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Comment by nagrom | Hacker News Reader

So, why don't they internally cap the data available to a card of that type? This is a technical solution that would take what, 10 minutes? 20 minutes? Rather than allowing someone to run up $193k of overage charges (all the while cackling manically and rubbing their hands), why not behave in a reasonable fashion?

In effect, this charge is a life sentence to a person. You don't expect the lady to pay this back anytime in the next 30 years, do you? Bear in mind that she needs to fulfill her regular needs with a criminal record hanging over her head. And since the fine is administered by a court, I don't imagine that it will be defaultable.

If an individual did this to someone, there's no doubt that it would be looked-upon differently. It's done by a corporation with no physical body and people defend it.

The goal of a society should, in general, be to construct a reasonable, fair place for people to live. This woman did not get treated fairly.

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Sure, a technical solution can and, probably, will be looked at at this point. That said, your blithe assumption that it's twenty minutes of work does belie an ignorance of how this stuff works. And you're castigating them for not putting one in place when it hasn't been, to the best of my knowledge, a significant issue in the past. Had there been a previous rash of SIM card thefts, something very well may have been done in the past.

In other words, I am reasonably certain that you have decided on your conclusion and are working backwards from there (see your nonsense about "cackling maniacally"). I am rather certain that this is an unacceptable way of looking at business or law.

As for whether the fine is equitable--well, let's see:

* The overage charges were part of a legal contract and agreed to by both consenting parties.

* An third-party agent--the thief--unlawfully incurred charges on behalf of the power company (charges that, one can presume, would have been an acceptable, if regrettable, cost of doing business had they been incurred, for example, due to a software fault in their power meters).

What do you think should happen? Do you think the telco should not be paid according to the agreement for their account? Should the power company pay it despite the SIM card against which the charges were levied being stolen? Or should the fine be levied against the thief who committed the wrong?

As is likely apparent, I am of the opinion that the thief should be forced to make good on her damages. They are not illusory damages; _someone_ will be made less than whole if the thief is not expected to provide compensation. And, no, I don't expect her to pay it back. But it is her obligation to make whole those she has wronged. Doing otherwise is neither reasonable nor fair.

The unforeseen cost of her action is quite high. That's unfortunate. But, at the end of the day: if you commit a crime against another person or entity, you _are_ culpable for the results. If she did not want to be held responsible for the results of stealing another's property, she shouldn't have stolen it.

Eropple: As is likely apparent, I am of the opinion that the thief should be forced to make good on her damages. They are not illusory damages; _someone_ will be made less than whole if the thief is not expected to provide compensation. And, no, I don't expect her to pay it back. But it is her obligation to make whole those she has wronged. Doing otherwise is neither reasonable nor fair.

Keyword: damages. Damages are not the same thing as missing out on an opportunity for profit through means of extortion.

Sure, she should pay for her damages caused to Telstra--they just need to give her an itemized receipt of expenses that she caused the company. This might include the amortized cost of hardware, maintenance, support staff, etc. However, these costs would certainly not include Telstra's insane profit margins. The purpose of most legal systems (Australia's too, I hope) is to maintain justice, not to serve as an alternative means of doing business. Somehow, I think Telstra might come up with a slightly smaller figure than 193k if required to itemize their damages.

These are damages, plus punitive damages.

The woman was not a party to the contract, so the damages should not be the contractual damages but the real damages incurred by telstra. Remember that what she actually stole was bandwidth from telstra's network, the method by which she did it hardly matters. $10.000 is a way more reasonable figure, even taking a profit margin for telstra into account. Asking for 200k in damages is using RIAA math.

Even at 200k, there has to be a sense of scale. Essentially this decision destroys her life. Leeching a bunch of movies over the course of 4 months is hardly worth having your life destroyed over. The crime does not match the punishment.

How exactly do you calculate what a profit margin for Telstra is? This I'm honestly curious about, as it seems to come off as rather kneejerk, more "this is what I think you _deserve_" than "this is what was agreed to as part of the contract that governed the use of this device."

Personally, I find the market value of the service - i.e., the stated rates of the contract - to be a reasonable starting point. If one finds this to be too high, perhaps one should not have stolen things in the first place.

She didn't know the "market value of the service." She knew the market value of consumer 3G, assuredly, but I wouldn't expect anyone who wasn't a telecom contract negotiator to know what power companies would be paying. Thus, your last sentence is meaningless: I suspect that she would indeed have found this "too high" if she had known, but rather would have been willing to pay a consumer-rated fine.

Say I steal a car. This car has a child in the back seat, but I am not aware of that. In fact, I go on being unaware of this for the whole time I am in possession of the car (and the child is fine, somehow.) When I am caught, do I receive the punishment for kidnapping, or simply for grand theft auto?

In the U.S.? Kidnapping, almost assuredly. Probably depends on the prosecutor. As it should - you kidnapped a kid. Doesn't matter if you knew he was in the backseat; you did it.

In Australia? I haven't the faintest idea.

The cost of data on cell-phone plans has most certainly been an issue in the past. There are simply too many cases to cite. My service provider in the UK limits my data to £40/month and texts me to let me know that it is is over £20 when abroad. The same thing can be done in every service provider in the EU as far as I know. I don't for a minute think that Australia's telcos wrote all their own backend software and I don't believe that this would be a high technical cost. Everything that I ever read about service plans in Oz say that the telcos there are particularly bastardly and this story resonantes with that quite precisely.

As part of the fine, the telco should be made good on damage accrued, i.e. the actual cost incurred. I certainly don't expect the court to allow them to profit on the crime. The contract was between the power company and the telco. Since the data was not used by the power company, I don't see that the contract is a valid point of reference at all. If I cut through a mains water pipe and spill 20,000 gallons of water, should I be charged at $10 per 200ml as I may be charged that somewhere else in the country? No, that's ridiculous - it's the same argument that record labels use to calculate 'damage' from file-sharers.

"As is likely apparent, I am of the opinion that the thief should be forced to make good on her damages. They are not illusory damages; _someone_ will be made less than whole if the thief is not expected to provide compensation."

I agree with you! But saying that the telco will be made less than whole if they aren't paid according to a contract that she didn't know about (which gives unfeasibly high weighting to data charges on a plan she didn't know about and which has no relation to the cost of the data transfer) is absurd.

"The unforeseen cost of her action is quite high. That's unfortunate. But, at the end of the day: if you commit a crime against another person or entity, you _are_ culpable for the results. If she did not want to be held responsible for the results of stealing another's property, she shouldn't have stolen it."

You're not charging her cost. You're charging her almost pure profit.

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