I think your analysis is off. It's not a matter of the ease of committing the crime, it's a matter of the punishment fitting the crime. Clicking a mouse is no

I think your analysis is off. It's not a matter of the ease of committing the crime, it's a matter of the punishment fitting the crime. Clicking a mouse is no more work than pulling a pistol's trigger, but we have completely different expectations for the implications of those two actions. Western societies have had the idea of proportionality between a crime and its punishment for over 3,000 years[1]. The reason this ruling is so shocking is that the punishment is in no way proportional to the crime, regardless of the ease of committing it. Thomas-Rasset was convicted of creating copies of 24 songs. The issue is not how easy this was to do; even if she had to tediously carve the tracks into vinyl records with a fork, her punishment would be no less shocking. The magnitude of this crime does not fit a punishment of millions of dollars, or even tens of thousands, because the harm to the victim of the crime is so slight. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi