Australian cricket has been hit by a double whammy of calamities this week. As though the prospect of an imminent 4-0 whitewash at the hands of India isn’t bad enough, the cricket team has been slapped with a $10 million law suit by Microsoft Corporation for using pirated version of MS Office for making PowerPoint presentations in the run-up to the Mohali Test. The law suit charges the board for infringement of intellectual property rights and can attract a two year imprisonment sentence if the amount is not paid. Indeed, as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 5,
“When sorrows come, they come not in single spies
But in Battalions.”
Confirming the news, Australian skipper, Michael Clarke, said, “I was giving a presentation to Sir Jadeja Arthur on his laptop after we lost the third Test when a mail popped in from Microsoft Corp, informing Mickey that the MS Office installed on our laptops was pirated and we would have to cough up 10 million Australian dollars by way of compensation.”
The Aussie cricketers have blamed their Indian counterparts for leading them astray, charging that it was Dhoni who guided them to a torrent link when Coach Arthur asked them to make those infamous PowerPoint presentations.
“I asked Dhoni if he could help me download the MS Office 2010 trial version from the net,” disclosed Australia’s answer to Sir Jadeja, Steven Smith. “Instead he guided me to torrentz.com and downloaded the full version of MS-Office. He promised that everyone in his team does the same thing and it’s not a crime in India. This is racist because when Indians do it it’s fair and when Australians do it, we get sued.”
When The Unreal Times asked for clarification, a spokesperson for Microsoft said, “Well, it’s perfectly fine if Indians download our software using torrents coz some day they might be developing and maintaining them for us. In fact we recently received CVs of two former Indian openers for an opening in our company.”
The Australian Cricket Board (ACB) now faces bankruptcy if Microsoft wins the law-suit. However, it’s not all gloom and doom for the cash strapped cricket body. Leveraging the recently acquired slide making skills of his wards, Coach Mickey Arthur has agreed to float a tier I management consulting arm, Mickey & Co, which could potentially make ACB the world’s richest cricket board, dwarfing even the BCCI.
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