I work for Getty Images (“the enemy”). Just thought I would point out that the Getty family no longer have anything to do with the running of the company. Mark Getty is a director by name only.
I find these comments hilarious by the way – I wonder what you would be saying if you were the photographer whose work was being used with credit/payment?
I agree the letters can be a little aggressive, but they are standard letters sent out whether you are an individual or a big corporation. There are so many infringements that we simply do not have the time to personalise each letter. However, if anyone who recieves one simply calls the number on the letter and explains the situation, you will find things a lot more human and reasonable.

In response to her, I posted this lengthy comment, which deserves its own post. Getty Images execs, listen up, because you are all fools if you don’t pay attention!

Lucy, unfortunately, you seem to have missed the point AND approached this matter with the same attitude that everyone here is complaining about. The problems with the letter are many and varied, but the largest problem that it takes the immediate approach of threatening to sue. Unfortunately for your company, if someone removes the images you claim to be infringing, all the screenshots in the world will not help, as they can easily be forged and by the time your lawsuit made it to court, all Internet caches of the supposedly infringing site would have long since been purged. As a matter of practicality, your letter is equivalent to the “pay up or else” notices sent by such unscrupulous firms as USCG and CEG.

But that’s not the REAL problem. The problem is that you are hostile towards customers. “I find these comments hilarious.” YOU might find them to be hilarious, but the person you’re demanding $1500 from under threat of lawsuit for an image whose licensing costs a tiny fraction of that amount does not see the funny side.

Lucy, I spoke to a lady in Great Britain OVER THE PHONE (not online, a real human voice) who had a tiny “psychic” website and received a Getty threat letter. She was almost crying because someone else designed her site and she didn’t know they had used a potentially infringing image, and her husband was bedridden with cancer and she was broke…AND she didn’t even operate the business any longer, she just hadn’t had the site taken down. She was freaking out because of the letter you think is so very reasonable and generous. This is what people like you, who have little consideration for others, do to people when you don’t give a damn and send blanket threat letters like this. To be perfectly honest, it’s unconscionable at best.

The simple remedy is to change the threat letter from “WE WILL SUE YOU IF YOU DON’T PAY US THOUSANDS” to a friendly request for customer conversion. Assume that the person who put up the site is not acting in bad faith and simply request that they license the image properly, and make it easy to do so, at the price they’d pay if they had searched for and licensed the image themselves. Getty would never have built such bad mojo if this approach had been taken from the start, and their customer base would likely have grown, as well as become more educated. When you take the threatening approach to copyright enforcement, though, you can expect nothing more than the digital equivalent of “get off my property.”

I will continue to advise people to thwart your moronic potential lawsuits and brush off your foolish customer-hating letters until I am advised that you have corrected this bad business practice, and you can’t do a damn thing about it, no matter how “hilarious” you think the backlash against your company is.

However, it’s been three weeks since the mass hysteria and huge price spikes occurred, and something extremely suspicious has caught my eye:

Despite the cheapest hard drives more than doubling in price, brand new full-sized laptops are still readily available for around $300.

Why? If the cost of a $40 hard drive (the kind usually found in cheap new laptops) is now $90, how is it at all possible that retail prices on laptops might have risen $20-$30 per unit at worst? Where is the PC price spike from hard drive “shortage” that we should all be seeing? I simply can’t believe that it’s standard competitive forces, because if the cost to replace a laptop is $50 higher, the price at retail should be jumping at least by that much due to the fact that the next batch will cost more to acquire. You don’t buy a unit at $250, sell it for $300, and then buy the next batch of pretty much the same thing for $300 to sell at $330. That means taking a loss on current stock relative to new stock, and retailers simply can’t afford to do such a thing unless the stuff won’t sell at all and they’re intentionally liquidating items in order to lose less. However, does that mean EVERY retailer is doing a loss-leading liquidation right now? That seems pretty impossible.

Unless the hard drive “shortage” is artificial, and therefore a bogus, exploitative construct. Something we might even label “price gouging.”

In fact, that explanation makes the most sense to me. Western Digital has many factories outside of the flooded Thailand one. Nidec, the manufacturer of 80% of the drive motors for hard drives worldwide, also has places to shift production, one of which is apparently in the United States. Seagate’s raw production capacity is unaffected by the flooding, though their supply chain might be affected to some extent while the production shift occurs. I’ve read many (admittedly hearsay) accounts in comment sections and forums all over the Internet that explain that the factories outside of the flooded areas were not operating anywhere close to their maximum output capacity.

