for a fulltime student, 200 hours of community service is a lot of time. if he has only a few hours free on the weekends, that could take a couple of years. a fine of $5,400 is possibly equivalent to a student loan for 2 semesters. taking the copyright laws course for a semester (and receiving a passing grade) is adding more time, effort and homework on top of his other scholastic requirements – if he’s not expelled from the university for this FELONY CONVICTION. plus possible jail time of several months. all of which will be on his permanent record.

this is hardly a “low pubishment”.

the other cases by RIAA and MPAA were merely threats to take the people to court and never reached a courtroom. the fines (i’ve seen reports of several thousand dollars to upwards of $10,000) were agreed out of court with a judge’s authorization. if these cases had gone to trial, the penalties – if indeed there were to be any – would probably have been much higher. but no one knows what would have happened in a full trial. just the threat of a trial and the real possibilty of jail time and huge fines scares people into settling out of court. no one has yet been convicted for filesharing. they’ve only been threatened into submission.

recent other cases involving large-scale boot-legging and selling have gone to court and the punishments have been much harsher – longer jail time and much higher fines. that’s the precedent. but this kid in university might not see the inside of a jail cell because he is a student and probably didn’t profit even a fraction of what the larger, organized pirate groups have by selling.

these punishments are often made by the discretion of the judge, each case on it’s own merits. so no one can know beforehand what a judge might decide. a lot of judges don’t want to set a precendent in either direction for merely filesharing what a person owns and has the rights of fair use to do with one’s own property what they will.

i’ve read that this student put counterfeit trademark symbols on what he sold/intended to sell, and when it comes to selling for profit especially with counterfeit trademark symbols, there are already many legal precedents on the books. people who have sold copies of films, music, software, etc. on ebay and other online/offline sales points – including flea markets and car boot sales – have been severely punished by courts because they actually advertised and sold their goods as if they owned the copyrights. selling them is just a stupid thing to do, and apparently what this student was doing/intended to do, even if he was just selling to other students on campus and not even advertising anywhere. selling a used, store-bought copy f an item is one thing: copying it and selling it as the real thing is another.

so if you’re looking for precedents, there are many you can research and find.

Some versions of this story mention that the FBI had been tipped off because this guy was selling the pirated material. This means what this guy got nailed for was selling the crap he downloaded. He did not (as far as I can tell from the court records available online, case CR2004023152, http://www.courtminutes.maricopa.gov/) get nailed just for downloading. The infraction for which he was convicted was in burning the music to disc and putting a counterfeit “trademark, service mark, trade name” on the disc. That’s just plain stupid. I dislike RIAA and MPAA as much as the next guy, but I cannot blame them for going after someone who is attempt to profit commercially from illegal activity.

Isn’t that illigal to hold off a case just so that you can be tried as an adult?

Yep, I bet the schools get a portion of the revenue through signup bonuses and referrals.

But.. in the case of this person.. careful investigation will show he was actually selling bootleg products.. not simply sharing files..

I love the extremely inflated $50 million figure though.. how did they come up with that one?.. if you assume a retail value of 1$ for each song.. and 4 mb per song… then that comes out to.. roughly 200 terabytes.. give or take a few gigs.. You’d be able to buy yourself a luxury car for the cost of the hard disks alone… and i doubt there’s a raid controller or motherborad capable of controlling that much data storage from a single machine.. or any but the most expensive industrial server.

it’s even more space if you use movies.. which take up much more space per retail dollar.. assuming full dvd value.

It’s not particularly surprising that the fbi lies so blatantly. After all few people understand these dynamics.. those that do have too few a voice to be heard amidst the din of continual blatantly false criminal accusations..

So now we have two technical fallacies about computers to go with legal fallacies of copyright… one is that bandwidth is somehow unlimited (i wish it were true) and “a single mouse click” can somehow distribute to millions of people instantly.. the other is apparently that people can right now economically build systems capable of storing hundreds of terabytes of data.

Again.. i wish both of these were true, then it would be impossible to actually detect and track the transfers, as they would be instantaneous, and one would be nearly guaranteed to have enough space never to need removable media storage again. In the words of brian wilson.. “oh wouldn’t it be nice”