the american legal system

i jab at americans quite often here. they've earned it.

the most recent jab comes from the news. a poor (not literally, but poor in the victim sense) lady was fined $80,000 dollars for each song she downloaded illegally off the internet. for 24 songs, she's being fined $1.9 million dollars. to put things in perspective, a legal download is 99 cents a pop. for $1.9 million dollars you can buy around 2 million songs. also, you can buy several exotic cars, a few houses, or live comfortably on the interest for a few years. but that's not my point. my point is this:

in an unrelated piece of tragic news, you must have heard of the crash of air france's flight 447, of which there were no survivors (even the wreckage hasn't been found). air france has been accused of not being sympathetic with the relatives of the families and decided to pay an initial $24,000 to each family. that's 30% of the value of a single song. in other words, a 32-year-old in minnesota has 3 times more incentive not to download songs than air france has to protect its passengers from death. even the warsaw convention, which governs the personal injury limit to airlines, sets that limit to around $27,000.

$80,000 per song. way to go.