Software Pirates Fined Four Brazillion DollarsS  If you thought
those greedy mom-assaulting vampires from the RIAA or the BSA
were bad, you haven't seen their Brazilian cousins yet: they
sued a shopping mall and its retailers for selling pirated
software to the tune of four billion dollars, winning every
single cent of it. Nothing bad with that, until they tell you
how they came up with that crazy sum. The Associação Brasileira
das Empresas de Software (the Brazilian equivalent of the
Business Software Association) sued the administrators of Stand
Center-a shopping mall in Sao Paulo-and 17 of the retailers in
there for seven brazillions (four billion US dollars). The sum
was calculated by getting 103 products, adding the total value
and multiplying it by 3,000, then putting that together with the
individual street price of the 71,000 products that were seized
during the police operation that lead to this court case. For
sure, crime doesn't pay. But with those outrageous quantities,
fining won't either. [IDG N