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.
Excellent point. Plus, downloads don't directly correlate to sales, because the vast majority that would pirate the music would never buy a copy if that's they only way they could obtain it. They pirate it, because it's free. This student didn't cause $675,000 in actual damages. No way. They're making an example out of him by fining him into debt slavery for life. I don't care what the law says here. This is not justice.