Information Week’s Mitch Wagner posts an excellent question to the internet community. Are there any examples of a company fighting piracy and launching lawsuits as a successful business strategy?

Wagner has several examples of the opposite; where lawsuits only alienate customers. He begins with Hasbro’s recent takedown of the popular Scrabulous game on Facebook to launched its own unpopular Scrabble game, coving the music industry and Garfield.  Matt Mason’s “The Pirate’s Dilemma” is a book length list of examples of lawsuits hurting businesses.

There are even examples of companies embracing piracy to improve their businesses.

So does anyone have an example of lawsuits helping companies?

[Via Techdirt]

Addition is a serious issue, and geeks are grossly susceptible. Unfortunately for serious geeks, we can have several addictions, each costing about as much as something classy like cigarettes or cocaine. The problem is the hobby begins to feed itself - if you’ve been doing something for 10 years, why stop?

Case in point, I’ve been a compulsive action figure collector for years, amassing a solid 300 plus figures.  I open the boxes, display them in awkward positions, and have oodles of fun.  Recently, my interests, especially financial, have been more focused on video games leaving me less budget for action figures forcing me to prioritize - the new Marvel Legends or dinner.

The problem is my action figure collection is so large, it begins to feed itself.  I want to buy more figures just to justify the figures I already bought.  If I stop buying them, it makes the first 300 look like a waste of money.  And that would be silly.

The challenge is always time and money.  I now have more video games than I have time to play, more comic books than I have time to read, too many movies and TV shows to watch, and obviously no social life.  So it’s always a challenge when I want to buy something else, but can’t figure out where to fit it.

For action figures, I’ve slowed my purchasing, weaning myself off the addition.  I still buy figures I’ve had on my must list for a while like Ra’s Al Ghul and upcoming Despero.  Thankfully Hasbro’s take on Marvel Legends is so crappy otherwise this would be much more of a struggle.  Of course, new Battlestar Galactica figures are just too tempting.

So I’m not really one to help you cure the addictions.  Better to just come up with justifications.  Me, I promise to stop after the I get my life-size Lee Adama figure.

Years of withdrawal after my parents threw out my action figures inspired me, after I ran away from home (to college), to begin collecting again. I started collecting at the early stages of Toy Biz’s Marvel Legends and the already churning DC Direct line. Every few months, about a dozen new and awesome figures earned a place on my shelves (yes, I open them…and play with them). And this went on for a few years until now I have a modest 300 or so figures.

But recently, the wind has left my plastic shell. DC Direct has shrunk their action figure lines to four characters instead of the previous five. When one or two of these figures is Superman and/or Batman, it doesn’t leave room for much variety. And Marvel Legends now under Hasbro have plummeted in quality, loosing most of their articulation and featuring cheap looking sculpts with plain paint jobs.

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