Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 1558433" data-attributes="member: 10201">The "large" in front of "corporation" in my post wasn't an accident, or redundant emphasis. I honestly see little or nothing that Disney, Time-Warner, Haliburton, Sony, WalMart, or other megacorporations--the sort with the power to push gov'ts around--has done that is a massive good, or necessary to society. Feel free to enlighten me--i could very well be overlooking things, due to ignorance of the accomplishments, or the accomplishers, that would change my POV on the matter. But, currently i am aware of a *lot* of ill that those size corporations have done to society, and very little good. Particularly those built around IP. If large corps used their economies of scale to raise wages, rather than lower prices, i'd be much mor sympathetic, frex. I'm much more sympathetic to the economies of scale argument when it comes to things that clearly benefit society, even if the means are less than desirable--medical research, frex.So, yes, i'm fully aware that large corporations can achieve things that small ones can not. I'm not fully convinced they are more efficient than gov't organizations--i think they have different sorts of inefficiencies. The drive of profit causes inefficiencies in much the same way that the lack of profit-drive causes inefficiencies in many gov't activities. Pre-industrial? Not a chance.  Pseudo-socialist? Maybe. Canada doesn't seem to work any less well than the US does. To be clear, i'm not saying that we could've gotten where we are without free-market capitalism. But i'm also not convinced that it's the pinnacle of societal development, and no future changes could ever improve on it.As for capitalism: in the strictest sense (absentee ownership, via investment) i *do* have questions as to its value. But i haven't seen (or come up with) a better solution. The fact that it's the least-evil economic model is not the same as saying it's a good economic model. The biggest flaw in capitalism is that the corporation is beholden, first and foremost, to the stockholders. Not the consumers. Not the producers (the employees). Therefore, there are market forces that can drive a company to do something that is good for neither the employees nor the consumers or, more often, not good for the employees. I'm not against capitalism, per se, i simply don't blindly accept that it's the be-all and end-all of economic structures. And, in any case, i really don't see what this has to do, one way or the other, with a discussion of the state of the RPG industry as a whole (Hasbro is the only player that *might* fall into the "too big" category by my standards), or the nature of IP vis-a-vis piracy, or with my fitness to have a valid, reasoned, and/or reasonable opinion. Are you really going to now discount any statements i previously made that you thought were reasonable (assuming there were any) just because you consider a different opinion of mine ludicrous or foolish? Should'nt you judge ideas and arguments on their own basis, not the basis of who uttered them?Oh, and looking back at my post, there is one things that was rather unclear: i don't actually download RPGs from WotC "because they're the bad guys", i have simply tried to reason through the consequences and decided that, if i were to only download from the megacorps, i'd be doing more good than harm, and if everyone followed my standard, likewise. Likewise, if i were to download from small, creator-owned companies, i'd be doing more harm than good. Given that, AFAIK, piracy affects the biggest producers the most, i see it distinctly targeting exactly the right people, for the most part, and thus the "if everyone did it" argument does not clearly argue against it, on consequences alone (it may argue against it, but it does not *clearly and unambiguously* argue against it). There are, however, other legal and moral arguments that do argue against free-for-all downloading. I just don't think that's necesasrily one of them.</blockquote>

Verification