corporate greed

Ever wonder why consumers modify (hack) electronics? Well let’s focus on Verizon Wireless phones. Some of the newest software released by Verizon is “locked”, essentially meaning that if you want to add ringtones, you have to purchase tones direct through the “get it now” option on your phone. Ringtones are not the only problem with Verizon’s software, this also affects the ability to transfer pictures, mp3’s, messages, and contact information. We will be using ringtones as the primary focus on this article about what is known as “Coercive Monopoly”

Get a well written description of Coercive Monopoly here at wiki, you will find many similarities to what wiki describes as C.M., and how Verizon runs their “Get it Now” machinate. A stock RAZR V3cm phone is equipped with 16 ringtones, some files are .midi, and some are .mp3. So you have opened up your box on your $10.00 upgraded phone, and you find you don’t necessarily care for the options that you have for ringtones. Now you look in your cd drawer, and think “I could just convert and sync a song.” Well guess what? You are wrong, not only can you not do this because the software is locked, but if you do succeed in this; you have violated your ”T.O.S.” with Verizon, and some speculate you have violated the Digital Millennium Act. Do you feel you are being forced to buy ringtones?

The software in question is most notably version 24.1_01.19.07. We got are hands on one of these phones, and decided to give it a whirl. We got really bored fast, there is essentially no options to customize this phone to are liking. Sure we could change the theme, a total of 4 options. We could take a picture, and set it as a background. We could not however, transfer the picture via Bluetooth, or transfer cable. This picture we took is ours, and not a copyrighted image from the web. The only way we could get this to our p.c. is to send it via e-mail; of course there is a charge for this service. This also applies to sound files we made through the voice recorder. This phone, the V3cm is also an mp3 player, but we cannot transfer our mp3’s we bought from the web to our new phone. We have to buy mp3’s through Verizon’s “get it now” program. Okay, so let’s say you have purchased an mp3 from Verizon, now you want to somehow protect your investment in case your phone crashes. Well you can’t, remember the above for mentioned about transferring? If you phone crashes, you have to repurchase the song(s). Verizon was kind enough to point that out on their FAQ page. These are some examples of what you cannot do with your new phone. You might be thinking to yourself “I’ll just get an older version of Verizon’s software so that I have some functionality,” wrong again.

You are now at the point that you subject yourself to Verizon’s means, and you figure “okay, I’ll just buy one or two ringtones, and that’s it.” We feel sorry for you; you are willing to pay what works out to be $13.45 for a song. Verizon offers ringtones for $2.99. This is an mp3 that is only 28 seconds long. If you take the average song, which is 4.5 minutes long your cost is the above stated of $13.45. To give you a comparison we went over to legalsounds.com and looked at an mp3 from Seether, legal sounds wants to charge you $0.09 for this mp3. To put this into perspective Verizon has 15,000% markup on their ringtones, versus buying an mp3 and cutting your own 28 second track out of it. To compound this, if you want to buy a Seether ringtone, you can only buy what 28 seconds Verizon has decided cut. Once that ringtone is on your phone, you don’t own it. Like we stated before, if something happens to your phone, or even if your kid accidentally deletes this tone, you have to repurchase it. Sounding a lot like Coercive Monopoly now isn’t it? Now we don’t condone “Piracy”, but we understand why people do use “Piracy” as a means to personalize. Head over to motox, and see what people are doing about this proprietary problem. Verizon will tell you that actions found on motox violate “T.O.S.”, and could be extruded as illegal activity, but isn’t price gouging illegal? We looked around on the motox website. We found that the hottest topics were; Verizon wireless, and or Motorola modding. At any given point there were over 150 users viewing topics. We also visited howardforums, be warned this site is so popular that their servers could be slow at times. Howard forums proffer a massive amount of knowledge so it’s worth the wait.

An armed consumer is the most dangerous type; you have been armed with knowledge. Do you continue to abide by policies set in place from Verizon? Or do you choose to change carriers, modify your phone, or buy into rhetoric? Unfortunately there is no clear cut government agency that will hand down a decision concerning “locked equipment” in conjunction with price gouging in regards to wireless carriers. With that in mind, our goal is to minimize their profits of what can be considered “seedy” practices.