Downloads.

It seems like Odex has got itself into alot of problems with the Singaporean population over pressing charges over people who (illegally) download anime that the company is licensed to distribute. And they claim that sales have fallen by about 60-70% recently. Apparently, people who have been sent letters for payments of $3000 to $5000, and it seems that many of those who recieved these letters from the company happen to be students.

Now now, let's not go into how these students are going to cough out the 4-digit sum to pay or argue over whether the parents/guardians or the people involved directly should pay. Question should be on the amount of money they are demanding/requesting for. I am not sure how much 60%-70% of their sales amount to. (A loss of 70 dollars out of a hundred is 70%.) But certainly, asking a student to pay $3000 for the amount of anime one can download sounds rather ridiculous. If a VCD can cost about $20 dollars and can contain about (assuming they do not fill the entire CD-ROM to the max.) 500MB of data, $3000 would give roughly 75GB of data. Hmm. What about $5000. If they really did download 75GB of anime, then I guess perhaps they do deserve it. But I somehow have my doubts that they would have 75GB of anime. (Unless they happen to watch quite a number of series.)

If sales of their anime did drop by 60%-70% 'recently', then I wonder what the rest of the download-ers have been doing for the entire time 'before recently'. What utter bullshit. And if you are asking for an estimated 1000 names from Singnet, Starhub and Pacnet each, that would give you about 3000 names. An avergage of $3000 of damages each person would give you 9 million SGD. If your sales fell by 9 Million, you must have been doing a hell lot of business 'before recently'.

How much can a greying population of 4.7 million (an estimate based on a figure of 4.48 million with a 3.3% annual growth in Jun 2006 from Singstat.gov.sg), consisting of a significant proportion of foreign talents and foreign workers, spend on anime, considering that (illegal) downloading and uploading of animes on websites like YT and CR have been around for a long enough time and that a healthy portion of the population has access to broadband to watch them online?

Go figure.

$3000 can get me a PS3 and 75GB of [ORIGINAL] games.