As this falls in the “rant” category, I’m automatically indicating that I know my reaction is over the top. But I just find this situation, along with the recent awards of hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages from kids and mothers successfully prosecuted by RIAA lawyers, to be fundamentally appalling.

If this guy deserves jail time, then why aren’t the chief executives of Lehman Brothers and AIG being lined up in front of firing squads? The difference in scale (hundreds of billions literally stolen from middle class citizens and their pension funds vs a few grand “stolen” from multi-billion-dollar industries) suggests that the punishment needs to scale to that level, or where is the justice?

I put the second stolen above in quotes for a good reason. Basically what this guy was doing was performing a change to consoles *that people owned and had paid for* that would allow those people to possibly use pirated games. He wasn’t mass-producing copies of the games and selling them. He wasn’t hacking in to the game companies websites and transferring money from their accounts. He wasn’t hijacking truckloads of games being delivered to Best Buy. He was enabling the owners of these consoles to bypass the copy protection systems in their machines.

Note that, technically, everyone is entitled to a backup copy of their purchased software licenses. Perversely, the DMCA prevents bypassing the systems that would prevent such a backup copy from being made or used. I’m not suggesting that the guy making these changes was doing so “legitimately”, but technically he wasn’t making the copies himself- just enabling his customers to use said copies.

I am pretty certain that, in most of the United States, I could perform the service of illegally turning a semi-automatic gun into a full auto without facing anything remotely close to ten years in prison. And yet there is no practical purpose to a full automatic weapon other than killing people. Based on the behavior of the U.S. justice system, performing a service that enables efficient mass murder is apparently less of a crime than performing a service that enables illegally copying Mario Cart.

I feel justified in pointing out the flaws in this supposed “justice” as loudly as I want.