[dmm]

The real rip-off of pirating software is that most software only has a useful lifetime of about 5 years. So 50 years of copyright protection is meaningless. Therefore, it is much more of a crime to pirate software than books. If someone pirates a book, the copyright owners have 50 years to get a return on their investment from law-abiding citizens. Not so with software! (Although, come to think of it, many books also have a short lifetime, such as celeb bios and computer "how-to"s. Maybe there ought to be different categories of copyrights, and short-term copyrights should be savagely enforced.)