It was nice to see Techdirt finally recognizing the ridiculous and obviously bogus ‘sales’ pricing of things like ebooks and other digital content that have a marginal cost of essentially zero. But here is a service that has a significant expense in bandwidth and disk space that is certainly measurable in commodity-based prices. And is selling at 98% off the ‘regular’ price (which apparently defines “lifetime” as 22.5 years). Considering the market price for such service, it would appear to be a tremendous bargain. But considering the history of companies making such “lifetime” promises, the word “scam” easily comes to mind.

Some people might remember that there were once numerous online storage companies that suddenly died when the ’90s tech bubble burst. Others unilaterally changed the terms of their contract and slapped increased fees on content, including new ‘download’ fees, that essentially held a person’s content ransom. That’s why it’s always worthwhile to read the fine print of the contract … which generally gives the company the right to do absolutely anything they want by simply revising an already bad contract to make it even worse.

A few extracts from the Zoolz site @ http://www.zoolz.com/terms/

“Genie9 reserves the right in our sole discretion to revise, amend, or modify this policy and our other policies and agreements at any time and in any manner.”

“If you cancel your account, your Personal Data and other information may be retained in our archive or backup records.”

“Zoolz may automatically update the Zoolz Products installed on your computer without your prior notice”