I think it depends on the case. Some of the leaders of those groups were basically using minors like myself as cover in the same way street gangs did, and doing a lot more than piracy. I think the folks that got hit for their actual fraud deserved it, but folks that just cracked and released games were unfairly targeted, very few profited from it, and I think a profit incentive is where I consider the crime to be more relevant, but I'm not a lawyer :)

Thanks for your comments. I've been pirating one way or another for a couple of decades. Always always saw the crackers as someone who did it for anything but money.

I think in general it is fair, but the very arbitrary 18/not-18 cutoff doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

I consider (myself) and most people I know to have been children at 18 and up to several years older than that. But it's not like people wear their "maturity" levels on their forehead, so the justice system has to make an arbitrary cutoff somewhere.

Not saying it's ideal, and individual circumstances have to be considered, but it's the best a crude system can do.

It is not just the justice system. After 18, you are given full citizen rights, but you also get the responsibilities that go with it. It is crude but fair.

There are exceptions, adults may have guardians and are effectively considered minors if they have mental problems for instance, and in some cases, children can be emancipated. But these are usually for extreme cases.

> I think in general it is fair, but the very arbitrary 18/not-18 cutoff doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

I saw some neuroscience research once that indicated you don't really mature until your early 20s.

That said, in some cultures you are considered an adult at about 14 (mostly hunter gatherer cultures that lack the insane complexity and fundamental weirdness that we have right now).

18 seems a good rough split-the-difference, but equally, in an ideal world it'd be 21. That said, most people wouldn't want to wait that long to do responsible adult activities like drive cars too fast around the place, vote for the people who do the best job of lying, and consume borderline-lethal quantities of alcohol ... :-)

I think the penalties of many laws weren’t made with fairness in mind but deterrence. The penalty goes up until crime rate comes down. It makes sense I guess, it’s not meant to be a trade - much less a fair one - but to stop/reduce crime.

Edit: That said, super heavy penalties for what are effectively (technically speaking) victimless crimes might not be good for society overall - might be better to allow the existing offence rate for that crime.

Yet , countries with the highest crime rates have the toughest punishments.

That is one of the clearest examples of both causal directions being plausible.

Depends on the crime and the punishment. I'd like to see the data you used to make this claim, since looking at many single cases it is certainly not clear that your claim is true.

Is that true? Crime across the Islamic world is remarkably low despite many countries being much more unstable. East-Asia, another region with generally harsh punishments is very safe. Like, even large Chinese cities with over ten million citizens and incomes far below what you see in the West have very low crime rates. Not to speak of more comparable countries lke Singapore.

The Islamic world is also notorious for how corrupt and non transparent it is, so getting accurate crime statistics beyond murder is going to be hard.

I mean it's not Narnia, you can ask people who live there. I've spent a lot of time in the MENA region. The countries of the Arabian peninsula who are comparably wealthy to the US are practically crime free. When I lived in Amman, the capital of Jordan when the population was a quarter(!) refugees, other than some petty theft in touristy places violent crime isn't really a thing. It was a safer place than a significant amount of American cities.

Of course you can, but that isn't necessarily a reliable source.

For instance in the former soviet and satellite states people felt like there was no crime, because of propaganda despite the fact that there was a huge amount of it.

"Discovered" crime rate goes down. Many folks actually got better at covering their tracks. The ones that didn't? yeah...

It’s still a factor in a potential offender’s mental calculation.

If the penalty is very high you will still think very hard about it even if you are good at evading detection.

Not really. It is the risk of getting caught that is a deterrent. If jaywalking was a capital offense but only one person in 300,000,000 a year got arrested and convicted for it, it wouldn't put a huge dent in jaywalking. Whereas a fine of say $75 and a 95% catch rate will pull jaywalking down to almost zero pretty quickly.

>I think the penalties of many laws weren’t made with fairness in mind but deterrence.

It's a very common misconception that laws prohibit a given action. Getting straight to the point, they don't and can't: Mere words on paper can't stop a swinging fist, per se. The pen is not mightier than the sword.

Rather, the point of laws is deterence by consequence. You can swing that fist, and no piece of legalese can stop you in your endeavour, but that piece of legalese can and will stipulate the consequences for swinging that fist. The hope being the consequences will convince you to not swing that fist. The pen is not mightier than the sword, but the gavel can be mightier than the sword.

Obligatory IANAL.

18 year olds are called young adults for a reason. I think it’s harsh to do it to 18-21ish year olds but over 25, maybe, but over 30 you know what you’re getting into. If you want to live that kind of life you have to except consequences. Ideology isn’t going to save you.

The same applies to scams, drug dealing, and other nefarious activities.

