This post is mainly is response to the people who claim that police should not go after pirates because there are worse crimes in the world. Lawyers can take it as far as they want (within the limits of the law of course), but police have to have at least some enforcement of their laws.

Your cited article seems like a good example of the rule of law. Lawyers take take it to far and break the law, and they are brought in for ethics violations, which may lead them to be disbarred. Seems like good rule of law to me. The system may be in need of balance, but this seems like a good example of the system working pretty well.

@guest

That would be a disproportionate punishment. For individual filesharers, this would also be a disproportionate punishment, although it may be acceptable for large scale distributors. The cops should write up and fine people who they catch breaking traffic laws, just like they should write up and fine people who infringe on copyrights. Until it’s legal, the police have a responsibility to prosecute.

Kill all rich men? Really? If you had been born and raised in a sewer, without contact from the human race, and then one day you sneaked up to our world (covered in poo, of course), and your first instinct was to repeatedly bash the nearest object with your fists, and that object happened to be a keyboard, and the result was your comment… I would not be surprised.

If you read the article, they don’t say anywhere that they attempted to contact ICE at any point in time. They do link to an article written by someone else who did contact ICE, who explains the prank. TF never even tried. That’s not professional. They only published a retraction because they saw someone else who had contacted ICE saying that ICE had nothing to do with it. I give them no credit for that. If they had taken it upon themselves to contact ICE, I’d be happy. They didn’t, so they get no professionalism points.