Only adding to my suspicion is that online retailers who only three weeks ago had completely pulled hard drives from their item lists (or severely throttled sales) now have almost the same selection of drives that they had before the whole disaster began…with pricing on the lower cost drives anywhere from double to triple the previous price, and higher units going for at least 40-50% their original price. How is it possible that, two weeks later, there are suddenly plenty of drives available, yet all at these grossly inflated prices?

I do have a personal stake in this mess: I run a computer service business in which we apply a slight markup to drives and charge labor to install them and shuffle data and Windows installations around. Our determination for our customers as to whether or not a repair is “worth it” has a ceiling in the form of the cost of a whole new computer vs. the cost of repair, and if the repair is due to hard drive failure, that repair cost has risen for us by no less than $50. We are essentially forced to lose markup on hard drives, and possibly even perform work below its actual market value, because a customer faced with a $200 repair quote (half of which is no-profit acquisition cost of a low-capacity new hard drive at this point) is apt to simply go for a brand new $300 laptop instead.

I want to know the truth. I want to know if the shortage is really caused by the flooding knocking out the manufacturing capacity, or if it’s now simply all of the retailers taking advantage of the situation and squeezing us little guys. I don’t like competing with brand new computers, and I happen to be based in a county where plenty of the residents don’t understand that a brand new computer isn’t always a great deal just because it has a low price. At $40 per drive, I can survive and even live a somewhat comfortable life. At $60, I could survive and perhaps take a minor hit that makes things tight, but manageable. When I’m having to quote $90-$100 just to get a replacement hard drive, I start having serious problems making money, and when I don’t see the same price spike happening to these “el cheapo” new machines that supposedly receive drives from the exact same sources, you can bet I’m going to get mighty suspicious.

I can guarantee that the first online retailer to cut hard drive prices down to the point that they’re somewhat sane again will suddenly become a favorite of many currently disgruntled small shops who are in the same boat as me.

Leave a comment with your thoughts, if you know something I don’t, or if I’m just completely off-base.

This seems to be the basic formula used on ZDNet to keep people reading and hotly commenting:

1. Have one writer trash a product in an article, no matter how silly or ignorant the premises or discussion have to be.
2. Readers foam at the mouth with opinion both ways, generating massive interest in the readership and getting them involved. Loverock Davidson finds a way to twist the post to be Windows-favorable no matter how trollish he has to get, further inciting comment riots and building the “conversation.” Article writer is accused of being a fanboy, zealot, or being bought off, further fueling the fire.
3. Have another writer praise the same product, again disregarding common sense and logic and standards if required.
4. Step 2 repeats. Loverock doesn’t change. Article writer is still a fanboy or zealot or shill. Enough foaming at the mouth is now made to put shaving cream corporations out of business.
5. Repeat steps 1-4 for anything and everything imaginable. Windows, Linux, Apple, Android, phones, tablets, netbooks, servers, Ubuntu, Oracle, Microsoft, whatever.

Sounds quite true to me. What do you think?

Below is the full text of a Charter Internet e-mail DMCA notice sent by Copyright Enforcement Group, LLC.  The identifying information has been stripped and replaced with words in brackets. I want you to pay specific attention to a few things that often go unnoticed:

