March 25, 2000

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.

Saturday, March 25th radar, about 2:30 PM On Saturday afternoon, a rash of about 60 small isolated storms broke out across West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. One of the larger storms that moved through the Teays Valley / Charleston area started with sporadic intracloud lightning which later progressed to cloud-to-ground strikes after the storm had moved off about 5 miles to the east. I didn't try to photograph this one because the storm was too small to adequately block out enough sunlight.

Top: Mammatus clouds as the storm moves off to the east - Scott Depot, WV.

Bottom: (Composite of two photo frames) The storm at a distance of 30 miles, looking east from Hurricane, WV. The dissipating storm is probably over the Charleston / Marmet area at this point. (And you thought there wasn't any flat land in West Virginia- Hurricane is in the heart of Teays Valley, a stretch of gently rolling hills between Charleston and Huntington.)