General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Homeland Security raids lingerie shop for panties that violate MLB copyright [View all]Ampersand Unicode
(503 posts)These companies have enough money as it is already. We have the technology, as they used to say in (I believe) Six Million Dollar Man. It's not like they're passing it off as the real thing; it's clearly a knockoff and labeled as such.
What's the big deal if some poor kid wants a Royals shirt but can't afford a "licensed" $100 one? Who's really getting hurt if I print out a Royals logo from Wikipedia and screen print it onto a $2 Hanes T-shirt, then sell it for $5 bucks? That's about the same salary they're paying to the Chinese kids who make this stuff anyway, so why the fuck should it cost $100 if not for all this lawyer bullshit?
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it certainly isn't worth a million bucks. Nobody bleeds if I go to Google, find a good-sized digital image of a Warhol or a Picasso, print it out on HP photo paper and put it in a frame for my living room. It's a replica and not the "real thing"; it's not like I forged the Mona Lisa or anything. I just printed it out from Google. Nobody gets hurt if I print out Mickey Mouse and screen print the graphic onto a shirt or a pillowcase. Nobody catches Ebola if I put a "licensed character" on a sheet cake for some kid's birthday party. And so what if I sell it for a few bucks, it's not like anyone's dying of cancer here. Just a bunch of whiny greed-mongers protecting their bottom line.
Personally I think anti-counterfeit and anti-piracy laws are bullshit and should be dumped like yesterday's old fish. It's not the same as "counterfeiting" say, medication and people dying from buying a cheap knockoff that has who-knows-what in it. It's a fucking logo, and if I want to put it on whatever either for myself or to make a few easy bucks off of it, what's the BFD?
Fuck the MAFIAA and their hired guns.