1. This is supposed to be a DMCA takedown notice. It is being abused to demand a settlement, rather than merely demand that infringement cease.
2. Note the XML section tag names and values, specifically the HashMatched and MetadataMatched values. What is notable here is that the hash and metadata are not the actual allegedly infringed content. Conspicuously absent is any indication that any of the file’s data was acquired from the alleged infringing party to ensure that they were actually offering out parts of the copyrighted material in question.
3. The hash is simply a calculated value based on the file(s) in the torrent that is likely to be unique, though it is possible for hash collisions to occur. Therefore, the hash under which someone is registered on a torrent tracker as a peer is not a reliable indicator of infringement. Being in a peer list for a theoretically infringing torrent and actually sending allegedly infringing data are very different things. Remember that a torrent peer list only lists IP addresses that supposedly have chunks of data for the hash in question and the only way to verify that the data is infringing is to actually acquire the data from the supposedly infringing party directly.
4. The metadata is information such as file names, sizes, and dates. Peer-to-peer file sharing has no way of enforcing the match between file metadata and file data, and in fact this was a severe real-world issue with the now-defunct Kazaa file sharing application, which was notorious for having incorrectly named files as well as having mismatched “file name” and “title” metadata. Again, the only way to verify that an offered file infringes is to fetch the file data from the person and verify that it contains the content described.
5. If a matching hash, matching metadata, IP address, port, and time are all the information that Copyright Enforcement Group, LLC can produce, they simply do not have enough information to prove that Joe Blow at 555 Foobar Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA is infringing on their copyrights.
6. I’ve noticed that in every single case where copyright infringement is alleged, the accusing party never offers up a complete copy of the file(s) alleged to be infringing; by extension, conspicuously absent is proof that the entirety of that infringing data was downloaded directly from the IP address in question rather than a combination of that IP address along with other peers in the same list for the hash in question.
7. The same accusers also fail to show that they have downloaded the file(s) in question themselves to verify that they are actually infringing. It can only be inferred that they are assuming the material infringes simply based on a matching piece of metadata (i.e. the file name contains a film name). Ask any file sharer who has downloaded an AVI file over the course of many hours or days only to discover it’s actually a password-protected RAR file how trustworthy such tagging is in practice.

The content of the infringement notice is below.

Dear Charter Internet Subscriber:

Charter Communications (“Charter”) has been notified by a copyright owner, or its authorized agent, that your Internet account may have been involved in the exchange of unauthorized copies of copyrighted material (e.g., music, movies, or software).  We are enclosing a copy of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice that Charter received from the copyright holder which includes the specific allegation.

Under the DMCA, copyright owners have the right to notify Charters register agent if they believe that a Charter customer has infringed on their work(s).  When Charter receives a complaint notice from a copyright owner, Charter will notify the identifiable customer of the alleged infringement by providing them a copy of the submitted DMCA notice.  As required by law, Charter may determine that the customer is a repeat copyright infringer and reserves the right to suspend or terminate the accounts of repeat copyright infringers.

It is possible that this activity has occurred without your permission or knowledge by an unauthorized user, a minor who may not fully understand the copyright laws, or even as a result of a computer virus.  However, as the named subscriber on the account, you may be held responsible for any misuse of your account.  Please be aware that using Charters service to engage in any form of copyright infringement is expressly prohibited by Charter’s Acceptable Use Policy and that repeat copyright infringement, or violations of any other Charter policy, may result in the suspension or termination of your service.  You may view Charter’s rules and policies, including Charters Acceptable Use Policy, under the policies section of charter.com.

We ask that you take immediate action to stop the exchange of any infringing material. For additional information regarding copyright infringement and for a list of frequently asked questions, please visit charter.com/dmca.

If you have questions about this letter, you may contact us at 1-866-229-7286.  Representatives will be available to take your call Monday through Friday 8am – 8pm, Saturday and Sunday 8am – 5pm (CST).

Sincerely,

Charter Communications Security Resolution Team

http://www.charter.com/security

— The following material was provided to us as evidence —

[Part 0 (plain text)]

—–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—–
Hash: SHA1

***NOTE TO ISP: PLEASE FORWARD THE ENTIRE NOTICE***
October 28, 2011
Re: Notice of Unauthorized Use of Registered Copyrights Owned by Diabolic
Case #: [case]

Dear Sir or Madam:

This notice is intended solely for the primary Charter Communications internet service account holder. Someone using this account has engaged in the illegal copying and/or distribution of pornographic movies. This notice may contain the titles of those movies, and therefore may contain text that is offensive to some readers.

Copyright Enforcement Group, LLC, (“We”) represent Diabolic. Diabolic owns all right, title and interest to the registered copyrights listed below.

