Re: Syndicomm Scam

[Eric Rucker <bhtooefr@gmail.com>]

Hmm... here's my thoughts on this thread.

Tony really does have a serious problem with not getting things shipped. I've had 6+ month shipping times in the past, and that was bugging him every now and then on IRC - I've gotten everything I've bought from him, but I generally don't expect to see it for ages, so if it's something I want any time soon, I go somewhere else.

PayPal does have ways to handle delayed fulfillment properly, although not at Tony's shipment times: https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/howto_admin_authcapture

My opinion is that copyright terms should be much shorter, the purpose of copyright being encouragement to make works that wouldn't be profitable due to copying by granting a limited monopoly. This does mean that just about everything that Syndicomm sells, in my opinion, should not be under copyright, and should have reverted to the public domain. (That doesn't mean that I think Syndicomm shouldn't sell it, and there is value in physical media, although I doubt Syndicomm's business would be sustainable with that software and literature in the public domain.)

However, under our current legal frameworks, Syndicomm is the legal distributor of quite a bit of software and documentation, and the copyright holders of most of those works are active holders and have set terms under which their works can be distributed. While we can argue until the cows come home about the fairness of those terms, and the effects on the Apple II community of those arrangements, Syndicomm and the copyright holders do have the legal right to charge whatever they want (except in certain situations, none of which apply in this case), and at least in some cases, have shown that they're willing to exercise their legal rights, unlike the many, many inactive or dormant copyright holders (which, it's still not legal to distribute their products, but hey...)

Also, I wouldn't necessarily describe the Apple II userbase as stupid for wanting to patronize businesses that have contributed significantly to the Apple II community in the past, nor would I necessarily describe the userbase as stupid for being willing to take risks on very expensive hardware, and being willing to spend a lot for accelerators (although I do think some of the prices have gotten quite stupid, but that's what happens when you have a market full of both collectors and users, with uncommon and highly desirable hardware - look at things like HP calculators, where the 41CX is incredibly expensive on eBay due to the fact that both a loyal userbase and a collector market have converged, combined with the fact that these calculators are suffering from attrition).

tl;dr: Tony needs to ship stuff (much) faster, PayPal has ways to mitigate the "he charged my card but didn't ship" complaints, copyright terms should be shorter, but they're not, so we need to negotiate with the copyright holders if we want things to change, and the market conditions are why things are going the way they are.