Who were you thinking of?

The show has always been entertaining but the 1st season was mostly episodic and focused mainly on character development, pretty smart imo. It gets you hooked on the characters before the plot gets complicated.

It doesn’t start getting complicated until season 2.

It’s really not that hard to follow and any confusion on my part is due to my confounded habit of multitasking while I watch TV. I am pretty good at it but I occasionally miss something.

BTW, I won’t touch that last line with a ten foot pole

Wouldn’t it be funny if Abrams turned out to be the world’s worst story-teller, but because nobody can understand him, everybody assumes he’s too brilliant for mere mortals and nobody wants to admit they’re baffled? Where have I heard that one before?

In the first season 4 episode there was a gate between the two universes and there was some interaction between the characters of each. That gate is apparently now closed and no one seems to remember it ever existed.

If they explained any of that I must have had a lapse of attention.

Currently, this is a third universe where Peter drowned and does not exist. A watcher was supposed to have obliterated his existence but refused to do it.

Since he was not obliterated Peter was trapped between universes and he has popped into this one where he is a stranger.

Will our hero find his way home or must he remake his life
in this universe.

In other words, it’s about like you said.

BTW, you’ll have to bring the acid, my dealer died of old age.

The Watchers supposedly obliterated his existence. But Peter has managed to pop into an existence in a time where he hasn’t existed since dying as a child.

For him to exist in this universe is only possible if the events of the other timeline actually had occurred. He must have a home to return to.

Frank, what do say we drop some acid and talk about it over Root Beer Floats?

Notice that I say “use” rather than own, because copyrights are granted for a fixed term. If you want an analogy, a lease is a better one.

It’s a stretch to call copyrights “intellectual property” because of the fixed term. They’re not property in a real sense.

So who grants the copyright, and who is the “lessor”? Who really owns a copyrighted work?

For bonus points, what is the basis in law for the present copyright regime in the United States?

Internet is already being treated as a “necessity of life” in a lot of places.

Meanwhile, we can download almost any movie or TV show in existence for a few bucks, anywhere there’s internet access, or buy it on DVDs. Blu-rays have better resolution than movies seen in the theaters.

And we’re bitching about it.

I’m old enough to remember when if a movie wasn’t in theaters, or playing on TV, you could lump it. Missed it on TV last night? Better luck next year. Disney re-released its classics into theaters once every ten years or so.

If somebody owning the copyright to a work is a “monopoly” now, we’re in trouble. I’m still hoping to make money as a writer.

It looks to me like Amazon’s contracts all fix the single-unit prices rigidly, but they have flexibility with bulk pricing–seasons’ worth of TV shows are sometimes heavily discounted. It’s clear that the “studios” are protecting their bluray market by prohibiting online streaming or downloading of true HD: 1080. The best you can get anywhere is 1280x720p in TV shows, and never better than DVD grade in cinematic movies.

It’s the contractual single-unit pricing that is so stubbornly arbitrary. For TV shows, it’s $1.99 in low-def(480), $2.99 in medium-def (720)…for 20 minutes of a failed sitcom, or a two-hour pilot of a successful series that would qualify as a movie based on runtime. Same price on Amazon and iTunes.

They have a name for a situation like that…what’s it called again? Mono…mononucleosis? Monogamy? No, that’s not right.

It’s a funny business. On the surface you can say that competition is fierce in the entertainment business. But because of copyright laws, the prize is a monopoly on a given work. If you own “Gone With the Wind”, you own the only GWTW, and everybody pays your price or they can’t have it. So entertainment is really a finely-sliced monopoly business, and a successful business strategy isn’t directly the creation of good productions, it’s the accumulation of a high-quality portfolio of copyrights.

Don’t worry, Tom, I don’t think that all monopolies need regulatin, only those that control a genuine necessity of life. You’ll know we’ve become the land of bread and circuses if it can ever be sucessfully argued that entertainment is a necessity of life in America.