| harvey |
12-02-2009 01:15 PM |
I know times are harsh but...
Times are harsh for businesses, no doubt about it. You can blame tubes, recession, oil, war, global warming, whatever. But IMHO, the main reason is the absolute lack of morals, ethics and most important, legality.
We always grew with the concept that adult business always was a very shady business and accepted it. There are thousands, probably millions of reasons to support this theory, anyone reading this board will read about 5/10 scams, steals, tricks, etc per day.
However, I don't perceive adult business like particularly "shady". At least not shadier than corporate business. As I said many times, adult is a reflection of mainstream, no matter how much you want to discuss it, I always thought that and nothing will change it. We all eat, drink, love, sleep, travel, pay taxes, etc. Adult is just our business and source of income.
Why am I saying that? Well, because once you take a closer look, you'll notice there's no one shadier, scammier or illegal than big US corporate business.
Just as a small sample, only in the last month I was scammed/stolen by GoDaddy, Paypal and pretty close to be stolen a good bunch of money from a mainstream company very known in this board, which I won't name because someone from this board fixed the mess. So far, only this month I lost around $600, and might be losing more unless I figure out a way to sue those scammers or at least make them believe I can do it.
Why they can do this? They push the law, hide in unknown countries with close to no laws, and they know most non-US won't sue them because it's too difficult and costs won't worth it.
Still they're acting in an illegal way.
They're very different to nigerian scams or russian hackers or whatever. They make way more money and people trust them. Nigerian scammers may catch one idiot from time to time. Russian hackers way more idiots but still a minority of internet population. These companies are trusted and steal from that trust feeling.
Want a better example closer to adult? Think about the biggest copyright infringer and pirated content distributor: yes, I'm talking about Google/Youtube. This is the legal basis that holds the whole theft and content piracy in adult nowadays. Is is illegal? It is. Is it unethical? It is. Is anyone suing? No. Because it's almost impossible to win.
More examples? Microsoft (well they're sued almost every single week and they usually lose, but in the meanwhile they make a few billion dollars), Facebook, Google again and the list goes on. These companies are from US (although some of them "legally" hide in remote places... how curious) and the few times they're sued they're sued OUTSIDE US. It looks like US legal system (or lobbies, or corruption or...) supports them in every possible way.
And the problem is everybody is happy. They own you. Me. Us. They know your name, family, bank info, tastes, thought, political beliefs, where do you buy, what do you buy, what's your fetish, who's your lover.... and you gave everything you'd never give for the chump sum of... a free email account (which you already had from your ISP).
As a matter of fact, Google just added some crap to my Firefox yesterday, something called sidewiki. Opened it and noticed you can see profiles. In my profile, I could see all the info from different google accounts (I separate adult from mainstream business and family/friend from all business) consolidated in one place for everyone to see, including family sites, adult sites, mainstream sites. All my "private info" at hand for everyone.
In short.... wanna make money? forget about work, content, creativity, professionalism or anything of that sort. And mainly, forget about morals. Just get a lawyer and steal as much as you can. It's fast, it's big and it's nonpunishable in US.
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