Word on the street is that it was done by the same directors. Go figure.

duhhh the two are produced by the same people...tsk tsk

http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/cultofmac/index.blog?entry_id=1391048

the zoom out for infinity thing was from the opening scene of Contact. (and probably others.) not 2001.

I'm increasingly disturbed by the degrees to which the public has begun to extend their own idea of copyright into realms that have nothing at all to do with intellectual property. It's like we are wilfully preparing the way for media corporations to extend copyright by misleading each other into believing that the extensions already exist.

Copyright has nothing to do with protecting creativity or originality. It's about publishing. You can copy and steal ideas all you like. You can't copy the expression of those ideas.

Suppose the videos were *not* made by the same people. Suppose the spots were as similar as Van Zant's Psycho is to Hitchcock's. It would still have nothing to do with copyright infringement. Copyright is about copying recorded images and sounds, not re-creating images. (If copyright was *not* merely about copying recorded images, then the extreme zoom shot would not have become a cliche. It's been around for about 50 years and has probably been used in hundreds of animations, commercials, and movies.)

So if the problem is not related to copyright, what is the legal problem? Trademark infringement perhaps? That was the best explanation for Volkswagon's recent legal threats against the artist Don Stewart, for drawing a picture which depicted a VW beetle composed out of pills in one version, butterflies in another. http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/12/vw_presses_ridiculou.html

The IP wars are moving from the ridiculous to the absurd. We should be careful to avoid muddying the waters with crazy notions about creativity and originality.

eah.Face it, the Postal Service doesn't have a creative bone in their collective bodies, don't expect their videos to be any different. It's all been done before. :)

Guess you could say the same about apple. h***, all their commercials seem to be rip-offs of others these days. Maybe its going to Intel. Its turning them into MS....

I don't know what this says about techno, but I happen to know that the music from Apple's ad pre-existed the Postal Service's song by a comfortable margin of 5+ years.

Of absolutely no importance. Does the date of the song then mean that the post office took Apple's ad idea? No. Its still the apple ad (which blows, by the way, just another of their "We're better then those PCs!" high-handed, nose stuck-up, upper class c*** that PC users hate macs for in the first place) that mimics a video from, of all people, the postal service.

How many here (including Apple themselves) would just ignore a new commercial, say from some TV network, that blatantly copied the 1984 ad? I'm sure you'd be fine with that, right?

Found this on the net last night and it does show there are a lot of similarities.

http://www.youtube.com/w/Apple-Ad-The-Postal-Service-Video?v=Xc-t9jBygx0&search=apple%20ad

Apple is in the music business, in case you all don't remember. Who cares if there are similarities? I can't imagine the music group in question cares a lick.

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