Evidence:
Infringement Title: No Swallowing Allowed
Infringement File Name: No Swallowing Allowed
Infringement Hash: c2c389655c099a8de9c5dc039597b32af8b1ac9f
Infringement File Size: 3375105242 bytes
Infringement Protocol: BitTorrent
Infringement Timestamp: 2011-10-28 00:08:57 North American Eastern Time
Infringers IP Address: [ip_address]
Infringers Port: [port]

The following files were included in the download:
File 1: No Swallowing Allowed/1 Tami Lynn.mkv
File 2: No Swallowing Allowed/10 Luci Thai.mkv
File 3: No Swallowing Allowed/11 Katin.mkv
File 4: No Swallowing Allowed/2 Luci Thai.mkv
File 5: No Swallowing Allowed/3 Dana Vespoli.mkv
File 6: No Swallowing Allowed/4 Hollie Stevens.mkv
File 7: No Swallowing Allowed/5 Tami Lynn.mkv
File 8: No Swallowing Allowed/6 Luci Thai.mkv
File 9: No Swallowing Allowed/7 Hollie Stevens.mkv
File 10: No Swallowing Allowed/8 Dana Vespoli.mkv
File 11: No Swallowing Allowed/9 Cris Taliana.mkv
File 12: No Swallowing Allowed/bonus Hollie Stevens.mkv

You are hereby notified that your unauthorized copying and/or distribution infringes the registered copyrights of Diabolic under the U.S. Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. 106. In this regard, demand is hereby made that you and all persons using this account immediately and permanently cease and desist the unauthorized copying and/or distribution of the registered copyrights listed in this notice or otherwise owned by Diabolic.

You may also be held liable for monetary damages, including attorney’s fees and court costs if a lawsuit is commenced against you. You have until Sunday, November 27, 2011 to access the settlement offer and settle online. To access the settlement offer please visit http://www.copyrightsettlements.com/ and enter Case #: P8087946 and Password: u2oim. To access the settlement offer directly please visit https://www.copyrightsettlements.com/?u=P8087946&p=u2oim.

Settlement Information:
Direct Settlement Link: https://www.copyrightsettlements.com/?u=[case]&p=[password]
Settlement Website: http://www.copyrightsettlements.com/
Case #: [case]
Password: [password]

If you fail to respond or settle within the prescribed time period, the claim(s) will be referred to our attorneys for legal action. At that point the original settlement offer will no longer be an option and the amount will increase as a result of us having to involve our attorneys.

Nothing contained or omitted from this correspondence is, or shall be deemed to be either a full statement of the facts or applicable law, an admission of any fact, or waiver or limitation of any of the Diabolic’s rights or remedies, all of which are specifically retained and reserved.

The information in this notice is accurate. We have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of herein is not authorized by the registered copyright owner, its agent, or by operation of law. We swear under penalty of perjury, that we are authorized to act on behalf of Diabolic.

Sincerely,

Dale Spislander
Copyright Enforcement Agent

Copyright Enforcement Group, LLC
8484 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 220
Beverly Hills, CA 90211

Local: 310-526-8610 Ext. 2
Toll Free: 877-5-COPYRIGHT (877-526-7974)
Email: X
Website: www.copyrightsettlements.com

- —-Start ACNS XML
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<Infringement xsi:schemaLocation=”http://www.movielabs.com/ACNS/ACNS2v1.xsd” xmlns=”http://www.movielabs.com/ACNS” xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance”>
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<ID>[case]</ID>
<Status>OPEN</Status>
<Severity>Normal</Severity>
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<Complainant>
<Entity>Copyright Enforcement Group, LLC</Entity>
<Contact>Dale Spislander</Contact>
<Address>Copyright Enforcement Group, LLC, 8484 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 220, Beverly Hills, CA 90211</Address>
<Phone>310-526-8610 Ext. 1</Phone>
<Email>X</Email>
</Complainant>
<Service_Provider>
<Entity>Charter Communications</Entity>
<Contact></Contact>
<Address>12405 Powerscourt Drive, St. Louis, MO 63131-3674</Address>
<Phone></Phone>
<Email></Email>
</Service_Provider>
<Source>
<TimeStamp>2011-10-28T00:08:57-04:00</TimeStamp>
<IP_Address>[ip_address]</IP_Address>
<Port>[port]</Port>
<Type>BITTORRENT</Type>
<UserName></UserName>
<Number_Files>1</Number_Files>
</Source>
<Content>
<Item>
<TimeStamp>2011-10-28T00:08:57-04:00</TimeStamp>
<AlsoSeen Start=”2011-10-27T22:46:35-04:00″ End=”2011-10-28T02:38:42-04:00″></AlsoSeen>
<Title>No Swallowing Allowed</Title>
<Artist></Artist>
<FileName>No Swallowing Allowed</FileName>
<FileSize>3375105242</FileSize>
<Type>Movie</Type>
<Hash Type=”SHA1″>c2c389655c099a8de9c5dc039597b32af8b1ac9f</Hash>
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<History></History>
<Notes></Notes><Type Retraction=”false”>DMCA</Type>
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<TextNotice><![CDATA[***NOTE TO ISP: PLEASE FORWARD THE ENTIRE NOTICE***
October 28, 2011
Re: Notice of Unauthorized Use of Registered Copyrights Owned by Diabolic
Case #: [case]

