You have just shelled out really big bucks for something you really don’t own. We own it. We also own you and everything you own in the event that we can prove that you have in any way distributed pirated copies of this product; reverse-engineered this product (looked at our secret code—similar to the “secret sauce” in the burger business but not quite as tasty) to come up with a product that you claim to own; or done anything that you might do with anything you really do own. Not only don’t you own this product, you don’t even own the media it came on. We own all that too.

In exchange for your big bucks we’ll give you a limited warranty that the product has a theoretical chance of working on your computer (our view of things, not yours) and a modicum of telephone support for 30 days via of our Byzantine customer service voice mail system.

We admit that you may own the computer that you are using to install our software. But if our product causes your computer not to work, it’s not our problem because you own the computer and our lawyers can prove that you should have taken better care of it. We may from time to time issue an “update” for our product. We’ll most likely charge you for that too. You might resent paying more bucks for what you consider to be a ‘bug fix.’ We’re charging you more bucks because we call it a ‘product enhancement.’ We can call it whatever we want. After all, we own it.

Copyright © 2001 Robert Paul Leitao, rleitao@atpm.com.