That was really awesome. The problem with trademark/patent law generally isn't in the laws themselves, but the jackassery going on in the lower levels of the Patent and Trademark Office as well as all the invalid lawsuits that get thrown around in hopes of a settlement. If more people were like this guy (or rather if more people had the luxury to be like this guy) that would happen a lot less. Again, that was awesome.
Monster cable needs to die anyway. I think they are one of the biggest reasons cable prices are so high.
Cables at a store like Radio Shack and Best Buy are seriously marked up like a couple thousand percent. A guy I know works at Best Buy. They get store items at 5% over store cost. I get all my cables through him. Yeah, like I'm going to pay $40.00 for a USB cable when I can get it from him for like $1.05. It's the same for every kind of cable. I blame Monster for setting the bar high and desensitizing consumers to high cable prices.
Edit: I finally read the guy's response. Holy crap he bitch-slapped them to kingdom come! That was awesome!
I worked at Futureshop, which is a Canadian branch and competitor of Best Buy (interesting legal dynamic there by the way) for a few months when I had to make some money on paper for taxation purposes. I think I've talked about this before, but it sucked. In fact, the only way it could have sucked more is if I really had to work there and actually took it seriously rather than spending my time fucking around pulling pranks, seeing how far I could push my 30 bosses, completely fucking up their inventory, and then displaying complete shock and indignation when I got called on anything. Anyways, all that aside I had the same discount (it's not actually just pure cost +5%, but total projected cost +5%. I.E. they figure shipping, labour, and a variety of other things into it, so the price they're actually paying for the product from the manufacturer is actually lot lower.) and spent a lot of time figuring out the markup on pretty much everything in the store and to be honest I don't think Monster is completely to blame for high prices on cables; it's more of an effect of the competitive business model used by electronics retailers.
About 80% of the stock is break even on costs or pretty close to it. Think about what you see in a Best Buy store. Games: No markup at all. Computers, Televisions: very little markup (when I was there HD and LCD tvs actually had almost no markup). Appliances: Large - almost no markup, small - medium scale markup. And so on and so forth.
These companies have little markup on big ticket items which bring people into the store because that's where shit is the most competitive. That's where people used to make all the profit, and that's why these stores have killed smaller appliance and electronics stores. They make almost all of their money off of shit that most people figure you can't get most other places (computer components like DVD burners and videocards) as well as what is typically considered an accessory. That's not limited to cables at all. Ink is a huge one (although this is more of a huge scam between the manufacturer and the store rather than just the store itself), as is paper, CD cases, little LED key chains, all that kind of shit. That's what pays the massive rent for these large stores as well as all their labour. The warranty sales make up the profit. The price of cables from standard usb, CAT5, phone, all the way to HDMI reflect this and it would remain the same even if Monster wasn't around.
That's not to say, however, that the entire high end cable market isn't a scam. It totally fucking is from the way they induce interference on demo units to help the salesman prove that you need to buy a monster power bar and cable set for an extra $200 all the way to the simple fact that it aparently doesn't make any difference: insulated cable is insulated cable no matter what it costs. There was a story on digg about a guy at some conference (which I'm guessing had something to do with the A/V industry) tricking a group of people into thinking that plain old copper wire (it also could have been a coat hanger) had the best picture over pretty much the most expensive cables out there.
