3 ms·

What is greed? Every day startups and investors sit in a room asking "how can we make as much money as we can for as long as possible?" and they're celebrated

• laumars 14y ago
  It's greedy because no other industry expects a 50 year product life cycle. And what's more, manages to get consumers to pay repeatedly for the same product every 10 years. You buy an album on vinyl, then cassette, than CD, then MP3 - that's 4 separate times you'd have paid for the exact same album if you were to do things entirely legal (in the UK, it's still technically illegal to rip your own CDs). The whole thing is mental and it's at least part of the reason why piracy is so prevalent - users have gotten so fed up of paying through the nose and not owning the content, being subjected to unskippable anti-piracy adverts and DRM, that they've turned to a subculture which can give them the content they want in a format they want and without any anti-usage policies. Going back to your start up comparison, free markets are driven by companies constantly seeking customers by either the best, the cheapest or by offering a unique element. This means that companies are constantly trying to out do each other, and those that are the most expensive and provide the worst service go out of business. Yet in the content industry, the big corporations are the most expensive, and provide the worse service. And we're not just talking about a bad service, we're talking so appallingly bad that they deliberately set out to make the product crap (like I said, DRM, anti-piracy ads, etc). In any other industry, those businesses would have gone under.