InsideTech

Bullshit. She did not steal anything, first off. At common law, larceny is "the tresspassory taking and carrying away of the personal property of another with the intent to permanently deprive". That is theft. Two major elements are missing here: "carrying away" and "intent to permanently deprive". The former implies that the victim has lost something, the latter that the defendant has intent not only to gain, but to deprive the victim.

Let's get this straight: copyright violation is copying something without permission. It is. Not. stealing, any propaganda from the IP industry notwithstanding. By any legal or rational convention, the two acts are only vaguely related. Copying without permission is against the law for entirely different reasons than theft/larceny, the elements of the legal definition are entirely different, and in a really bullshit twist, modern copyright law puts burden of proof of damages on the defendant - meaning you are essentially guilty until proven innocent, which is against all legal precedent and principled thinking. That's a point that requires its own article to discuss.

Now let's talk political theory. What is copyright, exactly? Copyright is a state-granted monopoly on the ability to reproduce an intellectual work. That means that the state is backing up the copyright holder's claim with force. This is not a feature of laissez-faire capitalism, which holds that the state may not interfere with economic activity except to prevent exchange coerced through fraud or force. This is also not a feature of Marxism, in which the state owns all goods and property and distributes it to the public. State monopoly is a feature elsewhere exclusive to medieval feudalism (where the king authorizes or turns a blind eye to assassination in order to protect guild secrets), to mercantilism under Imperial Britain (where one company, e.g. East India Trading Company, is granted exclusive authority over a market), and to Mussolini's brand of socialism, aka corporatism (wherein the state awards monopolies to favored corporations and competition is thought to be destructive). Mussolini's socialism was, you may recall, later adopted by national socialists in Germany, leading many to fairly call this fascist economic policy. I'm not calling the RIAA Hitler here for the sake of demonizing them (they do that enough on their own), just setting the record straight on political theory and history. Still the most accurate propaganda poster would read, "Every time you illegally download an MP3, you're fighting SOCIALISM."

Getting back around to the meat of the article, it is curious that we should be penalized 8,000 dollars for stealing a real product that actually deprives a store of profits, vs. 1.65 million to copy. Especially since the prosecution is allowed to set that amount basically arbitrarily with no proof of damages. All independent studies show illegal copying has a neutral or positive effect on sales, while on the flip side the recording industry has been shown to have blatantly and knowingly lied to congress multiple times concerning their projected damages from copyright violation. Just to put this in perspective, you'd have to steal anywhere between 10 and 100 CARS to get a similar penalty as sharing 2 albums on the internet. As a car thief, you'd actually profit, but as a copyright violator, you're paying out of pocket to do promotion and distribution for the recording artist. In all fairness, maybe they should be paying you the going rate for album promotion.

What are we going to do about these egregious miscarriages of justice? Fight back. Fight harder, fight smarter. I'll have to repeat myself again here - if you are a file sharer, or otherwise engaged in any civil disobedience or political dissent, it is imperative that you understand data security. The three biggest things you can learn about to reduce your risk are: onion routing, deniable encryption, and public key encryption (for data transfer). They will grant you almost impenetrable anonymity, unbreakable file security and deniability (note that in the U.S. your 5th amendment rights against self incrimination mean you don't have to give up your encryption keys, but in Britain the law may compel you to do so, also beware of key loggers and radio frequency emission interception - otherwise it is impossible even for intelligence agencies to break strong encryption at the moment), and highly secure data exchange. You NEED TO KNOW THIS STUFF and you NEED TO APPLY IT if you're going to be serious about this. Do that, and we have a good chance of winning the fight, even if Obama and the Tories turn our respective countries into socialist police states.

Ah, another valid reason why the RIAA and MPAA need to be stopped.

Sort of makes you sick, doesn't it?

Sounds to me like Communism is coming to the US - this latest RIAA/MPAA BS is further proof that the US is becoming a Second USSR...friend of mine recently referred to America as the USSA

Considering Obama is a Socialist the picture at the top of this article doesnt make sense. He supported the RIAA not file sharing. Your reference is backwards.