Then, nefarious is the key to judge.

no it's never fair to ruin lives and torture people ("the hole" during months is torture [0][1])

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitary_confinement_in_the_Un... [1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2020/02/united-state...

At least for the US, the life ruining part is the very low barrier access to background checks. Unlike the 1980's, where only huge employers could look into your past, now everyone can see everything you've ever been arrested for, even if you hadn't been convicted. It's very difficult to find any employment at all now, and even harder to find something that isn't minimum wage.

As I understand it, in other places, like Australia, employers don't do a background check exactly. They send the job description and the candidate info to a government agency that just answers back "yes" or "no". So that, for example, a hacking conviction might disqualify you for some jobs, but not ALL jobs. And you have some idea beforehand the kind of jobs you might have success passing for. The offense is very specifically weighed against the job description, and not just some HR person's delicate sensibilities.

To me, barring some extreme exceptions, it's not fair for punishment to extend beyond what you were sentenced to. There's also peripheral issues, like the plea bargain system, which gives prosecutors lots of leverage to "convict" people that are either innocent, or guilty of a lesser crime than they plea to.

Background check companies in the US scrape public access government websites, too. There’s a great chance that if you have the same name as someone listed on those websites and in the same geography you’re going to get false matches. An Evan Anderson close to my home was involved in a hit-skip car crash and it has come up in searches that have been done on me. Fortunately I was told about it and able to produce documentation that showed it was a different guy. I’m lucky.

I had a similar thing happen a few years ago when I bought my house. There was a guy the same age as me with the same name who had defaulted on his mortgage, and I had to sign a statement saying I wasn't him. The funny thing was, I looked up the house he abandoned, and it was basically identical to the house I was buying, down to the ornamental plum tree in the front yard. Presumably got built in the same wave of development in the 70s.

In the Netherlands when a job requires a background check - for example working in fintech - the employer is only permitted to request information directly related to the industry, e.g. financial crimes.

Unfortunately this does not avoid them using "3rd party" services but it is refreshing to know employers can't have a data trawl from the Government.

To add to the Australian landscape in this discussion: - only convictions are assessed against, not arrests.

- only relevant convictions are assessed against.

- most states expunge convictions after a certain number of years. Those convictions will not ever be considered in any job application ever, nor any court case. There are some small number of exceptions.

- your record is as tightly held as a state secret.

- there is no third party access to records beyond police and courts.

- there are no for-profit prisons with quotas. I don't believe there are many, if any, for profit prisons at all. They are looked down upon.

- the judiciary is well educated, career accomplished, is not voted in, and has an expectation of continued professional development.

- the judiciary tends to be more progressive than politicians, focusing on interventions and improvement rather than incarceration, where appropriate and possible.

Even under the ancient - and extreme - jurisprudence of 'an eye for an eye' then this is clearly not fair unless a cracker actually ruined people's lives.

> I'm sure it is a polemic terrain, but I really wonder if this is fair.

None of it's fair.

A servile government, with license to use force/incarceration, bent on defending putrid industrial system that hordes as much rights for itself as it can? That has extended copyright to 70 years, by crook & by hook? The whole thing is a sham, a disgrace to the human spirit, a scourge upon the earth.

The damage numbers are all made up. These people get punishments exceeding those of violent crimes. It's all deeply unfair & unjust & immoral. The system debases itself by being a mean, cruel, unjust bastard with no remorse to adults. It's pathetic & weak & servile to the worst aspects of society. Asshole Jack Valenti piece-of-shit RIAA lawyers & trashbag DRM systems are a heavy foot of injustice stomping down on the face of society, forever & ever. It's all woefully biased brutally against society & social possibility, for the greed of very few.

Alas there's seemingly next to no representation for the human cause. Patents & IP rights grow, & seemingly little curbs them, ever. The proprietarization of knowledge & intellect ever expands, a system unable unwilling & uninterested in checking the expansion of intellectual ownership. Fucking shit show man. Fucking awful. Fuck all this.

And, this unjust behaviour with intent, like lies do, hurts not like a mere blow, but like erosion of goodwill and trust of everyone, including unborn yet children of all paths of life.

(late edit: Valenti was an MPAA lawyer, a different head of the cerberus)

I never could wrap my head around long prison sentences. Even assuming a truly humane prison (not a reality in many places), which rehabilitates inmates well, it's hard to map a year, five years of prison on a crime that happened in one moment in time.

The way decisions, actions, arguments and repentance work in real life, as regularly seen with children, is usually on a short time frame. If you really need to punish someone - questionable in itself - maybe bring back the whip, but let people walk with a clean record the next day. If people can't be put back into society, they could be subsistence farmers with a netflix account in a fenced in plot of land or something. A significant change in scenery, and some forced lifestyle changes could be OK as part of a judgement

But putting humans behind bars? Nah...