Jarjarthejedi's Journal: An angle I've never thought of before...

So I was stumbing around with my new StumbleUpon extension, and I happened upon an interesting picture that made me pause and think. Here's a link to it on imageshack, I can't remember where I originally found it - http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/4316/sharingdp6.jpg

So basically the plot of the picture is that a kid is in Kindergarten being told to share with the other kids. The next panel shows him grown up sitting at a computer, with the semi-obvious implication that he's sharing music (obvious if you assume the first and second panels are linked). The third panel has him behind bars, a slightly exaggerated way to show that he got sued for it and lost.

So I thought to myself, that's interesting. I've never even thought to compare the old childhood teaching to share toys with music sharing. There are some obvious differences, the plain-as-day one being that when you share a toy you both can't have it at the same time and the sharee can't use it without you being there (unless you lend it to them in which case you can't use it). However there are some very interesting similarities.

Allow me to bore you with a story from my childhood. I used to play with a couple of the other kids in my neighborhood when I was younger. We all liked Transformers (Beast Wars primarily, and the sequel whose name I can't remember) quite a bit and got together regularly to play with them, we all had some. One of our group, let's call him Alex for convenience, was really into them and was smart about getting his hands on them when they were on sale. One day Hasbro (I think) released the newest, greatest Transformers toy of the time, a large Optimus Primal (or with it Prime?) toy with lights, sounds, and 4 transformation modes. This was an awesome toy, something like $60 when it came out (can't find it for less than $75 on ebay, so that's something), had 4 transformation modes and was just plain cool. All my friends and myself wanted this thing. Then one day our friend Alex found it, I'm not sure if he got it on sale or what (never asked, but he usually bought all of those toys on sale) but he got it.

And he shared it with us. When we had our giant Transformer battles (we each had something like 5-20 figures, and they'd all participate in a battle, so we had 40+ figure battles weekly :) ) Optimal Optimus was always right in the fray. Occasionally alex would be busy somewhere else and so one of us would be the one using Optimal to fight, just like if we owned the toy ourselves. Suffice it to say that after that I didn't really want Optimal Optimus anymore, I still thought he was one of the coolest toys (and was actually getting hopeful that I could find him cheap when I searched ebay today) but since Alex had it and was cool about sharing I didn't really need it anymore. None of the other people in the group got that toy, in fact the only Transformers we had more than one of were the ones we'd had when we'd met, no one bought a toy someone in the group had, not because it was some kind of law, but because we didn't need it, one of our other friends had it so we got to play with it as well.

In essence Alex's sharing of his toy cost the toy industry at least $60, and probably more like $180 because I'm pretty sure my other friends would have picked one up if no one they knew had it and was willing to share. And you know what, his parents were proud of him for being so nice. No one disapproved of his sharing, that would be nuts. Now had Alex shared even a single song with us, cost the music industry $3, his parents wouldn't have been happy. My parents would have probably told me to stop hanging out with him over that.

So I say this to any Toy Industry Exec's out there, you've got to start suing your customers. They're ruthlessly sharing your toys and cutting your profits down significantly. First things first, make toy sharing illegal, I can't find any legislation that makes it legal, so this shouldn't be too hard if you do enough appeals to emotion about starving toy designers and record low profits, make sure you ignore the China lead thing though, the blame for low profits should rest squarely on these little miscreants. Second you should wipe out the 'sharing is caring' curriculum of Kindergarten, it's obviously an effort to teach children to break the law. Third, start suing kids at random, they all share so it should be easy to find a target. Just sue one kid who you're pretty sure of, or threaten it, and then get him to tattle on the other kids (won't be too hard, just threaten to take away all of his toys). Then start chaining out from there, filing actual lawsuits occasionally. Use plenty of appeals to emotion. Then you've got to work on stopping this sharing at the source, I recommend little handcuffs attached to every toy and legislation to make it illegal to use the toy without the handcuff on your arm and to allow another kid to put the handcuff on their arm, call is ARM (Analog Rights Management). Make sure you specify that you're selling the toys at the store, and leasing them in the box.

Once you do this you should start seeing record profits as kids everywhere buy their own toys. If you don't then just blame it on the sharers and go after them even more vigerously. You don't have to pay me for this idea, just don't go after me, it was that kid Alex who was sharing the toys.

Kindy raids

[tqft]

Something the FBI should probably be able to manage: raiding Kindergartens where they have big stores of toys that everyone gets to play with, without paying.

And don't forget playgroups - where parents take their pre-kindy kids to play together and undoubtedly share toys. You may need heavy duty backup for these actually as often pregnant women are there. As these meetup are organised by the internet/phone - probable people (people with kids) should have all theirs comms tapped to see when they are organi