According to the Baltimore Business Journal , Microsoft filed suit March 28 against five Maryland computer firms for copyright and trademark infringement. Among the defendants, the one that caught my eye was Expert Computer Technology in Catonsville.

I ran across this store pretty much by luck last summer. Coming out of a CompUSA, where I'd gone to price budget computers, I got the fool notion that I could build one myself. When I saw the sign for Expert a little further down Route 40, I rushed in.

"I need everything you got to build a cheap computer," I eagerly instructed the woman behind the counter of this basement shop, who I later found out was co-owner Sue Zhang. She eyed me wearily when I confessed that I'd never actually built a computer before. Another weekend hobbyist, she no doubt thought. Probably couldn't even get the voltage settings correct. Nothing but trouble.

If she was thinking that, she didn't say it. Instead, she just gathered everything I'd need. I was entrusting her to give me a set of components that would work with one another. She snapped the RAM and the processor into the motherboard, made the settings that she figured I'd probably miss, and sent me on my way. And my homemade computer worked fine.

A few months later, when I had problems with some other hardware, Expert helped me through the diagnostic process. (The cause of the trouble turned out to be a piece I'd purchased elsewhere.) On another occasion, I had discovered that some RAM I bought at Expert about six weeks earlier was faulty, a very elusive problem to pinpoint. The store has a 30-day return policy, but when I took the RAM back, Tim Shi, Expert's other co-owner, replaced it with nary a question. Didn't even ask to see the receipt.

In short, these are good folks in my book. They took the time to help me out. They trust my judgment, and I trust theirs.

So what am I to make of Microsoft's charges that these same people were "involved in the installation, marketing, distribution, advertising, and/or offering of counterfeit and/or infringing copies of Microsoft software," as the suit filed at the U.S. District Court in Baltimore read?

On paper, Microsoft seems to have a pretty strong case. If nothing else, the software giant appears to have bent over backward not to take Shi and Zhang to court. According to court records, by the end of last year Expert had received four different cease-and-desist orders for selling and/or installing unauthorized copies of Microsoft software. Yet when Microsoft dispatched an investigator to this basement shop this past February, he or she was able to purchase a personal computer that ran on Windows software -- software that wasn't licensed.

Alleged piracy of this sort is a great concern for Microsoft. A few months back, I went to a Marketpro (www.marketpro.com) show, where local vendors assemble in some hall to sell goods. Microsoft was there too, but not to sell software. It rented a great chunk of space and staffed it with identically uniformed marketing people handing out fly swatters with anti-piracy messages on them. I managed to swipe a swatter without being buttonholed by the Redmond Gestapo, but I imagine the point they were making was thus: All you people copying Microsoft programs are doing wrong; you're hurting the economy; you're taking money out of the hands of the software programmers. They may have even quoted a statistic from Microsoft's Protecting Against Software Piracy page (www.microsoft.com/piracy), in which the company estimates that 25 percent of all software running now is illegally copied.

And Microsoft is right. It is a problem. So why can't I take piracy as seriously as the legal plight of Sue Zhang and Tim Shi? Could it be that Microsoft founder Bill Gates is already the richest man in the world? Microsoft is already obscenely profitable: The Wall Street Journal recently noted that while the Coca-Cola Co. makes 14.3 cents for every $1 in sales, in itself a phat margin, Microsoft keeps 60.6 cents for every dollar earned.

How is this so? See, software isn't like soda. Each bottle of the bubbly stuff costs money to make; software, you write once and copy indefinitely for pennies. So, at what point does charging $250 (the approximate price of Windows 2000) become simply exploitative? Interestingly enough, the anti-piracy site states that "Microsoft plans to devote 50 percent of all software piracy recoveries to nonprofit organizations, approximately $25 million during the next five years." If the company isn't even going to miss the lost revenue, why dispatch marketing thugs and lawyers hither-and-yon? To teach the scofflaws a lesson? Maybe Microsoft isn't trying to squash piracy so much as reinforce the idea that software is just like soda, when in fact it's something entirely different.

Don't get me wrong: The law is the law. If a company can prove it has been wronged, justice should be served, no matter how wealthy the victim. Still, I have to wonder what's going on when a local business is threatened by the world's largest software company for depriving the company of profits it doesn't need anyway. Something isn't right. But I'm not sure how to fix it.

Bad faith: joabj@charm.net.