Sunday, January 17, 2010

40 moveece into cd!

My family walks up to a store that has a display of different dvds,

    But different than usual dvds. These ones are in a thin cardboard envelope with a photocopied sign on the front. One might say, "Harry Potter VS. Lord of the Rings," or "Starcomedy." This is all enclosed in a resealable plastic casing. On the top of it, there is the Hewlett-Packard logo, except red and the letters are in gold. Next to that says NEW 2009 MOVIE. On the side of the envelope say 40 MOVIES IN 1. WORKS ON ANY CD-ROM OR DVD PLAYER. If you turn the case over, you see a set of little boxes housing pictures of movie posters. For example, there will be HARRY POTTER A 1, HARRY POTTER A 2, HARRY POTTER A 3. And in fine print at the bottom of the case, you will see a grammatically incorrect passage saying that no part of the dvd shall be copied, or recorded without asking permission from the company. It sounds like one large scam, right? Actually, these disks are real, and the do hold movies.
    The only difference is that the "movie company" is probably someone in China in their office illegally copying movies to his computer and putting them on a CD, then getting money out of it by selling the disk like it's real. We actually just bought one of these disks out of curiosity recently called "HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE VS. JOHNNY THE MAD DOG." On that one cd we got Ice Age 3, Year One, Harry Potter #6, and 10 other movies my parents would probably watch.
    The reason Nigeria has very few legally made disks is because that the U.S sells it to them at stupidly high prices, and the Nigerian distributors just can't afford it. Instead they buy from the pirates that produce the disk in China who want to make a profit at what they do. So no, I do not blame the Nigerians one bit for buying the pirated cds and dvds. They deserve to have movies and programs too.
    But I do blame the pirates for the quality of some of the disks. "Works on every cd-rom and dvd player." Not! Every time we try to play something on our dvd player, the video is very choppy. And sometimes when you use the computer to play it, it'll actuallly freeze the whole system and you have to restart it manually. I know they're pirates and all, but come on!

Signing off,
The Traveler

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