Dear Sir or Madam:

This notice is intended solely for the primary Charter Communications internet service account holder. Someone using this account has engaged in the illegal copying and/or distribution of pornographic movies. This notice may contain the titles of those movies, and therefore may contain text that is offensive to some readers.

Copyright Enforcement Group, LLC, (“We”) represent Diabolic. Diabolic owns all right, title and interest to the registered copyrights listed below.

Evidence:
Infringement Title: No Swallowing Allowed
Infringement File Name: No Swallowing Allowed
Infringement Hash: c2c389655c099a8de9c5dc039597b32af8b1ac9f
Infringement File Size: 3375105242 bytes
Infringement Protocol: BitTorrent
Infringement Timestamp: 2011-10-28 00:08:57 North American Eastern Time
Infringers IP Address: [ip_address]
Infringers Port: [port]

The following files were included in the download:
File 1: No Swallowing Allowed/1 Tami Lynn.mkv
File 2: No Swallowing Allowed/10 Luci Thai.mkv
File 3: No Swallowing Allowed/11 Katin.mkv
File 4: No Swallowing Allowed/2 Luci Thai.mkv
File 5: No Swallowing Allowed/3 Dana Vespoli.mkv
File 6: No Swallowing Allowed/4 Hollie Stevens.mkv
File 7: No Swallowing Allowed/5 Tami Lynn.mkv
File 8: No Swallowing Allowed/6 Luci Thai.mkv
File 9: No Swallowing Allowed/7 Hollie Stevens.mkv
File 10: No Swallowing Allowed/8 Dana Vespoli.mkv
File 11: No Swallowing Allowed/9 Cris Taliana.mkv
File 12: No Swallowing Allowed/bonus Hollie Stevens.mkv

You are hereby notified that your unauthorized copying and/or distribution infringes the registered copyrights of Diabolic under the U.S. Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. 106. In this regard, demand is hereby made that you and all persons using this account immediately and permanently cease and desist the unauthorized copying and/or distribution of the registered copyrights listed in this notice or otherwise owned by Diabolic.

You may also be held liable for monetary damages, including attorney’s fees and court costs if a lawsuit is commenced against you. You have until Sunday, November 27, 2011 to access the settlement offer and settle online. To access the settlement offer please visit http://www.copyrightsettlements.com/ and enter Case #: [case] and Password: [password]. To access the settlement offer directly please visit https://www.copyrightsettlements.com/?u=[case]&amp;p=[password].

Settlement Information:
Direct Settlement Link: https://www.copyrightsettlements.com/?u=[case]&amp;p=[password]
Settlement Website: http://www.copyrightsettlements.com/
Case #: [case]
Password: [password]

If you fail to respond or settle within the prescribed time period, the claim(s) will be referred to our attorneys for legal action. At that point the original settlement offer will no longer be an option and the amount will increase as a result of us having to involve our attorneys.

Nothing contained or omitted from this correspondence is, or shall be deemed to be either a full statement of the facts or applicable law, an admission of any fact, or waiver or limitation of any of the Diabolic’s rights or remedies, all of which are specifically retained and reserved.

The information in this notice is accurate. We have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of herein is not authorized by the registered copyright owner, its agent, or by operation of law. We swear under penalty of perjury, that we are authorized to act on behalf of Diabolic.

Sincerely,

Dale Spislander
Copyright Enforcement Agent

Copyright Enforcement Group, LLC
8484 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 220
Beverly Hills, CA 90211

Local: 310-526-8610 Ext. 2
Toll Free: 877-5-COPYRIGHT (877-526-7974)
Email: X
Website: www.copyrightsettlements.com]]></TextNotice>
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So, we had this unit sitting on a bench, with clearly functional sound, having tried all kinds of driver and BIOS and OS changes, and we couldn’t get the thing to stop detecting headphones and disabling the speakers. You’d think that meant we were pretty much screwed on getting the internal speakers to ever work. Fortunately, we found a workaround!

