It's been a while since I posted last, and since I reached a milestone in my collection of dvd's (I just passed 900 discs), I got to thinking about how many cheap fucks there are ...
There's been quite a lot of news recently regarding copyrights in the anime world such as; this guy that was busted for uploading anime and this action by manga companies to shut down "scanlation" (fan-translated comics) sites. And it really got me thinking how no one buys shit anymore, speaking in terms of movies (DVDs/BD's) and music (Cd's) and especially PC software (hell, I'm not sure I know anyone who's actually bought an Adobe product since like 1995). I hear people talk about how they got *whatever* via bittorrent, but I rarely hear someone say I just bought a copy of *whatever*. It's gotten the point where the people that BUY things are the ones that get shit talked, "you actually paid for a copy of *X band*'s new CD, lol what for?".
Of course it revolves around the whole "entitlement" shit I see so often anymore (speaking personally of anime/manga, though I'm sure it happens for everything else too), where "fans" simply can be bothered to buy, basically, fucking anything. A look though almost any anime forum discussion will yield at least a few outspoken people going on about how they never buy a series that they haven't seen in it's entirety (via fansubs), or how they "would buy", but they're so far ahead of the American release that they'd have to wait X years to catch up to where they are right now. Or the official translation is crap and the fan-sub is more true to the original (and clearly they'd know since they speak Japanese fluently, and are only watching the fan-subs to critique the translators grammar). Or any other list of bullshit excuses someone uses to justify stealing.
The only justification I can at least understand is "it's not available" (either it's out of print, or was never released for purchase in your country, or is super rare and basically the only way to get a copy is to get prison raped by someone on Amazon marketplace). But, while that may be true for certain things it's hardly what's mostly being pirated, I'd say rare/hard to find stuff is probably near the bottom of the list. People aren't going on torrents to download an obscure Russian film from the 1940's that someone translated into English for the small group that wants to see it. They're going there to get the latest Lady Gaga album so they don't have to go spend $13.99 to get it at Best Buy (or they're just ashamed they listen to shit music like Lady Gaga). I mean shit, I'm far from rich, but I respect the fact that someone put a lot of time and effort into making something that I enjoy, I'm not about to be some dick and just rip the shit off. Just recently, I bought the latest Coheed and Cambria album and since I'm a huge fan I got the super deluxe box set version. It was almost $60 after tax, just so I could have a few bonus tracks and a novel, and I'd be willing to bet for my purchase 150 cheap fucks just DL'ed the whole album off some torrent site.
Part of me feel angry, knowing that what I spent hard earned money on some cheap ass spent about 2 minutes to google search and downloaded for nothing. But mostly I'm just sad that it's gotten to the point where people have so little respect for musicians, directors and programmers that they feel what they do for a living is basically worthless.
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