http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/o-tenenbaum-riaa-wins-675000-or-22500-per-song.ars

Basically, it looks like this:

Steal two CDs from a store = Petty theft, pay a fine in the hundreds of dollars

Pirate two CDs' worth of songs = Copyright infringement, pay a fine almost twice the value of an average house in Toronto

Discuss.

After much deliberation, my conclusion is that I hope the RIAA companies go bankrupt.

They're going after their own customers without even caring for the ethics or morality of the issue. I don't like immoral institutions.

Huh i guess there pissed of all this piracy.

I'm very anti piracy but this is extremely over the top. Not to mention ridiculous.

The way I see it, the whole issue of copyright isn't going to get addressed until we find out some way to give financial encouragement to intellectual properties in a world where the ease of copying such materials means the supply is effectively infinite. Until then, though, it might help to ask, "what's a reasonable punishment for copyright infringement?" Personally, I'd say something about 20-50 times the cost of a song would be pretty effective, which would work out to between $600-$1,500 for Tenenbaum, at the market price of $0.99 a song, taking into account that although the infringement was willful, downloaders do not stand to reap any financial gain from their activities.

Divide 675,000 by 30. then multiply that by the amount of songs I have downloaded... I hope they do not catch me