also being the most recent film iteration. (The original medium tends to take precedence over any other, like comics or novels.) But Dark Horse's 90s comics still exist, for example, and they provide a very different interpretation of the Space Jockeys. In 2012, 2013, those comics aren't considered canon (if they ever were to begin with), but they still exist and you can still read and discuss them.
This is why I really do love what Hasbro established with their multiverse bullshit. "It's all canon, somewhere," is really the best way to deal with all this crap. Somewhere, there is a universe where Prometheus doesn't take place--and also, Aliens, Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection don't happen either.
Here's the thing though, we're talking about character intentions and foundations, so later changes by other authors don't necessarily speak to the beginnings of the character because they aren't inside the mind of the original character creator.
Prometheus is unclear because it's intended to be, Ridley Scott isn't Dan O'Bannon - who actually wrote Alien vs. Predator as well, which is CRAAAAAZY and possibly confuses the hell out of these arguments, but it's done tongue in cheek so it barely squeaks by - so he has connections but intentionally muddles the true nature of its connection to Alien.
"It's all canon somewhere" is tricky though because ultimately you end up with different religions based around each canon, just like in real life.
Sparky Prime wrote:"Those sources"? The ONLY thing I said is that Wikipedia is not a reliable source, simply because it isn't . If I was going to actually comment on those sources one way or another, I would have just kept arguing the point. Except I had expressly said I was skipping it because it wasn't going anywhere and still isn't. I don't see how it isn't sage advice for both of us to agree to disagree when even you had said at one point we were just arguing in circles. And now it seems like you're trying to drag me back into that arguement because you can't seem to admit you've been distorting the points I have made in this topic.
"Those sources" as in I cited Wikipedia for 2 separate definitions, "Sentience" and "Free will". No need to get in a huff over that.
It wasn't and still isn't sage advice to me, I don't agree with you on the blanket statement that it's automatically undermining a point to use wikipedia. Had I not stated the source for those sentences, they'd still be solid work and you'd have not known the difference. That's what I said was only sage advice to you, the part about wikipedia. I'm not trying to drag you back into anything, you keep needling smaller and smaller points. And distortion? You just applied my "sage advice" comment, which the sentence clearly shows is a comment on "whether or not you find those sources to be of question", to an entirely different issue -- talk about distortion.
Dom wrote:The owner can speak to original intent. But, as far as any current or future changes (including those that might over-write previous content), the owner is the authority.
Did you mean "The owner CAN'T speak to original intent"? Otherwise I'm confused to that sentence. So assuming you meant "can't" because otherwise the "But" in the next sentence doesn't make any sense, keep in mind that we are talking about the character's creation and original intents.
The Charlton comics are no longer relevant.
The content hasn't been erased from time, you can still read them, they are still historical fact, they still have meaning to why they were created at that time in that way.
The difference though is that we assign those rights to ourselves as a group, as a society, and that's a very big difference.
How so? (And, that assumes that I agree that we as a culture, let alone a species, agree on what rights to assign ourselves.)
Because only when all people create rights together can rights be equally applied, fair and moral. When rights are defined by an individual, that is a dictatorship and rights created there are not applied equally, morals cannot be derived without common acceptance. No one person even decides on morals, morals are derived by group actions, nobody votes for morals, they are derived by the group for the group's best interest by the group's actions and intents.
Nobody, nothing, is responsible for the circumstances that led to it existing. Yes, there is responsibility that comes with being self-aware. But, the circumstances of one's creation/birth are beyond anyone's/anything's ability to control .
We're specifically applying this to Sentient Artificial Intelligence which is not spontaneously self-created but created by man, doesn't that by itself argue your point there? If spontaneous sentience is the metric here, then these machines don't measure up to that. You leave a human baby in the woods, and assuming it survives it will still eventually gain some level of sentience. You leave a computer baby in the woods with only a power supply, it'll never be anything more than it was.
If I am remembering the Deep Blue incident from 10 years ago correctly, (and I have not been able to find anything in my searches either), then yes, machines can make their own choices. (Blue made a decision about a chess game that required gathering and applying information from outside of the game. Nobody *told* Blue to do that.)
And, in the case of "Terminator", clearly SkyNet was acting counter, or at least beyond, its programming. And, it clearly had the inclination to do so.
If we assume your Deep Blue information is correct despite not having anything more solid to go on, we still have a computer that is acting based on human input telling it to analyze behavior and look for ways to win.
Skynet is different from Deep Blue in that way, but it's also not a usable metric for determining life because it's a wholly fictional construct. It's only use for creating a real philosophy in this matter is a cautionary tale of what to avoid.
I would argue that until we can answer, (or at the very least are willing to think about), questions like that we should probably not be trying to build (let alone actually building) AI level machines. And, if we do build such a machine, we should take in to account what we are going to do with it and how we will maintain it.
If we don't build them, how will we create a philosophy accurate to the situation? Peter Benchley never met a shark before writing Jaws, and after he saw the negative philosophy that book and its movie lent the public, and then learned more about real sharks and how they differed from what he wrote and how society's new philosophy negatively affected them, he regretted writing the book in the first place as it gave everybody the wrong impression, artificial fears about something that didn't truly exist.
AI is software that we write, if we write software with no feelings and no free will but it's still sentient and can even be saved to storage media, why should science wait for ethicists? We stopped human testing when we started using lab rats, and now we concern ourselves with the ethics of using lab rats, so shouldn't we take those ethical concerns off the lab rats' shoulders and put them into our machines, then worry about the ethics after we stop hurting the rats? Wouldn't it be MORE unethical to leave lab rats suffering longer by not advancing AI technology?
You do not think that the ability to learn and adapt makes something worthy or moral consideration?
My smartphone learns and adapts constantly to my input based on a very smart programmer's ability to create a smart keyboard software, I give this no moral consideration whatsoever. I don't see Deep Blue any differently, just more complex.
Conservationists make the genocide arguement, if only because they do not have a workable term to describe maliciously and stupidly wiping out a species. (And, yes, I will be the Eurocentril asshole who will call out poachers for butching rhinos, tigers and other species for tribal medicines. No, I do not respect that kind of backward culture.)
So, no serious usage then.
Look, I love the environment and animals and all that, but conservationists are not known for restraint, they are known for loud hyperbole because they are fighting from a minority standpoint. There aren't conservationists going into courts and using "genocide" as legal argument. They may say stuff like that in the press and in their papers, but they don't take real action under that definition. They take real action based on real laws, they work hard to make sure they have solid legal and real arguments when the chips are down.
all this for a discussion of a 25+ year old franchise.
You're right, we should get back to the board's true business, discussion of a 30 year old toy franchise.
In a way, this topic does connect to Transformers, the Transformers are living machines and they deal with their own levels of ethics in these matters as well, Megatron having vastly different ethics from Optimus Prime re: the rights of all sentient beings.
Well you've always been a pain.
