Slashdot Mirror
Pirate Bay Founder Fined For 'Continued Involvement'
tekgoblin writes with an excerpt from TekGoblin: "The founders of The Pirate Bay have been hit with a bunch of punishments and other measures to prevent them from continuing. However Fredrik Neij was just fined by the Stockholm District court another 500,000 Swedish kronor ($70,690 US). Fredrik Neij and Gorrfrid Scatholm both had been banned from operating the site but Neij had been recently found still involved with the site. Neij already owes around 10.6 million."
True, it's "only" around $1.5 million that he owes right now. Still, it's a valid point, and the problem with levying such exorbitant fines. If I were fined $1.5 million for something, at that point, no amount of additional fines would ever make a difference in my activities. Whether it's $1.5 million or $1.5 billion, I know I'm never going to pay it off, so what difference does it make? If I were fined $1.5 million for something, I would pretty much take it as free license to do whatever I want from that point forward with no concern whatsoever for monetary penalties.
"I know it's fun to get stuff for free (I do it myself), but authors still deserve to be paid. Some of ye appear to say they do not (which is why you oppose copyright)." So you don't accept the clearly logical slashdot argument that because artists make too little money from selling what they make, that we should take steps to insure that "too little" amount plummets to zero?
Or, you just try to harm for the next 30 years those companies who imposed the fine with their immoral lawsuits, invent and promote new p2p technology and generally try to make sure these companies loose billions after billions.
At least that's what I would do if somebody told me to pay 1.5 million dollars for maintaining a site with links to files that could be used to obtain potentially copyright infringing content.