Hacker Cinema
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
2016 · Film · 108 min
Directed by Burr Steers
A zombie outbreak has fallen upon the land in this reimagining of Jane Austen's classic tale of the tangled relationships between lovers from different social classes in 19th century England. Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is a master of martial arts and weaponry and the handsome Mr. Darcy is a fierce zombie killer, yet the epitome of upper class prejudice. As the zombie outbreak intensifies, they must swallow their pride and join forces on the blood-soaked battlefield in order to conquer the undead once and for all.
1 positive5 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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7 comments on Hacker News
You’re extrapolating a huge amount of shock content from just one or two examples, but no strong evidence. Sure, I’ve heard of Blood and Honey, but that’s the only nasty Pooh derivative that’s made its way to my consciousness. Comparing to other public domain properties is instructive: I also remember when Pride and Prejudice and Zombies came out, but I don’t remember any other gory Jane Austen adaptations, and Zombies is rather low‐profile compared to the more popular adaptations such as the BBC series, the 2005 film, or Bridget Jones’s Diary. Or compare to Sherlock Holmes, which despite the Doyle estate desperately holding onto every shred of copyright to the last, has had many good “unauthorized” adaptations in recent years.
And even if 90% of public domain adaptations were crap (a reasonable number for copyrighted content as well, if we believe Sturgeon†), I think a single unconstrained Mari0 (https://stabyourself.net/mari0/) is worth ten gross Mario fanfics that I’ll never see without looking for them.
† Sturgeon’s Law: “90% of everything is crap.”
I thought Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was absolutely excellent. It sounds like maybe you haven't seen it.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1374989/
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies didn't in any way damaged or removed anything from Pride and Prejudice though. The book is still there for everyone to enjoy.
The movie was also a commercial failure, I'm not sure we would end up with so much junk if it doesn't sell.
Who could forget "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" ? They even made a movie of that one
Well, Sony Pictures is huge. Their database of movies is enormous. (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is one of the movies distributed by Sony)
Imagine they stored all of the movies they distribute in 4K in your TV. Whenever the movie is displayed they just find it in the database and reproduce the 4K version.
Of course, that is very much infeasible, it requires too large of a storage.
What they do is something like Waifu2x I linked, they train a neural network to learn how to properly upscale movies. They put the "algorithm" on the chip, and its fast enough for real time usage.
https://community.sony.co.uk/t5/blog-news-from-sony/inside-4k-what-is-x-reality-pro/ba-p/1346224
They won't tell you it's NNs but it is. Sony distributes a lot of movies, they use their database of movies to train the upscaling models (which is obviously NNs https://github.com/nagadomi/waifu2x ) and then put the chip in the TV.
It's something almost equivalent to storing Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in your TV in 4K, and then reproducing it when they match it with what's playing on TV.
I read far more fiction produced with zero expectation of financial return than 'traditional' fiction. Sure most of it is terrible, but so are most books. When Harry Potter fan fiction outpaces the actual published books by 1,000's to 1 all it takes is a sane ranking system to find something interesting to read. If the cost of abolishing copy-write on fiction books is no fiction book would be published in any form then I would find that perfectly acceptable, because I know there are plenty of viable alternatives.
So, while I think you can make a case for copy-write it's not necessary and at the extremes it's clearly harmful. Just think of how many great movies would not have been produced if if Shakespeare's plays where still under protected. You don't get to see Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in a world of unlimited copy-write. (http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594743347/ref=asc_df_15947433471849115?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=asn&creative=395093&creativeASIN=1594743347)
PS: I think a 5 year copy-write length for movies, TV shows and video games is a perfectly acceptable, but I don't think they need copy-write protection either.