my "dream" has been shattered

[Belen]

And that is why I feel uncomfortable working for PDF publishers. I'm working with one at the moment and everythings been fine, but they tend to be hobbist based "businesses" with little in the way of paper work.

If you had any kind of contract you need to scan it and send a copy to that company stating your grievence, he has commited theft. If there was no contract then its your loss.

That particular company no longer exists. The company that bought the material does exist and I do have a fairly solid contract. However, I do not have the cash for a legal battle across interstate lines. So I let it go. It still pisses me off though.

 

[John Q. Mayhem]

I don't suppose that you're allowed to tell me what the product is, that I may shun it and the wicked who stole it?

 

[der_kluge]

Pretty much every chord progression and musical melody has been written before in classical music.

This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Where did you get this information from? When John Williams was writing the music for Close Encounters of the Third Kind Spielburg asked him for a 5-note pattern to play for the final scene from the mother ship. Williams worked up over a hundred, and in Spielburg's office, they went through them one at a time until they finally selected the one that was used.

Before this, however, Williams thought that surely there couldn't be that many, but he asked a mathematician friend to determine how many 5 note combinations there were in music, and the answer was well into the hundreds of thousands.

Arnold Schoenberg once said "there is still plenty of good music in C major left to be written".

 

[diaglo]

"Art is dead! There's nothing left to say. Style is exhausted and content is pointless. Art has no purpose. All that's left is commodity marketing." - Calvin and Hobbes.

Wish I could find the actual strip online somewhere. That particular one is a classic.

which of course was a paraphrase of another quote.

 

[Mystery Man]

which of course was a paraphrase of another quote.

Couldn't remember where that one came from, I just remember the strip. Which of course was framed and hung on the wall of our painting studio when I was in school.

 

[jester47]

I had a similar event. I once wrote a science fiction story where the people find a planet where the environment was ravaged and while life there would be harsh it was not impossible. Then exploring they found this collection of huge stuctures and some robot building more of them. Exploring the structures the people that were exploring the planet found that the population of the world had voluntarily entered into a virtual reality and were living in a fantasy land generated by a huge computer. It turns out they had done so so as to avoid the environmental destruction they had caused. Many did not know that there was an outside world and just assumed that the fake world was he real one. The thing was that once you were put in, your body would begin to atrophy. essentially you were putting a healthy person on life support. Once a person became dependant they would not be able to be separated from the machine without certain death. The scary part happens when the explorers discover that there is a roving maintenence robot that makes sure everyones life support is hooked up correctly. Visitors, obviously are not hooked up correctly and the robot moves as fast as possible to fix the "problem." A lot of this was inspired by the Dr Who episode "The Deadly Assassin" art by HR Geiger, and Neuromancer.

Needless to say, I was impressed when the matrix came out.

 

[Staffan]

Only goes to show, if you have an idea, get it copywritten.

AFAIK, ideas can't be copyrighted. Only the expressions of those ideas.

 

[CronoDekar]

For my first homebrew camp I came up with what I thought was a unique character concept -- a person living on the prime material who has ultimate power over the Region of Dreams and brings order to it, and when she dies she is reborn in the world as a new soul.

Then I read Sepulcrave's story hour and read the character Fillein (I think it was) who was very similar. There were some minor differences (Fillein generally had more control and knowledge over his powers), but the basic concept of a naturally reincarnating person (who does not possess the same soul each time!) that controls Dream was the same. And it's highly, highly unlikely that he somehow caught wind of my campaign and borrowed the character concept.

 

[Len]

Before this, however, Williams thought that surely there couldn't be that many, but he asked a mathematician friend to determine how many 5 note combinations there were in music, and the answer was well into the hundreds of thousands.

Now think about how many MILLIONS of five-note sequences have been played in all the different songs over the last few thousand years. If there are only a few hundred thousand different ones, obviously there are lots of sequences duplicated in different songs.