Do you mean someone might be punished for being a thief?
Do we need the Justice Department going after civil law violators? The recording industry has more than enough money to pursue their own cases. "The Recording Industry Association of America has sued 3,429 people, including several 12-year-olds, for file sharing so far."
Nope. Someone might have the USG land on him with both feet for owning something that might conceivably be used to illegally copy copyrighted material. No matter that there are many legal ways in which one can copy copyrighted material. (For instance, under present law it is perfectly legal for you to rip the audio from a CD you own and install it on an iPod. The labels hate this. They want to sell you Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band again, as they did when you went from vinyl to 8-track tape to cassette to CD. They consider you a thief for only buying the same product four rather than five times. The law, by the way, disagrees).
This isn't about punishing thieves -- which the present law already allows both the Government (criminally) and the victims (civilly) to pursue. This is about (1) making an assumption that anyone that has, say, an MP3 player or CD burner is a thief, and (2) renting the Department of Justice out as cheap muscle for the major labels.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
What about making a tape or cd for a friend? Is that copyright infringement?