>>> <markring40 at ippimail.com> 09/04/06 10:58 PM >>> >Mike I think you've answered your own question. >The company in your example has lost $499 >Million dollars!! That would definately hurt them. >It would not help them. No! The company has simply endured 998,000 violations of their license agreement, something they can create and enforce based on copyright. You may think that translates into the loss of $499M, and Mike may not. While I think the company may be owed $499M by those who violated their license, it is money they never had and in reality were never likely to make. Everyone in the world may come up with some analog for this license/copyright violation, but analogies are made for people who may have a difficult time understanding or relating to a situation. I do not think we at TCLUG have this problem. We do not have to call it Piracy or Theft because all of us can be made to understand exactly what this is (if we don't know already). The attempt to make an analogy is understandable because the situation is complicated. Unfortunately, complicated situations are where analogies fall apart with the greatest speed. To me, the air-time analogy makes the situation seem more mysterious, not less. That is probably because I am less familiar with air-time than I am with software licensing. A non-analogy: You own or are employed at $SoftwarePublisher, and your company produces $SoftwareProduct. $N years of blood, sweat, and tears have gone into making $SoftwareProduct the most $PositiveDescriptor software on the market. You have recently discovered that illegal copies of $SoftwareProduct are easily available from a number of sources. What can you do? What should you do? What will you do and why? Too bad polls usually don't have essay options because I think the answers would be very interesting.