The woman was not a party to the contract, so the damages should not be the contractual damages but the real damages incurred by telstra. Remember that what she actually stole was bandwidth from telstra's network, the method by which she did it hardly matters. $10.000 is a way more reasonable figure, even taking a profit margin for telstra into account. Asking for 200k in damages is using RIAA math.

Even at 200k, there has to be a sense of scale. Essentially this decision destroys her life. Leeching a bunch of movies over the course of 4 months is hardly worth having your life destroyed over. The crime does not match the punishment.

Eropple: As is likely apparent, I am of the opinion that the thief should be forced to make good on her damages. They are not illusory damages; _someone_ will be made less than whole if the thief is not expected to provide compensation. And, no, I don't expect her to pay it back. But it is her obligation to make whole those she has wronged. Doing otherwise is neither reasonable nor fair.

Keyword: damages. Damages are not the same thing as missing out on an opportunity for profit through means of extortion.

Sure, she should pay for her damages caused to Telstra--they just need to give her an itemized receipt of expenses that she caused the company. This might include the amortized cost of hardware, maintenance, support staff, etc. However, these costs would certainly not include Telstra's insane profit margins. The purpose of most legal systems (Australia's too, I hope) is to maintain justice, not to serve as an alternative means of doing business. Somehow, I think Telstra might come up with a slightly smaller figure than 193k if required to itemize their damages.

The cost of data on cell-phone plans has most certainly been an issue in the past. There are simply too many cases to cite. My service provider in the UK limits my data to £40/month and texts me to let me know that it is is over £20 when abroad. The same thing can be done in every service provider in the EU as far as I know. I don't for a minute think that Australia's telcos wrote all their own backend software and I don't believe that this would be a high technical cost. Everything that I ever read about service plans in Oz say that the telcos there are particularly bastardly and this story resonantes with that quite precisely.

As part of the fine, the telco should be made good on damage accrued, i.e. the actual cost incurred. I certainly don't expect the court to allow them to profit on the crime. The contract was between the power company and the telco. Since the data was not used by the power company, I don't see that the contract is a valid point of reference at all. If I cut through a mains water pipe and spill 20,000 gallons of water, should I be charged at $10 per 200ml as I may be charged that somewhere else in the country? No, that's ridiculous - it's the same argument that record labels use to calculate 'damage' from file-sharers.

"As is likely apparent, I am of the opinion that the thief should be forced to make good on her damages. They are not illusory damages; _someone_ will be made less than whole if the thief is not expected to provide compensation."

I agree with you! But saying that the telco will be made less than whole if they aren't paid according to a contract that she didn't know about (which gives unfeasibly high weighting to data charges on a plan she didn't know about and which has no relation to the cost of the data transfer) is absurd.

"The unforeseen cost of her action is quite high. That's unfortunate. But, at the end of the day: if you commit a crime against another person or entity, you _are_ culpable for the results. If she did not want to be held responsible for the results of stealing another's property, she shouldn't have stolen it."

You're not charging her cost. You're charging her almost pure profit.