That's what I suspect as well. Anyway, I don't have any problem with PMDG's copyright protection measures, and I hope these ****** get caught!VOlker :]

Well interesting topic.I of course own the PMDG 737, but I dont think PMDG can take legal actions against people from other countrys like UK or Germany.The authorities wont prosecute anyone for such "small" software theft. Its bad that it happens, but its not much you can do about it.You really wanna hunt all those XXXXXX number of people who downloaded your software from Emule? I understand you want to do, its sad for you but it wont be possible I fear ;(Good luckJan Urban

They might not catch those freedownloaders, but more important than that, since they wouldn't buy the software anyway, is to prevent them from geting the product in the first place, that is controling the ownership of the people how actualy buy them, so PMDG, by catching an ilegal copy in the internet, may trace it to a person how bought it and procecute this individual, with charges of theft and loss of revenue or words to this efect, and thus preventing chances of a "generous" owner to share it to others.I am 100% in the side of PMDG on this one (as long as I dont have to sufer from an overprotection limiting my rights :) ), if they protect they product they are ultimatly protecting ourselfs by assuring us the protecttion of our investment and not surcharging us with a "pirate tax"Why the hell one person buys a product and then shares it to others that are unknown to him in order to these others use it free of charge is beyond me... :-roll. jos

Judgement is rendered in a USA court. There are plenty of not so polite people who are more then happy to make their living collecting judgements for percentages. They like those breaking the law in the first place do not generally follow it too closely ;)All PMDG has to do is establish that YOU did it. That would seem rather simple considering we downloaded a personalized file with our own unique id & password which was probably serialized. If they go out and find that version on the web, it came from you. Case closed. You can't pleed "the dog fell on the keyboard" and it accidently got uploaded. ;)Ray

Hey Robert, First I want to say that I for one support whatever measures you use to secure your product as long as it does not negatively affect my legal enjoyment of the product. I thank you for your clarifacation, I did not think that the gauge was "phoning home" since many of the other gauges that did this were also default FS98 and FS2000 gauges and I too felt that it was some thing unrelated. I can say that a few times I got a little scared when I got a new freeware plane and when I would take it up for the first time Zone Alarm starts screaming at me that some gauge is trying to talk to the internet. You I trust but others that I do not know make me nervous. I wish you the best of luck in prosecuting those that can not follow their ethical and legal responsibilities. I am glad that you are taking a stand against those that ultimately drive up the cost for us that do things the right way. I think more of these scum bags need to be made to pay for their crimes! Anyway thanks again for the comments about this and thanks for all of the great products!Philip Olsonhttp://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/forum/supporter.jpg

Jan-Funny you should mention it... the first country in which we hit the ground legally was the UK.....;-)