Living in the past...
Have you been struck yet by the number of corporations that are supposed to be cutting-edge that are instead about a decade out of date in their thinking?
I mean, their whole DRM approach is laughable - they make life harder for the average customer, who wouldn't be trading MP3s in the first place, and ignore the fact that it only takes one pirate to put something on P2P and the whole world can get a DRM-free copy.
Somebody needs to sit the execs down and say "Look, imagine a P2P which can make ten copies an hour. (And that's a very conservative P2P speed) Now imagine one person breaks your DRM:
In one hour, there are ten copies
In two hours, there are a hundred
In three, a thousand
Four hours, 10,000
Five hours, 100,000
Six hours, a million
And in only ten hours, you've now got more copies than people living on the planet. That's why even a DRM scheme that stops 99.999% of copiers will not do any good. P2P makes numbers irrelevant, find a better solution!"
Something like that might possibly make it into their heads. Baby steps.
But then you see the whole Printers & Game Console thing. And you just sigh.
Here's the wonderful bit of logic they used here: "We have one product, that is very hard to duplicate at a lower cost than we could supply it at. We have subsidiary products for it (ink & games) that can be replicated very cheaply, in fact virtually free.
So, where should we try and make our money? The easy-to-rip-off product, or the hard-to-rip-off product?"
And then they go and sell their printers & consoles at LESS than they cost, and sell the ink & games at ludicrous prices. And then people supply ink & games at pennies, and so they come up with all sorts of schemes to make it hard to supply ink & software.
FFS! How dumb do you have to be?
They could supply games at $1 each and still make a profit on them. Same goes for ink fills. Instead, they supply stuff that's easy to rip-off at hugely inflated prices to cover the cost of the stuff that's hard to rip-off sold at a loss, and then they complain that people are under-selling them.
And then you get such utter stupidity as the DMCA being used to prevent ink cartidge refills, and people downgrading their PSP firmware so they can install homebrew games, and Howto guides on taking an Xbox apart for modding without damaging it.
What is WRONG with these people? Is it so hard for them to understand that the world has changed, and the old tactics won't work any more? They're supposed to be the ones who understand this better than anybody!
Plus, if they worked out just how their futile efforts were causing so much resentment, they might realize just how pointless it is for them to keep trying to get people to switch away from Linux, BSD, GNU, and all the other Free initiatives by pointing out how hard to use they are.
Who cares? I'm sitting on a computer whose OS has been designed 100% to maximize what I can do with it, not to maximise what I can't do because corporations make more money that way.
I mean, their whole DRM approach is laughable - they make life harder for the average customer, who wouldn't be trading MP3s in the first place, and ignore the fact that it only takes one pirate to put something on P2P and the whole world can get a DRM-free copy.
Somebody needs to sit the execs down and say "Look, imagine a P2P which can make ten copies an hour. (And that's a very conservative P2P speed) Now imagine one person breaks your DRM:
In one hour, there are ten copies
In two hours, there are a hundred
In three, a thousand
Four hours, 10,000
Five hours, 100,000
Six hours, a million
And in only ten hours, you've now got more copies than people living on the planet. That's why even a DRM scheme that stops 99.999% of copiers will not do any good. P2P makes numbers irrelevant, find a better solution!"
Something like that might possibly make it into their heads. Baby steps.
But then you see the whole Printers & Game Console thing. And you just sigh.
Here's the wonderful bit of logic they used here: "We have one product, that is very hard to duplicate at a lower cost than we could supply it at. We have subsidiary products for it (ink & games) that can be replicated very cheaply, in fact virtually free.
So, where should we try and make our money? The easy-to-rip-off product, or the hard-to-rip-off product?"
And then they go and sell their printers & consoles at LESS than they cost, and sell the ink & games at ludicrous prices. And then people supply ink & games at pennies, and so they come up with all sorts of schemes to make it hard to supply ink & software.
FFS! How dumb do you have to be?
They could supply games at $1 each and still make a profit on them. Same goes for ink fills. Instead, they supply stuff that's easy to rip-off at hugely inflated prices to cover the cost of the stuff that's hard to rip-off sold at a loss, and then they complain that people are under-selling them.
And then you get such utter stupidity as the DMCA being used to prevent ink cartidge refills, and people downgrading their PSP firmware so they can install homebrew games, and Howto guides on taking an Xbox apart for modding without damaging it.
What is WRONG with these people? Is it so hard for them to understand that the world has changed, and the old tactics won't work any more? They're supposed to be the ones who understand this better than anybody!
Plus, if they worked out just how their futile efforts were causing so much resentment, they might realize just how pointless it is for them to keep trying to get people to switch away from Linux, BSD, GNU, and all the other Free initiatives by pointing out how hard to use they are.
Who cares? I'm sitting on a computer whose OS has been designed 100% to maximize what I can do with it, not to maximise what I can't do because corporations make more money that way.
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