Karl Wagenfuehr, who is not a lawyer, has compared the penalties for "stealing by downloading" and "stealing by shoplifting", and found that the former carried much stiffer penalty. He gives an example of stealing the entire season of the TV show Alias, and shows that the maximum penalty one can get via "stealing by downloading" is $3'400'000 plus lawyer fees and cost, whereas the maximum penalty one can get via "stealing by shoplifting" is $100'000.

Cory Doctorow comments that crime penalties are a measure of how bad society thinks a crime is. "The punishment should suit the crime -- if we instituted the death-penalty for public spitting, and didn't ratchet up murder to at least the same penalty, it would be as though we were saying, as a society, 'Murder is trivial when compared to gobbing on the sidewalk.'"