OT: Recording Industry Ripoff

Baron Munchausen · #1 September 21st, 2005, 05:20 PM

Yeah, and what else is new? Corporations learned a long time ago that the best way to make profits is to make the product scarce and then extort the highest possible price from people. The 'Oil Industry' has been shutting down refineries for decades. They haven't built a new one since the 1970s as I recall? Every time some 'accident' closes one of the remaining refineries down for a while, they get to charge huge markups because of the 'tight supply'.

This is just the music industry trying to do the same old thing a bit prematurely. They must think that most people are 'intimidated' enough to have given up on piracy.

El_Phil · #2 September 21st, 2005, 08:03 PM

Quote:

Baron Munchausen said:
Yeah, and what else is new? Corporations learned a long time ago that the best way to make profits is to make the product scarce and then extort the highest possible price from people. The 'Oil Industry' has been shutting down refineries for decades. They haven't built a new one since the 1970s as I recall? Every time some 'accident' closes one of the remaining refineries down for a while, they get to charge huge markups because of the 'tight supply'.

I'd like to think that the evil corporation that would actually deliberately kill lots of people for profit only exists in fiction. Given that quite a few of these refinery accidents do kill people (or get damn close and injure large numbers), I hope they are actually accidents.

Fyron · #3 September 21st, 2005, 08:22 PM

Any chance that BM gets to defame the name of corporations is a good day.

What he says has absolutely nothing to do with corporations themselves, but rather with anyone trying to make money. Such artificial product scarcity occured eons before the first corporation was ever chartered.

The RIAA wants variable pricing on music tracks so that they can charge 1.50 or more for popular songs, and likely the same as now for less popular songs. Absolutely none of their actions in recent years have done anything to curb piracy, but instead to destroy the last vestiges of reputation that they had and to provoke further piracy. I seem to recall that in recent years, piracy (of all forms) has approached the levels of bandwidth usage of pornography on the Internet as a whole...

Baron Munchausen · #4 September 21st, 2005, 08:31 PM

Oh, it's not necessary for them to 'deliberately' arrange for accidents. They and the government knew quite well that a major hurricane like Katrina could shut down a major part of our national refinery capacity. But the corporate boards didn't want to cut into their profits by buying more refinery capacity than absolutely necessary to met demand and the government didn't want to violate the 'free market' by forcing them to. So now that the inevitable has happened, we all pay the price and the owners of Exxon, Shell, BP, etc. make even fatter profits off of a disaster. What do they care if ordinary working people who can barely afford to drive to work every day are being ruined by this huge price rise?

El_Phil · #5 September 21st, 2005, 08:41 PM

Nothing to stop other people opening refineries. Or just buy shares in an oil firm if your that convinced they actually make money from petrol. That would be a bad thing to do by the way, check the published accounts and it's all upstream and oil production that makes money. Fuels (and that includes aviation gas, ships fuel oil, etc.) aren't that much, not in the scheme of things.

Does remind me though, start of Bush's term in office the emergency planning chappies produced the list of three worst potential threats to the US
1. Cat 5 hurricane on the US Gulf coast
2. Terrorist attack on New York
3. Huge quake in San Fransisco.

Frankly as yet another cat5 hurricane prepares to hit the gulf coast I'd be moving out of Frisco right now.

Xrati · #6 September 22nd, 2005, 10:57 AM

Remember El_Phil "CHANGE IS GOOD!" I think?

I find it funny that as always the RIAA goes after the small people rather then the 'Site or soure' of the downloads. I guess that they figure it would be easier to go after people who probably can't afford a lawyer rather than a larger target that could. It's like going after the 'drug users' rather then going after the 'dealers' and 'suppliers'. Go to the source of the problem to eliminate it, NOT those effected by it!

El_Phil · #7 September 22nd, 2005, 11:12 AM

It's not a site is it though? It's peer to peer networks, so there is no 'source' to go after. You can only go after the people who download (and upload of course) because there is no central point to chase. The 'source' of a peer to peer network is the people who write the protocls (too late to get them, the programmes are already out there. And ther are dozens of legit uses of peer to peer anyway).

So they have to chase the users, there is no-one else. Of course they are scum sucking maggots, but not being American I really can't work up much enthusiasm for the issue.

Baron Munchausen · #8 September 22nd, 2005, 01:28 PM

Ah... NOW we see why the move for the price increases. They had sent 'cease and desist' letters to a bunch of the P2P software companies and some of them have folded as expected. WinMX network is now disconnected. Several others are having serious problems.

Fyron · #9 September 22nd, 2005, 01:03 PM

They (and the MPAA) have gone after the people that run large bit torrent tracker sites catering to piracy of music (or movies). They went after Napster, and Sharman Networks (owners of Kazaa), and other larger p2p software makers. They do not always go after just the little people.