He can whine all he wants, but in the end, he was stealing and got caught. All the rationalization, justification, denial, anger, resentment, etc., but he was stealing and got caught.
Copying is not stealing. If he stole the songs the band, store etc. would not have them to sell. He made two where there was one. It is simply not the same as stealing. His penalty ought to be to remunerate the lawful copyright owner the download price multiplied by the number of times he shared it.
Yes, it is stealing. But is it right that he be made "an example" and therefore pay the price for everyone else who does it? $675,000?!
The rest of us, however, have a right to wonder about such a capricious and out of proportion system. Copyright “stealing” may dilute a market but it doesn’t remove physical goods from a vendor. You can literally steal that many CDs and suffer orders of magnitude smaller penalty for it.
Yeah! The hell with the Bill of Rights! Excessive, cruel or unusual punishments are just fine!
They should have slowly tortured him to death! His parents, too! And anyone he's ever met!
[He can whine all he wants, but in the end, he was stealing and got caught. ]
You are soooo right. And next time your taxes are underpaid by about $100, which is a stretch for the amount of royalties stolen by this kid, then you should feel fine with being charged $675k
The intentionally harsh Mosaic law dictated at most a five-fold repayment as punishment for theft. Cross the RIAA on the other hand and you’re forced to pay 22500 times over.
He wasn't even stealing. Theft is when a thief takes an item and the original owner doesn't have that item anymore. What the guy did is copyright infringement.
As you know, copyright is an artificial right (not a natural one.) It is created by the government as a reward for making useful intellectual property - books, songs, paintings. The law gives the author an exclusive right to make a copy.
The guy violated the rights of the copyright holder by distributing the works without permission. However the penalty (and the law) that they used against him was originally designed for mass counterfeiters. That's where those huge fines come from. A counterfeiter, owner of a vinyl or CD stamping factory, can sell millions of copies before he is caught. The fine was supposed to lessen the appeal of that business. [Of course that didn't work - the pirates simply moved elsewhere. Best thing they did, with all these minimum wage laws and taxes in the USA :-]
This means that the poor guy (very poor, by now) is punished as an industrial counterfeiter, and all courts are happy with that and they don't see a problem. Actual harm from his actions is probably well under $1,000. But nobody wants to calculate the actual harm when it's far more profitable to stick him with a much higher figure.
There is nowhere else for this guy to appeal to. His debt most likely cannot be repaid. Most people struggle for many decades to pay for a house, and many houses are cheaper than this fine.
The most rational strategy for this guy is just to leave the country while he can, to never return. He is done here. Hopefully he has a passport. If not, there are many countries where documents are optional. These aren't very nice places - like Somalia - but he will be free there. With his education (per Wikipedia, he attended Goucher College in Maryland, majoring in physics and mathematics. He is pursuing doctoral studies in physics at Boston University.) he should be able to easily find an excellent job in the 3rd world. Two-bit presidents of African kingdoms still want all the high-tech toys of the world, and they sit on piles of diamonds that are tall enough to pay for this little caprice. The RIAA will not find him as long as he does not advertise his new name and location. The RIAA won't even be trying; the chance of recovery is minimal anyway, just due to him having no money. The RIAA's purpose was simply to scare others into obedience.
True, but two of the principles that engender respect for the legal system are:
1. Proportional punishment - making the punishment fit the crime, and
2. Uniform application of the law - People committing the same crime should have a similar punishment.
Both of these seem to be violated here. So this will get people to fear this law in particular but lose respect for the law (and for the RIAA) in general.
Yeah, off with his head! (geesh) What about making the punishment match the crime. It's very, very unlikely he actually caused $675,000 in damages. These are punitive fines, and in my opinion, they are WAY out of proportion to the crime.