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Sunday, July 8, 2007 - 4:26AM

Lightning over Mayberry

By DAN ROBINSON

Editor/Photographer

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

In September of 2025, my work is generating the most income it ever has in my career. Yet, I'm being forced to shut down my successul operation, against my will, due to one cause alone: 95% of that revenue is being stolen by piracy and copyright infringement. 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. Do not be misled by the lies of infringers, anti-copyright activists and organized piracy cartels. This page is a detailed, evidenced account of my battle I had to undertake to just barely stay in business, and eventually could not overcome. It's a problem faced by all of my colleagues and most other creators in the field.

This wasn't much of a chase, but an interesting storm chasing event on Thursday of last week. Thunderstorms briefly developed on the eastern edge of the Appalachian mountains, at the terrain feature adjacent to the North Carolina-Virginia Piedmont. Upper level winds were weak and any storms were not expected to be anything of note. As I headed south on I-77 down the steep grade near Mount Airy, a small rain shaft became visible just east of the mountain slopes. It was gradually becoming denser as I turned east on I-74, so at Mount Airy, I exited and stopped to watch for a while. The storm began producing cloud-to-ground lightning about five minutes later, and continued sparking for about 15 minutes. Finally, the storm succumbed to its own outflow and fizzled as it moved away from the mountain slopes into the North Carolina Piedmont.

Mount Airy is the hometown of Andy Griffith, and the location on which The Andy Griffith Show's Mayberry was based.