FireMonkey, enough. hehe whatever. I don't care. Nothing personal. Debate with Ynsaen. lol He seems to enjoy your exchanges. Fair enough. ynsaen: I debated on responding to this point as I really am not trying to send things off on some wild tangent but in the end I felt that I should [maybe it's the fox terrier in me ... you know how they can never let go ... heh - no, or at least I try hard not to be like that] Anyway, here goes: Correct on my location (Southwestern US) -- not so correct on patent and copyright law. There's more in common than not, and the differences are very slight and deal with country specific issues Ah... I'm not so sure about that - it depends of course sinec there are international agreements which come to bear in some cases, but I look at the fact that the Canadian Supreme Court has maintained until just this last month that p2p trading of MP3s is not a violation of copyright at all unless there is monitary gain involved. It's the only example I personally know enough about to say anything but it seems to indicate a distinct differance to me. Oh, the court still says it does not violate copyright laws at all, however, as a result of a great deal of pressure from the US, they are now drafting a new law which, if passed, will make MP3 sharing a crime - but even then owning MP3s will still be legal even if you do not own the album they came from [which means that what you have you can keep - I have to wait for the final draft to know if you can borrow CDs and rip them at home for yourself or not - right now it's unclear if that loophole is being left or not] This is something I have followed both in the US when Napster was first taken to court and in Canada from the same point. I am aware of 14 separate attempts by the music industry to get the Canadian courts to chanmge their stand and in each of those the ruling remained the same. In simple terms [which admittedly are less precise than legal terms but I think enough for this purpose] the Canadian courts ruled that copyright was never intended to protect profit margins but rather it was intended to prevent a person for representing an item as their own and to prevent someone who had no legal claim to an item from profiting from it. It further stated that potential 'lost sales' were in fact not a lost by a company at all because there was no way to show that those sales would have occured and that a person gaining a song without needing to pay for it was not a profit within the scope of copyright definitions. Now maybe I'm wrong, but that certainly does not sound like a slight difference to me and although it is directly in regards to MP3s, it is a ruling with significance to all areas of intellectual property where there is no physical property involved [not to suggest that it is the same - only that in does cast a shadow of influence on other areas] I realise that the difference between Canadian law and American law is much less in the area of copyrights and patents than it is in criminal law [where the differences are sometimes quite large] but I really find it hard to believe that they can be called slight given the whole matter of MP3s and the rulings that have been made in that area. Not exactly on topic but since issues of copyright and patent have been a part of the issue, maybe it isn't totally off topic [just mostly] Dan Farr: Thanks for giving some info - I'll have to mull it over a bit but it is always nice to get things direct from the source. I believe I see some pieces to the puzzle in what you have said - details that help me better grasp the whole picture - that's kind of my nature, I hate it when the pieces I have don't seem to quite fit right and so I keep looking until the odd bits that don't seem to fit are put into better focus. Comes from being a monkey - we monkeys are natural puzzle solvers, just can't resist when we see one.