>My guess is that US copyrights are enforced in the EU due to UN resolutions and other treaties. But as I said, you need to determine the risks for you.

AFAIK, they are not enforced through UN resolutions but through other means. Copyrights are respected up here, but we have other national rules that might override the copyright rules of the vendor. Some rules enforced in the US simply do not apply here. Punishment in regards of violation the rules is something beyond the control of microsoft or the US government. It is controlled by the Dutch government. We have a national institute call BREIN that is scanning for violations.

I'm not taking any significant risks, as I know I'm reasonable covered. There are too many complicating factors involved. I know about cases of larger companies beeing fined for running illegal software, but that always is exclusive to large scale abuse of licences. Other companies were prosecuted to pay for the licencenses.

There is no judge in holland to find, who would put someone in jail because of not understanding the utterly complex EULAs of software vendors that are open for many different interpretations.



>>It shows that the power of MS does not reach as far they hope it is. Anyways, US laws do not apply up here. So pointing to the US risks to a foreigner is out of line. We have our own laws in regards to piracy.
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>>Don't get me wrong... I'm against piracy, but I'm not keeping track nor strictly following the EULAs. I've got a whole bunch of licences which are stored in a box somewhere. I know I've got the licences for each OS, Office installation, MSDN, SQL server, all VFP versions etc. But since the production server is used by several people (developers, marketing, testers, potential clients, etc) it is impossible for me that any given time I'm (or the logged in user) is violating a particular licence. What if that person holds a personal license (for example VFP... you can install VFP on any machine as long as the number of developers is not more than the collective number of licences).
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>>There are too many complicated situations. If a software vendor thinks I'm consistently violating their EULA's they can contact me and we will work it out together. But threatening me with jail (would not be possible in my case anyways) or with fines would only make me go away from that software vendor or find an alternative construction without paying any money to the vendor.