by Tomorrow's Man
October 31, 2008
Movie Piracy
It exists because smart people are smart, greedy people are greedy, and the grey area between them is vast like a very vast thing.
The smart people...the greedy corporations hate them.
The movie companies, choosing to lemmingly following a foolish tip from the now-hemorrhaging-profit-price-gouging-can-you-taste-karma record companies, create, market, and distribute the only thing other than CDs and video games that explicity warns you that once you have purchased their product -- for better or for worse -- your money is gone.
To simplify:
If I buy a $2400 widescreen HDTV from Best Buy, get it home, and realize I don't like it, I can bring it back to Best Buy and they will give me back my $2400.
If I buy an apple from the grocery store, and I get to my car and see that there's a nasty, rotted bruise on the apple, I can go back inside the grocery store and get my $1.09 back. (It was a big apple. Organic. I got paper towels instead.)
However, I much choose not to drive to a theater (burning gasoline, earning wear-and-tear on my car) and eat nothing while there, to avoid spending this minimum of $10 per person to find out if a movie is at all decent, nevermind whether it is good enough to invest in forever by purchasing a static copy when the DVD comes out.
My next choice is rental or On Demand; where I live, both rentals and On Demand are about $5 for a weekend.
In other words, with zero evidence that a DVD copy of a motion picture is worth a monetary investment, motion picture production and distribution companies have created a racket in which the average consumer must invest a non-refundable amount of money TO FIND OUT IF THE MOVIE IS WORTH SPENDING ANY MONEY ON IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Yes they can not figure out why the act of movie piracy continues apace; and why the latest metrics show that 75% of males aged 25-54 who pirate movies own massive conteporary DVD collections (100 or more), race to the store when a "good" movie becomes available on DVD, despite having downloaded an illegal copy -- and complain how much garbage is cranked out each year by the movie corporations (oh so invested in zero level of artistry).
Oh, and this will be my last Texticity.
Cheers!
Tomorrow's Man
The smart people...the greedy corporations hate them.
The movie companies, choosing to lemmingly following a foolish tip from the now-hemorrhaging-profit-price-gouging-can-you-taste-karma record companies, create, market, and distribute the only thing other than CDs and video games that explicity warns you that once you have purchased their product -- for better or for worse -- your money is gone.
To simplify:
If I buy a $2400 widescreen HDTV from Best Buy, get it home, and realize I don't like it, I can bring it back to Best Buy and they will give me back my $2400.
If I buy an apple from the grocery store, and I get to my car and see that there's a nasty, rotted bruise on the apple, I can go back inside the grocery store and get my $1.09 back. (It was a big apple. Organic. I got paper towels instead.)
However, I much choose not to drive to a theater (burning gasoline, earning wear-and-tear on my car) and eat nothing while there, to avoid spending this minimum of $10 per person to find out if a movie is at all decent, nevermind whether it is good enough to invest in forever by purchasing a static copy when the DVD comes out.
My next choice is rental or On Demand; where I live, both rentals and On Demand are about $5 for a weekend.
In other words, with zero evidence that a DVD copy of a motion picture is worth a monetary investment, motion picture production and distribution companies have created a racket in which the average consumer must invest a non-refundable amount of money TO FIND OUT IF THE MOVIE IS WORTH SPENDING ANY MONEY ON IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Yes they can not figure out why the act of movie piracy continues apace; and why the latest metrics show that 75% of males aged 25-54 who pirate movies own massive conteporary DVD collections (100 or more), race to the store when a "good" movie becomes available on DVD, despite having downloaded an illegal copy -- and complain how much garbage is cranked out each year by the movie corporations (oh so invested in zero level of artistry).
Oh, and this will be my last Texticity.
Cheers!
Tomorrow's Man