Greetings, visitors to adifferentcity.com. What you are seeing here is the interweb equivalent of a white flag. We have tried to deliver a quality selection of rare and out-of-print movies on DVD-R since 2005, and while we succeeded on some levels, there were a lot of obstacles thrown our way.
In my last post, I went over some of the problems we've had with "the man" over the years. To sum up, we started selling our DVD-R movies on eBay back in 2005. We were making really good money at that, for about three months or so, until eBay decided that we couldn't do that. "No movies can be sold on recordable media." OK, we can live with that. We set up a PayPal shopping cart here on the site, and while we didn't sell one-third as much as we did on eBay, we did OK.
Until the day that PayPal decided they didn't want their logos or shopping cart on our site. Although selling DVD-R copies of movies legally in the public domain under USA laws is perfectly legit, we were still deemed a "bootleg" operation. As I've always said, a bootlegger is the guy on the street selling homemade copies of DVDs you can buy in the store, or camcorder versions of movies currently playing in theaters. We're not bootleggers. You can't bootleg a product that doesn't exist on store shelves, or for sale at Amazon.
Anyway, we (we being me and my wife, and what help our four-year-old daughter could offer) tried to struggle along with manually invoicing customers via PayPal, or sending instructions on how to send a check or money order. Accepting credit cards directly was always too prohibitively expensive to get started. Then Google Checkout came along, and it looked like a good deal.
We should have guessed that it would turn out like the PayPal situation did. But it was even worse. Google locked us out of our Checkout account so that we couldn't get customer information, all the while still accepting orders on our behalf. Attempts to remedy this situation proved fruitless, leading to a string of endless form letter e-mails.
As mentioned above, we have no idea if you ordered from us via Google Checkout or not. Google refuses to hand over this information at this point. So I've decided to shut down the site for now, and try and collect order information the old fashioned way. Please email us at order_fulfillment@adifferentcity.com with your name, address, and what you ordered. You can also do this if you paid by check and never received your order. We may have missed sending out your order while we tried to sort out the Google mess.
Honestly, I don't know. There were a lot of great sites, like The Weird World of '70s Cinema and SuperHappyFun.com, that had a lot bigger selection than we did, and they couldn't succeed either. Part of it is the low profit margin for a lot of work by hand, and part of it is "the man" always coming down on the little guy. We sold a bunch of copies of Wanda, The Panic in Needle Park, and Zabriskie Point when they were out-of-print and copyright-free in the USA. That prompted the studios to put out their own versions with renewed copyright. Anything that we sold a lot of, we could usually predict a major studio release was forthcoming. It's also hard to make money on the internet when most of the major payment systems look upon you as bootleggers and ban you from using their service.
So for now, we're just going to try and fulfill all the orders from the people who used the Google Checkout service, or otherwise paid us in the past couple of months. We'll re-evaluate things then. All I know right now is that our little money-making hobby that used to be a lot of fun is not fun any more. It turned into a huge burden that made us very little money, and pissed off a lot of people along the way. Check our RSS feed in 2010 for updates.
Thanks to everyone who has ordered over the years and enjoyed our service. We met a lot of cool people, including a lot of folks who worked on the movies we sold. That was definitely the best part, and we always made sure to send free copies to those folks. To everyone who has been understandably upset with us the past couple of months, we understand your frustration and will do our best to fulfill your order ASAP. Google Checkout is probably a good service in and of itself, but there's probably no way for people like us to make a decent living selling DVD-Rs on the internet. You can probably find what you're looking for on BitTorrent anyway!
Cheers!
December 7, 2009