Karaoke Forums

You guys are trying to turn this into some kind of moral dilemma.

Case in point. I wanted to get a hardened case for my iPad. The top dog, Otterbox, charges about $80 on their website. I found a site out of the country selling them for around $20+shipping, so in the end I got it for less than 1/3 the retail price.

Am I somehow stealing or ripping Otterbox off? I don't think so.

But is it an Otterbox or a counterfeit. I can go to Manhatten and buy a $10 Rolex or any apparel from a major deigner for $40 or a Louis Vittain (sp) purse for $20. So am I harming these companies for buying "their" products for fire sale prices. Yep, I sure would be.

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Yup...the real deal, right down to the packaging and inserts. Am I taking food out of their mouths because they chose to sell for less elsewhere?

I understand Canadians like to buy cars in the US and drive them back to save $$$. Are they bad people for doing so? Stealing food from the mouths of Ford & Chevy?

Anyone who would buy a "Louis Vuitton" purse for $20 (haha! Would LOVE to see what it looks like! ), or even $200 or $300 would know it's a fake.
And the "quality" would be extremely substandard, for that matter. I would dare to say that it would be so substandard that anyone with eyes could tell it was a fake at fairly good distance away!
But more to the point, anyone who would buy such a purse would never be able to afford to buy the real thing in the first place, so they really wouldn't be stealing sales from Louis Vuitton, would they? If those fakes didn't exist, sure enough, they would be spending their money anyway, but I guarantee you, it wouldn't be on a real LV.
That's not to say that they should be allowed to sell such fakes, because they shouldn't. The world is full of idiots who would believe such an inferior piece of crap is real and THAT, though not harming them directly in sales, could eventually harm their reputation, especially where such idiots are concerned.
Not quite the same thing as the SC situation.
But nice try.

Actually, Daifel, I have heard your exact analogy applied to karaoke by a singer with her own home hard drive with 60,000 songs on it. She told me it wasn't stealing because if she had to pay for the songs, she would never have bought them. Yet she still had them and was getting use out of them without paying for them--and also diverting people from those shows who HAD paid for their music.

Even if the person who bought the cheap purse could never have afforded a real one, someone is still profiting off the design work of someone else without paying them for their efforts so it is still a loss as it takes away some of the "exclusivity" from the real thing.

Yes you can buy a car cheaper in the States but bring it across the border and be prepared to pay all the taxes and duties on it and if you do not declare it, prepare to lose the car. One thing about VINs is that it's easy to trace where a vehicle was delivered to and original point of sale.

Who was even talking about SC, but nice try.

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You can be strange but not a stranger

Those poor starving auto workers!



Joe was...amongst others. Nice try indeed.



They are getting paid what they agreed to get paid. This is not an ethical/moral issue.

The point is, LL, that the analogy most certainly is not fit to compare to the SC situation, simply because the cheaper "imitation" that people could afford to buy would then be the likes of SGB or THM or any number of other brands. What "design" of SC's would someone else be profiting from, really? Lyrics? Music?
What exclusivity would be taken from SC. There are many, many other manufacturers who cover the same songs. Nothing exclusive about that.
And really, the difference in price is hardly to be compared between a $2000 (average authentic price) Louis Vitton with it's imitation being sold at $20 (or even 2 0r 3 hundred dollars) vs. a $25 SC disc and and a $15 THM disc. The ratio doesn't even equate between the two. Not even close to being the same thing since the reality is that someone who claims they cannot afford to buy a "real" SC, but they can afford to buy a $15 THM is just a plain liar anyway.
But people who can afford to purchase a cheap imitation LV may very well not be able to and are even more likely not to be able to afford the real thing.
As for the LV design being stolen, most of them are so far off the mark in design as to not even resemble a real one and just have the LV insignia on them.
Like I said, they certainly should be stopped and I don't condone piracy in any form, but the LV analogy just doesn't fit here. Period.
Maybe pick a better one that does fit. Then we can talk turkey.

If one could download a LV handbag free, then would it fit?

Nope. The cost ratio of original vs counterfeit doesn't work.
Why can't you see it? It's clear as day.

A counterfeit is a counterfeit regardless of the "cost ratio".

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You can be strange but not a stranger

What's "clear as day" is that you have a double standard.

Agreed, but the problem here, regarding the SC case, is the definition of a counterfeit.



Did you check your reading comprehension at the door?


All I was saying was that the analogy does not equate to the SC case. Period.

My daughter bought me one of those N.Y. City Rolex watches....

Dam thing eats batteries..

Make sure that's an "L" and not an "I" in the middle.

I have to disagree here too. I think the analogy does fit, and here's why....

While you may be comparing SC (at $25 per disc) to the cheaper brands such as SGB (at $15 per disc), you are overlooking something in your equation. If someone were to go out and knowingly buy a counterfeit LV bag at (let's say) $200, that person may not have stolen anything, but the person who sold it to them has. Now, let's take the person who buys a FULLY LOADED Hard Drive for $500. That person has made 1 purchase (just like the Consumer who just purchased that LV bag). That fully loaded hard drive would have (just about) every disc that was manufactured on it.... not just SC or SGB or THM or DK, etc... Now, just taking the SC Spotlight series as an example, this series started at number 8000. before production stopped, it was already into the 9000 series. Let's just round it down to 9000 for this case. That means 1000 discs were produced in that series. At (let's just say) $22 per disc, that would total $22,000 if you were to buy the whole series, as compared to someone else just paying $500 for the hard drive to have it (and then some).

You're just comparing the cost of 1 disc vs another disc, and not looking at the entire picture. It really is close to the LV analogy where you are buying 1 real bag vs 1 counterfeit bag. You are buying a full set of real discs as vs 1 fully loaded (illegally at that) hard drive which contains all these discs.

Not quite. Now you are bordering on the ridiculous (analogy speaking). The equivalent would be buying every known designer bag known to man at an extreme discount of, let's say, $500. Still doesn't equate. Sorry, but no matter how you try to work it, the analogy just doesn't fit. Why not pick something more realistic, rather than try to force fantasy into reality?
In other words, why are you trying to force analogy that doesn't work, rather than give an analogy that does work? Makes no sense to me why you all keep trying. Perhaps it's the same mentality that feeds the "logic" that SC has the right to audit your systems with no evidence of any wrong doing, other than seeing a computer in use (for what purpose, who knows?) at a venue?
Go ahead. Keep banging your heads against a wall. You all are the ones that look dumb for doing it.

And denial is not just a river in Egypt. .

And I tell patrons that "Tipping" is not a city in China.

(Of course Earthling will now go looking for one...)

While I think that on the surface, this discussion is about counterfeiting, I do believe that there is an "apples-to-oranges" fundamental difference going on here. I actually understand both sides of this, and neither side of the argument is necessarily "wrong" so it's best to agree to disagree..

... and I tell folks that Tipping isn't just for aggravating sleeping cows...


but that's probably just a Colorado thing...

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