Re-Code.com website to make fake pricing barcodes - Satire or theft?

[astro]

From this salon article.

How the hell are these idiots claiming this scam is satire, it’s just instructions in how to defraud a store? Why aren’t these guys in jail.

[sub]The Web site Re-Code.com parodies the design and chipper lingo of Priceline.com’s “name your own price” shopping site. It invites shoppers to “recode your own price,” by making their own barcodes using the site’s barcode generator. The theory: There’s just a 10-digit number standing between you and a better deal on anything that you want in a store, and this site will help you crack the code.

The site’s creators call it satire. Wal-Mart’s legal counsel calls it an incitement to theft and fraud.

Re-Code.com lets shoppers share barcode numbers from products they’ve purchased or search for codes entered by other visitors to make their own. So far, the site claims that it has collected about 150 codes. Barcode swapping, say the site’s creators, is a way of subverting a chain’s own inventory management system to really name your own price: “Apply the cheaper item’s barcode to the more expensive item,” the site instructs, then go to the checkout where: “Cashiers usually don’t notice but machines never do.” …

Re-Code.com is a project of the Carbon Defense League, an artist and activist collective affiliated with the “tactical media network” Hactivist.com.

“Nathan Hactivist,” the nom de guerre of one of the collective’s operatives, who is based in upstate New York, says “We think of ourselves as a friend of Priceline.com, making good on their promises of naming your own price. We’re carrying out their goal to its logical extreme.” He sees the site as a commentary on the absurdity of a company, like Priceline, marketing itself as “giving the power to the consumer,” and as a tool for making a political statement about the perceived differences between brand-name and generic products, organic-labeled and non-organic foods.

[/sub]

[njufoic]

I can’t imagine this would actually work very well as a scam, although I’d like to see someone wheel a cart full of VCRs and stuff up to the K-mart self checkout and see how many times the scanner would say, “BEEP! One-ninety-nine!” before one of the attendants noticed something amiss

By the way, one time I went to Bradlees to buy a fire extinguisher for my car (you know, just in case). There was no price on the box, and I took it up to the register and it rang up two bucks. The cashier didn’t seem to have a problem with this, so I bought it for two bucks. The next week, Bradlees went bankrupt. I guess that was the last straw!

-Andrew L

[Revtim]

IMO, if the stuff can be used easily for theft, calling it parody or art or whatever inconsequential.

I assume there is no technological reason why the codes that were on the site couldn;t be actually used, correct? I cannot read the entire Salon article, as I am not a subscriber and it’s a pay article.

[markdiscordia]

Nonetheless, providing general instruction on committing crimes is hard to prosecute. If they match particular codes to particular stores, that’s one thing, but saying:

“The code for a ten dollar bottle of premium hairspray is X-XXXXX-XXXXX-X.
The code for a three dollar bottle of budget hairspary is X-XXXXX-XXXXX-X.
Here is how to print out and affix a bar code.”

could certainly be justifiable as a simple posting of information. After all, one is allowed to publish manuals on committing murder and give a speech saying “kill all Armenians!”; it’s only conspiring to murder specific people or saying “kill Jerry Tarkanian!” that liability arises.

[kanicbird]

Come on guys, I love the self checkout and now you are going to ruin it for all of us!

[Guinastasia]

Um, don’t you have to program the bar codes into the computer?

Most likely, some of them would be “Item Not Found!”

[bouv]

Well, if you have the barcode of a pre-existing product that is $2.00, and will scan as a similar item as the one you are buying then it’s actually very easy to do this. And yes, I am pretty much speaking from personal experience here. I’ll be damned if I’m going to always pay full price for a DVD.

[kanicbird]

So bouv you pretty much are going to steal the DVD in a way that going to hurt the store when you could just download the thing off of a pier to pier network and hurt nobody?

[Czarcasm]

Too damn easily used for illegal purposes, if you ask me.

Lockdown.