the great pig in the sky

One of the unique things about my job is that the CEO is always thinking about the next big thing in movie delivery.  Well, i suppose that's not unique; what is unique is that he's always right and ahead of the game.  The latest big change was implemented last year: streaming movies into people's dreams.

"Everyone knows that there's little as dull as listening to someone else describe their dreams," he said at the all-hands meeting when he announced it.  "Our latest offering will completely dispel this problem.  Tomorrow morning, you'll be able to talk to your coworkers about Gone With the Wind, Taxi Driver, or The NeverEnding Story."

Fast-forward to today and we've suffered our standard growing pains: dealing with encryption bugaboos (you need a secure tunnel to the Morpheus Arms dream delivery device so some pinhead on the Internet doesn't piggyback National Lampoon's Van Wilder onto your The English Patient stream); scaling issues (because more people than ever want to watch movies in their sleep); shifting peak traffic (used to be that quiet time was when people were sleeping, and, well, not so much now).  But now we've run into new problems, and the movie studios are not happy.

Here's a plain English summary of the legalese: "We want you to put an end to the lucid dreamers.  They can watch a movie when they're awake or when they're asleep, but in a lucid state, they're able to manipulate the story, and the license clearly forbids these shenanigans.  The content must be delivered unaltered, so find a way to fix it or we yank our content." In addition, in a twist that's too bozotic to be fairly called ironic, the studios not only want the altered movies recorded, but they also want us to record the dreams of people who have Morpheus Arms but are sleeping without having them activated (i.e., dreaming under the stochastic processes of their own sleeping brain) and send the recordings to them as their own intellectual property (apparently, it's buried somewhere in the EULA for the MA device, or so they claim).  So now the big question around the company is whether we should stand up for our customers' intellectual property rights.  We aren't built for activism, but that might change in the next quarter.  I'm hopeful.

the great pig in the sky

One of the unique things about my job is that the CEO is always thinking about the next big thing in movie delivery.  Well, i suppose that's not unique; what is unique is that he's always right and ahead of the game.  The latest big change was implemented last year: streaming movies into people's dreams.

"Everyone knows that there's little as dull as listening to someone else describe their dreams," he said at the all-hands meeting when he announced it.  "Our latest offering will completely dispel this problem.  Tomorrow morning, you'll be able to talk to your coworkers about Gone With the Wind, Taxi Driver, or The NeverEnding Story."

Fast-forward to today and we've suffered our standard growing pains: dealing with encryption bugaboos (you need a secure tunnel to the Morpheus Arms dream delivery device so some pinhead on the Internet doesn't piggyback National Lampoon's Van Wilder onto your The English Patient stream); scaling issues (because more people than ever want to watch movies in their sleep); shifting peak traffic (used to be that quiet time was when people were sleeping, and, well, not so much now).  But now we've run into new problems, and the movie studios are not happy.

Here's a plain English summary of the legalese: "We want you to put an end to the lucid dreamers.  They can watch a movie when they're awake or when they're asleep, but in a lucid state, they're able to manipulate the story, and the license clearly forbids these shenanigans.  The content must be delivered unaltered, so find a way to fix it or we yank our content." In addition, in a twist that's too bozotic to be fairly called ironic, the studios not only want the altered movies recorded, but they also want us to record the dreams of people who have Morpheus Arms but are sleeping without having them activated (i.e., dreaming under the stochastic processes of their own sleeping brain) and send the recordings to them as their own intellectual property (apparently, it's buried somewhere in the EULA for the MA device, or so they claim).  So now the big question around the company is whether we should stand up for our customers' intellectual property rights.  We aren't built for activism, but that might change in the next quarter.  I'm hopeful.