Recently the FBI rounded up the heads of the largest music copyright infringement ring in the world and taken them into custody. They are known to have distributed over 25,000 albums, most of them before their release to the public. Each member is being charged with a single count of ‘conspiracy to commit copyright infringement’ that carries a maximum penalty of $250,000 USD fine and up to 5 years in jail. That’s $10 per album – the price you’d pay on the iTunes Music Store – or about $1/song, assuming a typical album has 10 songs. Now for the fun part. If they had been popped by RIAA and MediaSentry, and had been found guilty on the sliding scale that is civil copyright law, they would have been paying $22,500 USD per song. That’s $5.6 billion USD in damages.

The lesson learned here? It’s better to run a criminal conspiracy to with intent to commit copyright fraud than it is to use Kazaa or Limewire. If you get caught, the punishment is orders of magnitude less. Please, Recording Industry Association of America, die in a fire.