–TG

Today spokesmen from the entertainment industry announced they have pooled their resources and efforts together to take down the largest pirating operation ever conceived. Every December they claim to lose untold billions due to this shady operation. A raid yesterday uncovered tens of millions of CDs, DVDs, video games, and computer programs, along with the most sophisticated equipment for mass production ever seen.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” one RIAA spokesman said. “This single facility could, in full production, triple the output of our member companies combined.”
“Today is a great day in our war against piracy,” a MPAA spokesman chimed in. “If our estimates are correct, as they always are, we have just shut down the source of 60% of the world’s counterfeit trafficking.”
The sting went down at approx. 9:00am local time yesterday after a four year investigation. The accused is a well known children’s hero who goes by a number of aliases but is most commonly known as Santa Clause. Armed enforcers, acting on a tip, burst into the North Pole facility and busted Santa and his production team, known as his “elves”, working at near capacity in preparation for their upcoming Christmas rush.
“This has been a difficult operation to crack,” said one spokesman. “Every year we watch our profits soar through the month of December only to have them grind to a hault come the 25th of the month. Yet on the 25th of December it is a well known fact that millions of children worldwide come into possession of countless CDs, DVDs, and video games that they did not pay for. Proudly, today we can say this situation has been put to rest. No longer will this bad actor break into children’s homes in the middle of the night to give away our product. The children are safe now and we will encourage our retailers to open their stores on the 25th so the children can legally purchase these items on their own. This will help us to educate children that everything in life must be paid for. It is both illegal and immoral to get ANYTHING for free, and our studies have shown that they will feel much better about themselves when they pay us. Christmas now has a brighter future than ever before now that we’ve busted Santa and his gang”
In addition to the 10 warehouses full of counterfeit goods, the raid uncovered 5,000 computers actively running Kazaa on special high speed connections. Upon further investigating it was learned that Santa regularly received requests called “Christmas lists” from the children. The “elves” would then recreate the items on these lists in their “workshop”, infringing the copyrights of artists and creators worldwide, stealing their livelihood on a massive scale.
Santa’s lawyers said he remains jolly despite this downturn of events and are confident he will be proven innocent.

***Update***

Two “elves” were reportedly shot and killed during the seige as they reached for two water pistols coming off an assembly line.

That is one reason why they are desperatly seeking on line sales. So that they can gain once again the marketplace for all the back catalog that the chains aren’t interested in. That’s 30% of their past market gone. Anyway to get the customer to believe that on line sales are taking off and it is the place to be for their product serves to further this image they wish badly to take place. Customers aren’t readily taking that to heart though. Any with a bit of experience with on line sales are finding the DRM too restrictive for their lifestyles and how they intend to use their purchased product. Given the only alternative is to get it through the p2p networks, at some point they have to question why they are buying for the hoops afterwards they have to jump through to use that product as they intended.

At somepoint the replacement try out purchasers are finding out that it isn’t worth the high price and new ones move in to find out what those that have been there for a while have learned and decided to move on to a place that more fits their needs. Without the steady increase of customers, there won’t be a continued demand for back catalog sales. That drives newer sales to even lower expectations as those same customers are likely to buy new or old.

Dwindling sales equals this new method to continue to reap profits. That of sueing your customer. In the long run anyone can see even that will reach the point of diminishing returns as customers decide that none of it is worth it and go for yet other means of entertainment. No matter how the coin falls, it comes up with further loss of income for the cartels as long as they push down this path of self destruction.

Good riddance I say. Let’s get some sort of business that understands the principals of economics and just how dependant they are on the customer and not the consumer.

well apparantly the big 4 think they are in the suing bussiness now and the music thing that’s just a side thing to pay for the crack…. i mean the bills

Some free legal adcise to RIAA:
Yor salavation is to sue the lawyers that gave you phony legal advise, to sue customers and potential customers.

You should have known: The customer is always right.
You should have known: Never take advise from a seller of a product or service. They always give advise to steer you to what they sell. Lawyers sell services.

Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com