Distributed Computing Lawsuit Settled
from the bum-deal dept
Last summer we posted about David McOwen being threatened with a huge fine and jail time for setting up distributed.net software on computers at DeKalb college. He has now settled the case. He gets one year of probation, a $2,100 fine, 80 hours of "non-computer related" community service, and none of it shows up on his record. Of course, many people think that he would have won his court case entirely, and he doesn't deserve any criminal punishment (he doesn't). But, court cases take time, energy, and money - and you never know how they'll turn out. In the meantime, he's lost his job because of publicity around the lawsuit. If what he did was a crime, I know a ton of people who could be charged with similar things.
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Punishment
He knowingly took computational cycles that belonged to someone else without asking. In many countries that is theft of services. I've worked in many places were if you want the spare cycles, all you have to do is ask.
This guy is the human equivilant of a resource wasting worm. I hope his fine was exactly calculated as per the number of cycles used as
to the cost of a machine over it's 3 year life
time. I figure roughly he should pay back .0000173 cents for each cycle stolen, and yes
it should go on his record as a petty theft.
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