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We consider the effect of a nonvanishing fraction of initially infected nodes (seeds) on the SIR epidemic model on random networks. This is relevant when, for example, the number of arriving infected individuals is large, but also to the modeling of a large number of infected individuals, but also to more general situations such as the spread of ideas in the presence of publicity campaigns. This model is frequently studied by mapping to a bond percolation problem, in which edges in the network are occupied with the probability, $p$, of eventual infection along an edge connecting an infected individual to a susceptible neighbor. This approach allows one to calculate the total final size of the infection and epidemic threshold in the limit of a vanishingly small seed fraction. We show, however, that when the initial infection occupies a nonvanishing fraction $f$ of the network, this method yields ambiguous results, as the correspondence between edge occupation and contagion transmission no longer holds. We propose instead to measure the giant component of recovered individuals within the original contact network. This has an unambiguous interpretation and correctly captures the dependence of the epidemic size on $f$. We give exact equations for the size of the epidemic and the epidemic threshold in the infinite size limit. We observe a second order phase transition as in the original formulation, however with an epidemic threshold which decreases with increasing $f$. When the seed fraction $f$ tends to zero we recover the standard results.