The system has a control panel called Conexant SmartAudio. Inside, there’s a configuration tab that allows pushing audio streams to headphones or speakers, and by default is set to “basic” settings; by switching to “advanced” instead, and telling the audio to duplicate headphone output to the internal speakers, we were able to successfully push audio out of the speakers despite the “always plugged in” headphone problem. Of course, it’s not a perfect solution since it will never turn off the internal speakers if headphones are plugged in, but most customers use the internal speakers almost all the time anyway, and the setting can always be reversed if it ever became an issue.

If you’re having problems with a system thinking headphones are plugged in all the time, and headphones work when plugged in, look for a vendor-specific control panel where you can change a similar setting. You might not have as big of a problem as you think. The most common vendors we see control panel items for seem to be VIA, Realtek, Conexant, and Sigmatel. I haven’t checked to see if any of them support this, but then again, this problem is somewhat rare for us, so I’ve not had a need. Report your results in the comments when you’re done!

500GB SATA hard drives that once cost as little as $50 at retail have now jumped to $80-$90 or higher.  2TB green drives, which have been notoriously cheap around $70-$85, have exceeded the $100 mark.  That means that, excluding major computer manufacturers who have tens of thousands of hard drives stuffed in warehouses and can wait out the temporary jump in prices, everyone can look forward to paying at least $30 more per hard drive until the factories dry out.

Would we have the same disastrous price increases if manufacturers had at least a minimal secondary factory here in the United States, or at least in North America?  I doubt it.  While the units would cost more to manufacture here, and all prices in general would have to be increased to make up for it, the lower risk of supply chain disruption would be arguably worth the slight increase.

I’m reminded of the Japan flooding which disrupted flash memory manufacturing, since the vast majority of the world’s flash memory chips are made in Japan.  Here again, we had a situation in which natural disasters temporarily shut down an industry that the modern world of technology relies on heavily.  Again, the answer seems to be to stick some factories somewhere less prone to quakes, tsunamis, and flooding.

Then again, what do I know?  I’m just a guy quoting computer builds to customers and having to explain why it’s $50 higher than it would have been last Friday.  Maybe I’m clueless about how huge manufacturing businesses work, but then again, I feel like a lot of this is common sense.  How many more things have to flood or collapse in Asia before our major manufacturers start hedging their bets?

That’s a bit off-topic for this post, but I feel that it’s very important to the reader to understand what I have personally experienced so far as it relates to the whole salary topic in the title. Today, I once again ran into iYogi because they apparently have sponsored videos on YouTube, and I wanted to find out what on earth they were doing that kept them “in the spotlight” so heavily all the time. Clearly, the video production, massive advertising, and partnering with major vendors as their technical support outsource company requires a LOT of money to keep going. That’s how I ended up finally breaking down and looking at the number one cost of business: paying people a fair wage to do the actual work.

Note that I’ll be using United States dollars as the currency from here on out; that way I don’t have to write “USD$” over and over.

The median hourly wage for a PC help desk technician in the United States circles around $15.00 or so (source: PayScale.com), depending on how lofty the title is (“analysts” make more than “representatives” etc.) and we’ll assume that they work a 40-hour work week, 8 hours per day, approximately 21 days per month (Monday through Friday). That’s about $2,520 per month in gross wages, or roughly $30K/year.

A job posting I found on PlacementIndia.com (which will probably be deleted before you read this) for a position titled “Required IT Application Helpdesk Support Executive” at Unistanz Software – Mumbai, Maharashtra, lists the following requirements: “Bachelor Degree, B.A, B.Com, or B.Sc” and 2-5 years experience. It is a full-time position, and the monthly wage is stated to be Rs. 15,000-20,000. (Rs. is Indian rupees, a form of currency.)

A quick spin over to the CoinMill.com currency converter for INR to USD reveals that the United States dollar equivalent is $315.99-$421.32 PER MONTH.

You read that correctly. Indian tech support agents with a four-year degree command a monthly salary that, according to these numbers, is between 12.53% to 16.74% of the monthly salary of an American technician that may not even have a degree at all. In other words, I could reduce my largest cost of doing business to ONE SIXTH OF THE CURRENT COST if it can be outsourced to India.

