But I saw a reprint of a recent "order form", and it was pretty bad. There were seperate charges for covers and for printed discs, and for you-name-it, and they were pretty steep.
I can understand that desperation can drive a person to a lot of things. And when you look around and see people on [site omitted], [site omitted], and [site omitted], staying in buisness for years, selling bootlegs, or fan-edits. You see Ebayers popping up 20 times faster than they get kicked off... You want your own piece of the pie. In a real sense, you earned it. If you took a fucking dead, abandoned property, and put in, literally, thousands of dollars of work - giving it the "value added" thing. You, of all people, deserve a piece of that big, juicy pie that the others are munching off of.
Now (I don't want to make a template to encourage others), if his form letter had said stuff like... "Here's a list of people and places you can get this, for free, for B&P, or for bandwidth." "I cant really spare the time...". "I don't understand the hardware side of things, and my dual-layers often fail..." "But, I am in a bad place, right now. If you would like to donate something in the range of xxx, so I can keep up the good work, blahblahblah."
But, I'm sorry, he was too blatent. It's a bad idea to even hint at taking a profit. You might not get banned from a site if you're honestly begging for donations. But you could get your broke ass sued right off of you. (And they'll find a way to get that blood out of a stone). Or you could end up in the county jail (or worse). An order form is just begging for it.
Don't ask me how some places can stay in buisness. But the world is full of that. Probably fall-guy owners, lawyers and loopholes and, ahem, greased palms. But ya' notice, whatever the crime or lawsuit its always the small fry that get busted...
Edit: as another note, the more people begging, the more (I suspect) the companies will be looking at us funny.