This sentence is in many ways way worse than jailtime.

Your initial comment did seem to miss the point, which is not to beat up on Finland for their absurd awards in IP cases but to point out the hypocrisy of the record industry in demanding these kinds of rewards.  The OP didn’t do this very effectively, though, since the argument seems to be based on misleading the reader about the actual nature of the quantities cited.

Also, there doesn’t appear to be any mandatory fine for murder anywhere in the US.  Conviction comes with jail time and/or murder by state.  Rape convictions under federal jurisdiction can come with fines, but doesn’t seem to be required as part of minimum sentencing. I’m not able to quickly come up with info on individual states having fines for rape or not.

The sentence for rape in Finland is one to six years in prison. If there’s torture involved, that would mean two to ten years in prison.

I don’t know where the author of this text takes these fines, but anyway it’s quite obvious that both murder and rape are heavier crimes in finnish law than piracy. The sentence for copyright crimes can technically be maximum of two years in prison, but in reality that would probably take selling copied Picassos or something, I don’t know. The actual piracy sentences have been just fines as far as I know.

And no, I won’t say “yes”, because it isn’t.

Sure, maybe the actual *fines* for murders aren’t staggeringly high, but how many years is a murderer going to spent locked away on top of that? And can jail time for “piracy” come anywhere even close to that amount of time?

Now, actual damages is funny – especially in the case of downloading when the actual damages of downloading an album is the cost of the album, and that’s only if I would have purchased it but for my download, and that’s not including the retail mark-up in price.

But what if I murder the husband and father, the sole provider to the Smith family, who over his lifetime would have earned 1 million Euros.

What about the rape victim who requires years of therapy (which steals time, money, trust, etc).

Actual damages indeed.

It is the “actual damages” that the record companies are riding on when they are awarded those astronomical amounts of money. “Actual damages” in citation marks, as it is just the record companies spinning tall tales. But the judges seem to buy it, unfortunately.

So no, you won’t get rich in this country by suing somebody… unless you are a record company or their representative.

If you want to get content for free, the smart money is to torture the content holder until they agree to release the material into the public domain.

Then everybody wins.