That’s why iYogi can charge a rate that is insanely low: $169.99 per customer per year for what they advertise as essentially unlimited technical support. A cover feature piece in India Inc. magazine states that iYogi has 6,000 people manning the phones, so doing obvious math, those people cost between $1,896,000 and $2,532,000 per month to employ (based on the pay scale I found advertised for a similar position at a different company). Dividing all that by the $170 per year fee (I used integer math, it’s one penny, get over it) the company requires 133,824-178,728 yearly paying customers to pay their people. I realize that this example ignores a whole host of other business expenses and staff; I’m only trying to get a rough idea of how much money is required to roughly break even on the actual workers, to make a point later.

So we can safely assume that iYogi has well over 180,000 yearly customers since they’re supposedly growing with the force of a deadly plague. What would it cost to employ American workers at the stated American wages, in place of the outsourced workers? Well, at $2,520 per month for 6,000 workers, $15,120,000 per month. That’s almost exactly SIX TIMES MORE. Using this “six times more” ratio, the equivalent yearly fee charged to the customer would need to be $1,020 per year to cover those workers’ wages, which works out to around $85 per month. iYogi’s yearly fee divides out to $28.33 per month.

Another way to put all of this in perspective is this: with the $2,532,000 that iYogi pays out for 6,000 call center workers, an equivalent American firm can only hire 1,004 people…and keep in mind that all of these figures ignore the standard 3-tier technician model, where Tier 2 and Tier 3 are paid much more due to possessing more experience and skill. Taking tiers into account requires information I don’t have, but consider that if Tier 2 makes 30% more on average than a Tier 1, the worker in India will be paid $127 more per month, while the U.S. worker will be paid $504 more per month. That’s notable because the difference in those pay raises equates to the cost of another Indian Tier 1 technician!

What should you take away from all of this calculator dancing and long-winded discussion? Indian workers cost about one-sixth of American workers to employ for completing any given labor effort that is capable of being outsourced. That’s why iYogi is doing so well: American firms can’t compete unless the call center workers can get six times the work done in the same time frame as the equivalent Indian worker. Can it be done? I don’t know. “Work smarter, not harder” has long been the reason for my company, Tritech Computer Solutions, being able to often pump out ten or more computer repairs in a day with only one technician on staff, but having been an individual self-employed computer technician that at one point lacked both the resources and the knowledge that I possess today, I can definitively say that even the best techs I’ve ever met don’t do six times the work of a “newbie” technician. (Though we definitely avoid the high rate of return or of creating angry customers, but that’s a story for another day!)

There are other factors that work in favor of U.S.-based technical support call centers, though, and once a critical mass of individuals is reached that becomes fed up with this outsourcing trend, we may see outsourced support diminish considerably. In America, we’ve recently learned to accept lower quality goods and services if they come with a sufficiently lower price tag, so we don’t give it a second thought until we discover first-hand what kind of serious quality issues can arise. Dell became the poster child for terrible India-based outsourced technical support staff because they were one of the first huge companies to make the switch (though XPS “premium” support remained stateside), and the backlash can be heard around the United States to this day. Customers in the United States find it highly frustrating to spend a significant amount of time on the telephone attempting to understand what the agent halfway around the world is trying to say, and the fact that most Tier 1 technicians follow “idiot-proof scripts” to the letter only adds insult to injury. When a Tritech technician calls Dell support to have a replacement for a customer’s failing hard drive shipped in to fulfill the Dell warranty obligations, and the person on the other end only repeats lines from some unseen magic flowchart on their desk which results in a 30-minute call that could have taken five minutes, the depressing failure of outsourced technical support starts to become apparent.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of properly conducted American tech support is that their communication is immediately comprehensible to the caller without unnecessary requests for repetition. Being capable of adapting (if not forced to stick to a script the whole time) is also very crucial; while representatives cannot be given unlimited power over the remedies they may make available to the customer, giving them enough freedom to break from the procedural flowchart can greatly reduce call times and improve service experiences for the help desk technician, the customer, and the company in general.

