On Fri, 15 May 2009 20:04:21 -0700, Chambers wrote:

> This makes me wonder if a person who has downloaded, say, 100,000,000
> songs off the internet without paying for them, was sued, could they
> defend themselves by saying they wouldn't have paid for the music
> anyway?

I can honestly say that I wouldn't want to be the test case for that, 
because it'd be difficult to prove that they wouldn't have.

Well, scratch that, it might be easy to prove - look at their income, 
look at how much the songs would retail for, and see if they could 
possibly have afforded it.

> Certainly they would still be guilty of copyright infringement, but I
> don't think there would be any theft involved.

Theft probably would be difficult to prove, infringement would be easy 
enough to prove and given the ability to have unreasonable punitive 
damages assigned for the infringement activity, any theft charge - even 
if proven - would be inconsequential.  The infringement charges would be 
more than enough to bankrupt the perp.

Jim

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