How to Waste your Time, the Intellectual "Property" Way

So the CBC has a story about the US government taking China to WTO arbitration over "piracy". (Please insert here the pro-forma rant about how piracy--the real thing, not copyright infringement--is a heinous crime in which people die whereas nobody has ever died from copied DVDs and CDs. I'm tired of typing it out again and again. Why don't you idiots at the RIAA and MPAA just call it "The Entertainment Holocaust" if you're so intent on grotesquely distorting words and concepts for rhetorical gain?)

Of particular interest in that article is this passage:

American companies contend they are losing billions of dollars in sales because of rampant copyright piracy.

Which planet are these people living on? The Chinese, for the most part, can barely afford movies at the infringed copyright rates (ranging CDN$0.25-$1.50 depending on quality)! What on Earth makes these morons think that jacking up the price to $10+ is going to have any impact on their income?

I think it's time for someone to kidnap copyright lawyers and entertainment company executives and force them, at gunpoint, to live in the countryside of China for a year without access to their millions. Then, maybe, they'll just grab a clue and figure out that their fight is self-defeating.

Printer Shafting

So, I'm getting a lot of good use out of my new HP printer (despite a few problems with the Linux driver that have yet to be fully worked out -- luckily I'm not printing photos!). Joan, when buying the printer, was already eyeing the price of ink nervously (the printer cost us 300RMB; one spare set of ink cartridges cost us 290) and got even more nervous when she noticed that I blew through the demo cartridge that came with the printer (3ml of black ink instead of 10ml, for example) with my first print job.

She was right to be nervous.

Printing at any kind of readable resolution sucks through ink at a prodigious rate. The printer manufacturers don't make their money from printers, you see. They make their money selling the ink cartridges. I have, since getting the printer, printed off five books on various things needed for my work (reference manuals in the main). Two books (of about a hundred pages each) is all I get per cartridge.

Luckily I live in China. In my neighbourhood you can hardly fling a brick without hitting at least three shops selling printer ink. And not just official cartridges, but, too, third-party cartridges (at half to a third of the price) and cartridge refill kits. These latter are the real life-savers.

Today I bought some ink refills. These are 30ml syringes (the black cartridges are 10ml, recall; colour cartridges are 8ml each colour) with the ink you need in the colours you need. Using them is simple: you peel back a sticker, insert the syringe, push the plunger and when the ink seeps a bit out of the hole you're using you're done. And they cost, literally, a tenth the price of the cartridge.

Going with the black cartridge (the ink I'll be using most often), that means that for one tenth the price of an official cartridge I get three times the ink. And refilling a cartridge is hardly difficult work! Fumbling with the packaging and tape of a proper cartridge means replacing a cartridge takes two to three minutes. Injecting the ink takes five. Hardly an onerous task when you consider that my print batches take hours.

Now sure, the ink quality isn't quite as good as the HP official inks. The black isn't quite so deep. The cyan/magenta/yellow isn't quite so vibrant. But it's still better than the official inks I used in my old Epson before it gave up its ghost and certainly more than good enough for the kind of printing I do (text).

So why would I want to be given the shaft by HP for its cartridges?

Well, I do blow my warranty away if they catch that I used an unofficial ink. On the other hand, if I refill my black ink cartridge three times, I've saved more than the price of a whole new printer....

Just how stupid do they think I am?!

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Wow! What a birthday present! One million dollars! I'm so there, man!

Replying by email (they lie, I lie):

Please send me the million dollars quickly. This couldn't have come at a better time. My daughter needs a life-saving operation and the family wasn't sure we could afford it!

I'll continue posting updates as I play these scamsters.

Update: March 3, 2007

Well, no word back from them. I guess they don't want to give me my million dollars to save my daughter....