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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  1. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 21 Jan 2002 @ 7:08am

    Punishment

    How can you say he doesn't deserve to be punished?

    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.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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