Someone dedicates his life to keeping landfills free of harmful material and the government wants to send him to prison. And it's all based on Microsoft's assertion it would have sold as many recovery disks as Lundgren created if only Lundgren hadn't created them. Ignored is the fact they never were distributed. Also ignored is the dubiousness of "lost sales" assertions, which are always 100% conjecture and always presented as a simplistic equation: "1 Piracy = 1 Lost Sale." But in this case, no sales were lost because no sales were replaced with bootleg boot disks.
And "sales" must be a legal term of art. Microsoft allows anyone to download a recovery disk for free. But in court, these are suddenly worth money because infringement. To ensure someone gets tossed in jail for breaking the chain of planned obsolescence, Microsoft (and prosecutors) want the court to believe the existence of recovery disks that do nothing unless a person already has a licensed copy of Windows has somehow made the company $700,000 poorer. Given the limitations of burned recovery disks, it's impossible to see where infringement even comes into play. And yet here we are, watching prosecutorial discretion morph into putting someone's head on a platter over recovery disks any one of us could download hundreds of times from Microsoft's website without a single murmur about "lost sales" from the tech giant.
by Tim Cushing
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180223/17294539295/microsoft-helps-get-computer-recycler-sentenced-to-15-months-prison-offering-unapproved-recovery-disks.shtml
