I don't think that anyone here doesn't want the consumer to be informed. The problem is that if you only give one side or don't fully show both sides then the consumer isn't fully informed. The consumer NEEDS to also know why we don't want to just give OUR work up like it's worthless. My clients haven't paid me for the THOUSANDS of hours I've spent making templates or bitmaps so they HAVE NOT paid for the complete programming. What about the ideas that didn't work out that I spent time on. If I hadn't been doing the programming on my dime then I might not have known that the design didn't work right until I tried it on the clock on a clients remote. If it takes me 30mins to program a clients remote because I have a proven easy to use template made up should they only be charged for 30mins? Nope they get billed for what it would take to create a new remote. I'm sorry a business is not a charity and therefore we are in business to make money.

The problem is that if this article is written and I charge an extra fee for the program that's on the remote and the guy down the street doesn't then I lose business and quite honestly it doesn't matter if he is a horrible programmer. So now they have a horribly programmed remote and they tell their friends it's the worst thing they ever bought. Now it makes it that much harder for me to get people to buy the one thing that will make their system the easiest to use.

Prime example is that I have a client whose house was on the COVER of Electronic House. They are going to be building another house in the next two years and they have already said that they will not get another distributed A/V system because the whole house audio is too complicated to use and they spent way too much money on it. I am trying to talk them into letting me change out the keypads but they don't want to put anymore money into the system. A good system programmed badly is very bad for our industry.

An escrow system would work great!! I have purchased all the domain names that I think would work well for an AV escrow company and will have something up soon. It won't be cheap but at least there will be a middleman. Oh wait what if I go out of business? Then we're back in the same boat. Ehh oh well I guess.