Student Console Hacker Faces 10 Years in Jail

Oh the horror!

Well it’s good to know that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency has their priorities in order. Instead of hunting down human trafficers, drug smugglers or international art thieves, they decided to bust a 27 year-old CSU student named Matthew Crippen who modified Xboxes, Playstations and Wiis so they were able to play pirated games. This is in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to be sure, but now the guy’s facing up to 10 years in a federal prison for the racket.

I’m not going to argue that what Crippens did wasn’t wrong, but I think we have to make the punishment fit the crime here. I’ve heard of murders and rapists getting out of jail in under 10 years, and that sort of sentence seems “cruel and unusual” for hacking a few video game consoles. Sure it’s the “maximum” and he probably won’t get it, but seriously, a crime like this shouldn’t even have the potential to take away a decade of your life.

I’m mostly up in arms over this because of another recent case where  a student has been ordered to pay $675,000 after being sued by the RIAA for downloading 30 songs. Though he did what he did knowingly, this kind of judgement is shocking and should be illegal in itself. The market value of 30 songs on iTunes is $30, so how the maximum damages is allowed to skyrocket to that degree is practically criminal. And the kid got off easy, the jury legally had the right to make him pay up to $4.5 MILLION. Who the hell makes up these numbers? Who decides that one song is worth $22,000?

I don’t see how this should be any different than say, shoplifting laws. If you are caught stealing $30 worth of merchandise, the law in most states says you face up to 6 months in jail and have to pay up to a $1000 fine. But if it’s your first offense and you’re an otherwise savory character, you’ll probably get  slap on the wrist and a few months probation. Can you imagine if I stole $30 worth of Diet Coke from a gas station and then Exxon-Mobil sued me for $4.5 million dollars?

I know legally it’s different because it has to do with intellectual property rights and yadda yadda yadda, but you can’t deny that the fundamental princple is the same. Caught pirates should be forced to make some sort of restitution for their crime, but absurd rulings like this do nothing but ruin the lives of otherwise good people and make the RIAA look even more like the bunch of greedy, evil assholes they are.