enishi wrote:blasphemy! so what if it looks like a .. crappy vcd. if your finances suck, its the best route. ive bought a few sets and watched some of my friends sets, and the video only pixelates about 7-12% of the entire video. not bad at aaaaall. if ya wanna spend $100-$200 on a box set, go to your best buy and shower them with cash.
Are you joking.... If this doesn't persuade you to not buy any more bootlegs then I don't know what will. Organized criminal organizations have made money from stolen/bootleg products for almost a century. From the Russian and Italian mobs here in the States hijacking gasoline and cigarette trucks and selling them off. To the 1920's with bootleg liquor during the Prohibition era.
But in Asia the Hong Kong, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Japanese mafias mainly use bootleg consumer goods to finance their activities. From anime, to merchandise, CDs, movies, all of that. And since the copyright laws are so lax they can do it pretty easily. Go to a subway in Tokyo and you can find Bob Dylan bootlegs, a Sony artist, but the authorities turn a blind eye to it as long as they don't bootleg Japanese artists.
And what's an easy outlet to sell these to unsuspecting and ignorant people? Ebay... People think they're just getting a good deal but instead they're more than likely funding organized crime and thus furthering their activities like the slave trade, opium trade, prostitution, you name it.
Now I know it probably sounds like I'm trying to go on a guilt trip here. I bought one bootleg in my life and didn't know it at the time. I told myself I'd never buy another again when I found out it was a fake. But if you're trying to justify why you should buy a bootleg you should really rethink that besides the fact it doesn't fund the creators.
"You can't sit on the fence when it comes to Jesus, Satan owns the fence." Mark Cahill
2-151 D Co. Infantry (Air Assault)