87 Months in Prison for Copyright Infringement: Fair Sentence or Utter Madness?

He wasn't just a large-scale commercial software pirate (discarding the always-ludicrous damage estimates the DoJ comes up with, he plead guilty to taking over a quarter of a million dollars from his clients). He was also a fugitive: he fled the country and hid in Pakistan; he was apprehended trying to return to the US.

That could not have helped his sentence.

Of course, that detail is the lede of most of the stories I found about Naveed Sheikh when I saw this on HN, but nowhere to be found in this story. As usual, TorrentFreak doesn't want to inform you about current events; what they want is to whip up rageviews, which is how they make money.

As ever, profiting (and in this case, presumably profiting wildly) from copyright infringement is usually enough to earn the ire of most decent people. "Information wants to be free" is one thing; profiting entirely parasitically from the work of others is another.