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Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

I could argue (though don't really agree) that Andrus Nomm was a threat in the same way as Bernie Madoff. Neither was running around shooting people or starting fires. The same could be said for elderly war criminals.

There are situations in which it is right to send people to prison without them posing an active and dangerous threat. Whether this in one of those situations is more arguable.

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It would be really hard to argue that. Bernie Madoff was more like someone who robs banks, or e.g. ATMs (i.e. no danger to human lives, but money stolen). Megaupload didn't steal anyone's money, and while people did get content without paying for it, it's not very clear that they would pay for it if it wasn't available for free.

One undermined the public's confidence in the strength, fairness and security of financial institutions, the other made some rich people not any richer.

Megaupload was not your plausible deniability-sort of file upload service.

There is loads of evidence of the Megaupload team getting a bunch of copyrighted content and putting it up there. The team themselves. Can't really hide behind safe harbor with that.

If I were handing out burned DVDs of movies to people, I'd probably get arrested too (even if selling DVD burning equipment would be fine).

I agree. There really is no question that the folks working on MegaUpload knew that it would be used predominantly for illegally sharing copyrighted material. The questions are whether that should be illegal, what it means to do something in one country that's accessible but illegal in another, and how it should be punishable.

As I see it, employees of Megaupload must have known the risks they were running, so we can't say it's unfair to punish them. We should be actively pushing for legal framework regarding the sharing of copyrighted material, instead of just whining about the punishment meted out to those who took advantage of the current chaos.

That has nothing to do with my post. I just said that the damage Madoff did was an order of magnitude worse than what Mega did.

And Madoff received a prison sentence that was greater by an order of magnitude. Nomm got 1 year, Madoff got 150.

That's revenge, not socially progressive justice. I'm sure there is something better that could have been done with BM to help society other than put him in prison. For instance serving elderly people tea and biscuits or such

Well, the type of punishment is also a question of policy - I guess jail is the most common one. Btw, would you trust him around your (grand-)parents after all the fraud he's committed?

> There are situations in which it is right to send people to prison without them posing an active and dangerous threat

Do these situations exist only when we consider punishment a valid reason for imprisonment? Don't get me wrong; Bernie Madoff being free and enjoying life wouldn't sit right with me, but you have to wonder if locking people away as retribution really benefits tax-paying, law-abiding citizens.

>but you have to wonder if locking people away as retribution really benefits tax-paying, law-abiding citizens

Well, we should also consider if it's benefiting or humane to the people we lock away.

It's not like "tax-paying, law-abiding citizens" are more human than those that end up in jail.

As I understood it from my very limited studies, there are five reasons for incarcerating somebody: retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, incapacitation, and restorative justice.

If somebody is judged by their peers to have broken the laws approved by their peers, then they receive the punishment deemed suitable by their peers.

As I say, my knowledge of this comes from a brief college-level history about 20 years ago, so may be outdated, naive or just completely wrong.

But I think in the case of Bernie Madoff, incarcerating him was justified to deter similar financial frauds in the future. I suspect (and judging by some of the comments on this page, it might have worked) locking up Andrus Nomm is an attempt to discourage programmers from working for firms like MegaUpload.

Without a doubt, unless we're making the argument that punishment benefits the punished somehow. I should probably have made mention of rehabilitation to contrast.

You also have to consider the cost to society locking someone away incurs. You not only remove an able-bodied worker and offload his costs of living to society, you also have to factor in the overhead of maintaining and staffing the necessary facilities.

But sadly putting people behind bars is considered a solution in itself in the US, rather than a means to an end.

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