A classic and very personal example of this would be when I had to call T-Mobile technical support to have my G1 smartphone replaced under warranty. The gentleman with whom I spoke was clearly a native English speaker, knowledgeable about both his job and the devices he was required to support, and willing to work with me on my level of technical aptitude. After I explained that I had rooted the phone myself, and detailed the exhaustive number of steps I had performed to figure out why the wifi was not functioning anymore where it had been perfectly fine with the same rooted firmware for months prior, he gladly skipped ALL OF THE DIAGNOSTIC STEPS ENTIRELY and simply set me up with a warranty replacement to be shipped out immediately. Imagine how long I would have been on the line if he had refused to accept my reports of having performed every diagnostic test known to man, started at step one, and had me reboot the phone, then try pulling the battery, then factory reset the phone, then…well, you get the idea. When that replacement phone decided to completely refuse to work as a USB mass storage device with my computers a few months after that, I had an identical experience with a very nice lady in technical support.

Yet when I call Dell and tell the Indian guy on the other line that we’ve run software which initiates a read of every sector on the customer’s hard drive from beginning to end and that unreadable sectors were detected, the experience was disastrous and we were forced to run Dell’s built-in diagnostics and read a Dell-specific code out before they would even consider sending a hard drive out. My software was questioned, my methodology was questioned, and when I was asked what prompted the drive test and revealed that the customer originally had viruses on the computer, I was told “we cannot fix viruses, you need to call the paid support people for that.” Riiiight, because somehow “the hard drive is failing” wasn’t the reason we called, it was now magically “viruses” that were the entirety of the problem. Needless to say, the customer and all of my technicians heard the conversation on speakerphone and we concluded that the Indian guy was either a complete idiot, deathly afraid of losing his job, or both. It was an extremely customer-hostile experience, and it was repeated twice because I called back twice, hoping to talk to a different person that wasn’t a complete idiot…and failing to do so. Apparently, Dell doesn’t care about customer service. Minimizing the cost of warranty fulfillment is priority one.

We need American tech support, but to get it, we have to be willing to pay the price. On the cheaper end of technical assistance, you tend to get what you pay for.

I know that this has been a very long post, but thank you for reading it. If you have any thoughts or more information, or you’re an insider of some sort that knows more than I can learn simply by trolling the Web, please comment below. I’d also like to hear from ANYONE in the United States that has had a personal experience with iYogi, either positive or negative.

References:

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Skill=Help_Desk_%2f_Desktop_Support_%28Tier_1%29/Hourly_Rate

http://www.placementindia.com/job-search/vacancy_detail.php?id=view_job_posted&job_posting_slno=259765&recruiter_mem_slno=279450

http://www.slideshare.net/alokmittal/iyogi-cover-story-inc-india-mar-2011

http://coinmill.com/INR_USD.html#INR=15000

By the way…there are more technical jobs that require significant knowledge yet pay even less than the one I used for this article. Here’s another that pays Rs. 10,000 – 15,000:

http://www.placementindia.com/job-search/vacancy_detail.php?id=view_job_posted&job_posting_slno=257776&recruiter_mem_slno=273972

iYogi complaints and reviews at this next link are quite scathing; according to one post, they ask their employees to drop tons of fake positive comments around the Internet in favor of the company:

http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/iyogi-c325325.html

The address of the site is http://copyright-infringement-notice.com/

To watch this sequence, please call 1-900-622-9900. Then, enter the following reference number: 114.  Or send by SNMS (text message): SUN114 to the following number: 64762. (blahblahblah) This is a “lock & pay” system offered by Euro First Multimedia. (more junk in mouse-type that I won’t bother with)

They’re monetizing a DVD they’ve already sold! I know that DVDs contain program code in the IFO files, and I know that it isn’t THAT complicated, so I started to look at the code with a program called PGCEdit…and I noticed something fishy. To play the video, the code selects “angle 2″ (yes, that’s right, the almost-never-used multiple angles feature of DVD video). So, with that in mind, I quickly figured out a solution and beat the challenge. I’m going to share those steps with you now.

1. Install Media Player Classic Home Cinema (run a search for MPC-HC and it’ll come up quickly).
2. Go to File – Open DVD, and select your DVD drive from the list.
3. When the DVD starts to play, right-click on the video and go to Navigate – Jump To… – (select whatever chapter you want!)
4. If the video doesn’t play correctly after selecting a chapter, you’ve found one of the “lock and pay” streams. To fix it…
5. Right-click the video and go to Navigate – Video Angle – Angle 2.

That’s it, you should be able to view the “locked out” video without tediously figuring out or paying money for a PIN code!