People had almost exactly the same complaints about sentencing during the Sun Devil era of computer security; hackers were just exploring, hadn't intended any harm, and surely hadn't cost millions in damages. Public opinion settled in the other direction.
It seems much more likely to me that it provokes outrage to penalize highly because it's widespread and laws against it are mostly unenforced. And if that's the case, the analogy with computer hacking is invalid, because only a tiny minority of Americans would even know how to crack a computer.
Other widespread, generally unpenalized acts-for-which-you-might-be-penalized-by-the-courts (hereafter "acts")[1] provoke outrage when they are enforced with heavy penalties, Other easy-to-commit acts are heavily penalized and provoke no outrage. Therefore, it seems to me your analogy is suspect.
1) Better than "deeds"? You threw scare quotes on that word for some reason. I'd rather just call them crimes, but I don't want to provoke an argument over the word.
1. Get out of the house
2. Remove an actual product from a physical store, so the loss will be physically noticed
3. Defeat the RFID tags on the merchandise (most stuff worth shoplifting is tagged)
4. Walk past the store greeters without looking suspicious (something an average mostly-honest person would struggle with)
And we all know public opinion is never wrong.
It's really easy to share copyrighted files. It's easier, in fact, than downloading them. Both are so easy people overconsume. They download more music than they will ever hear - music they would never buy if they had to incur the cost.
More interestingly, how do plaintifs prove the sharer allowed the copy of the whole file? It's easy to imagine any downloader got the files from a number of different sources, each effectively sharing a tiny part of the file.
Thinking about it... Couldn't the protocols not advertise the parts of the file the sharer has, but, instead, receive a list of wanted parts from the downloader and respond with some, but perhaps not every, part of the file? What would happen to these lawsuits if nobody ever shared the whole file with anyone?
This relates to an idea I had: create a "fair use" file sharing network, by posting carefully-chosen 10 to 30 second "review" clips of songs on various web sites, then distribute a tool (script, program, whatever) that can locate the pieces and reassemble them.
For that to work what you would need is an annotation protocol reviewers would adhere to (hash, start-end) that could allow a downloader to locate the missing pieces. The locator tool would also have to be designed in such a way not to ruin the fair-use defense too.
This is not a trivial problem and, I must add, we are talking about a tool designed to violate copyright laws and to get away with it.
It would be much wiser to direct our efforts towards a more rational copyright system instead of trying to break the law.
People are outraged by this for a perfectly good reason. The penalty seems too large for the deed. This is not simply a case of those-entitled-kids thinking that they deserve to be able to steal music for free; this is a reasonable response where someone is being bankrupted for the moral equivalent of speeding.