Ars Technica: The PC enthusiast's resource

Ars Technica: The PC enthusiast's resource: "Why pursue costly civil litigation when you can have the government do it for you? That's the gist of part of the so-called Pirate Act, a new set of legislation aimed at criminalizing various online acts of piracy. While common parlance often talks of file sharing as 'theft' or 'stealing,' in the overwhelming majority of instances, copyright infringement is a civil matter, not a criminal one. The bill hopes to see such acts criminalized, allowing the government to step in and do the grunt work with the added benefit of increased fines and jail times that such criminalization would entail. Previous attempts to do an end-run around civil litigation limitations have included assigning massively skewed financial values to shared music in the hopes of making even minor instances of file sharing into felonious acts. But get this: under the No Electronic Theft Act, file sharing can already be prosecuted as a criminal act if a very large number of files are shared, but the Department of Justice has yet to bring a single case. Apparently the RIAA and MPAA would like the government to ask 'how high,' when commanded to jump."