Steve

You know what? I hope this passes. Then we can throw John McCain, Sarah Palin, and Barack Obama (among others) in jail for felony copyright infringement.

http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/migrated/intelprop/magazine/LandslideNovDec2010_Clarida.authcheckdam.pdf

In regards to Fetttson's post #13, I agree that there's a distinction between subscribers and players. I currently play Puzzle Pirates (the light blue line just above 20,000 right now in the second graph) and they have the notion of a "subscriber ocean" and a "doubloon ocean".

The subscriber oceans are for people who subscribe to the game (obviously), while the doubloon oceans are for players who want to either buy doubloons via credit card or Paypal to make in-game purchases, or for those players who want to spend time working for their doubloons rather than spending money buying them.

From how many people tend to be on the doubloon ocean in which I play, I suspect that the number of players is significantly larger than the number of subscribers.

It's a fun game, I experienced a problem logging in once in the several months I've been playing it, I haven't noticed any downtime for maintenance, they have recently added new functionality, and it's free. I recommend that if you get frustrated waiting to log on to WoW, pop over to Puzzle Pirates for a quick bit o' pillaging. [My only association with PP is that I play it; I don't work for the company running it or anything.]