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Later in the article:

"You can’t count all those users taking advantage of the license as lost revenue, like the music industry does with song downloads. The Avast! Pro license was there to be used, so people used it. If it hadn’t been on P2P sites then the vast majority of users would have gone elsewhere for protection."

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It seems that that latter part is part of the Geek.com writer's commentary on the original article from PC Pro, though, so the original article likely didn't call out their own broken logic.

Right, but with free alternatives available such as the fantastic Microsoft Security Essentials, so you can't say that the industry lost $X in sales because of the license.

That's literally the next sentence.

>You don’t need to spend any money to keep your machine protected, especially if you run Windows. Microsoft offers you a firewall as part of the Windows default install now, and Microsoft Security Essentials anti-virus software is free.

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