However, people that inadvertantly break the law are usually given probation or a suspended sentence. In many cases, making restitution is enough to get the charges dismissed.
On the other hand, It cost this guy $100,000. If he chose to fight, he had to pay the costs of his prosecution and his defense. What would you have done, if confronted with the same problem, due to an inadvertant error on your part?
Irrelevant and unprovable supposition.
No more so than your claim that he was intentionally stealing software.
Irrelevant and unprovable supposition.
In places that don't mind software piracy, there will seldom be more than one licensed copy of anything. For places that do mind, there will be pretty close to one license per person. There isn't that huge a middle ground.
One of the big problems is that, in an era where Borland's No-Nonsense License (which debutted with Turbo Pascal 3.0) is more and more necessary, it becomes less and less used.
Essentially, the No Nonsense License states that a piece of software may be used "like a book". Just as one book may be read in many places, so too a piece of software may exist on many machines. On the other hand, just as a book may only be read by one person at a time (unless two people are reading the same page together), so too may software only (legally) be used by one person at a time, unless two people are sharing a computer.
The fact of the matter is that since copyright law and software licenses would be unworkable if enforced literally(*), honest people generally act as though Borland's licensing terms are the ones in effect. This applies not only to computer application software, but also to such things as music. If the software and music industries would recognize this, I think they'd be much more respected.
(*) As a simple example, the copyright statutes explicitly allow only a single backup copy of software to be made under "fair use" statutes. Consequently, anyone who does a full disk backup of their system would be violating copyright if they didn't destroy the old backup copies before producing new ones. Since such a policy would be insane for a number of reasons (not the least of which are (1) the legitimate need for backups from different times, in case it's discovered that a file was corrupted or altered sometime before the last backup; (2) the difficulty, when using many forms of backup media, of expurgating only selected files; (3) the danger of the primary hard drive failing sometime between the destruction of the old one and the successful and complete creation of the new one). Such a policy would thus be insane and unreasonable, and yet it would be precisely what strict copyright compliance would require.If the BSA or RIAA were interested in trying to promote goodwill compliance with copyright, they'd get a lot more respect. Instead, however, they regard as theft behavior which is necessary and proper and thus dilute their legitimate claims of theft.