Seven Crimes That Will Get You a Smaller Fine Than File Sharing

http://www.prefixmag.com/news/seven-crimes-that-will-get-you-a-smaller-fine-than/32033/

1. Child abduction: the fine is only like $25,000.
2. Stealing the actual CD: the fine is $2,500.
3. Rob your neighbor: the fine is $375,000.
4. Burn a house down: the fine is just over $375,000.
5. Stalk someone: the fine is $175,000.
6. Start a dogfighting ring: the fine is $50,000.
7. Murder someone: the maximum penalty is only $25,000 and 15 years in jail, and depending on your yearly salary, would probably be far slighter a penalty than $2 million.

Jammie Thomas was fined $2 million for downloading 24 songs!

[Source: www.prefixmag.com]

$1.9M file-share verdict stuns Minnesota mom

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2009-06-18-music-downloading_N.htm

A replay of the nation's only file-sharing case to go to trial has ended with the same result — a Minnesota woman was found to have violated music copyrights and must pay huge damages to the recording industry.
A federal jury ruled Thursday that Jammie Thomas-Rasset willfully violated the copyrights on 24 songs, and awarded recording companies $1.92 million, or $80,000 per song.

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Swedish pirates fire a warning shot over internet censorship

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/elections/article6452298.ece

Sweden’s Pirate Party, which wants an internet filesharing free-for-all, is one of the surprise entrants to the European Parliament after winning 7.4 per cent of the vote.[Yeah!!!]
The party, which also wants to beef up internet privacy, was founded in January 2006 and quickly attracted members angered by Swedish laws that criminalise filesharing and authorise the monitoring of e-mails. Its membership shot up after a court in Stockholm sentenced four men in April to a year in jail for running one of the world’s biggest filesharing sites, the Pirate Bay. Voters had their revenge last night by electing at least one of the Pirate Party as an MEP.
“When the verdict was announced at 11.00am, we had 14,711 members,” said Rick Falkvinge, the party’s founder. “We tripled in a week, becoming the third-biggest party in Sweden in terms of numbers. All of a sudden we were everywhere.”

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