This post started out on topic.
I have a sheet of paper tacked to my wall. Over a year ago I printed a phrase on it, and then I stuck it to the wall.That was at least a printer ago, possibly two. I seem to get through printers the way that other people get through biros. And then they squat around all broken and dusty and loomy and make me look as if I’m a mad hoarder of broken things.
And that’s where things began to wrong…
Incidentally, did you know that printer companies region protect their ink cartridges? Ink cartridges! To stop people shopping around for a better deal, and, incidentally to render your printer a worthless doorstop if you are in the habit of moving from continent to continent.
While we’re on the topic, I’m the reluctant owner of two Wiis, one for Europe and one for America, so my children can continue to interact with brightly colored brain popsicles. And Nintendo, it seems, have applied the same logic to their handheld DSi platform, prompting tears from my youngest when a long awaited game, bought in the UK, failed to work on his American player.
Now globalization is a wonderful thing for big corporations, they get to play national governments off against one another to win tax breaks, they can shop around for the lowest wages, the least regulation, the cheapest property and raw materials. They can pitch their prices to local markets.
When a consumer takes a handheld device to a new territory and buys a game to play on it — this is what the device is designed for after all: ease of movement and the playing of games — he discovers that the rules are very different on the other side of the counter. Consumers, it seems, should remain static so as to consume at the prescribed price for their local market. Looking for a better price elsewhere, if that’s even what they’re doing, is apparently tantamount to theft.
Try taking your US-bought iPhone to a UK Apple Store and getting it legitimately transferred to a local network. Even having paid AT&T a large termination fee, we were left with glorified iPods. ‘You should have read the small print, a charmer from Apple told me. Genius indeed.
Well long live jailbreaking and modding and DRM-busting. By treating all their customers like thieves, the consumer electronics companies are making us all proud to be pirates.
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The actual idea that prompted this post will arrive in the near future._
