Monday, December 11, 2006 - 12:46AM

New Family Addition

By DAN ROBINSON

Editor/Photographer

From Dan: How the crime of copyright infringement took $1 million from me and brought down my business.

I've lost more than $1 million to copyright infringement in the last 15 years, and it's finally brought an end to my professional storm chasing operation. This page is a detailed account of the biggest threat to my photography and video operation that I had to battle daily to just barely survive, and eventually could not overcome. It's a problem facing all of my colleagues as well.

I'm officially an Uncle! My sister Katie and her husband Randy are the proud parents of Caleb Randolph Barnes, born late at night in Boston on December 7. My parents left for Boston earlier in the day and arrived in time for the delivery. The new family came home from the hospital on Sunday, and mother and son are doing fine.

All this transpired as I was returning from a long week covering lake-effect snowstorms on the shores of Lake Erie in New York and Pennsylvania. I'm finally back home, anticipating a much calmer pace for a while. Things are going to be warming up significantly in the coming week, which means snow is going to be out of the question for some time. While we may hear a little thunder this week, the main weather story looks to be some benign rainfall. A return to cold and snow is possible just before Christmas, but as with most model forecasts, we'll just have to take that prediction with a truckload of salt.