Shoplifting is safer than downloading

Boy, this really makes you think! According to this article, it is better to simply rip off the DVD from a brick and mortar store than to try stealing it off of the Internet! We live in scary times and the new penalties don’t seem to take ignorance into consideration!

Legal punishment is a kind of social policy. When our laws have terrible punishments for some action, we’re saying, “This is very bad, and those who do it are just as bad.” The worse the punishment, the worse the crime. The punishment should suit the crime — if we instituted the death-penalty for public spitting, and didn’t ratchet up murder to at least the same penalty, it would be as though we were saying, as a society, “Murder is trivial when compared to gobbing on the sidewalk.” One has to wonder, then, what kind of crazy society we live in given the relative penalties for infringing a copyright using a computer as compared to stealing an object from a store? Why kind of fool lawmaker lets himself get talked into making this social policy?