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Comment by zactato | Hacker News Reader

Often times I think lawsuit culture in the US is ridiculous, but maybe its justified in some cases. I'm astounded that he only got $180k from these lawsuits. I would expect a conviction like this to result in sums that would bankrupt the news paper. Even if dozens of other celebrities got the similar amounts it would be low. Also this article doesn't discuss the felony aspects of phone hacking. Was it not illgeal in the UK in the 90s?

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The BBC article on the subject mentioned somewhere around £100M of legal fees that were incurred in this case, so the damages are just the tip of the iceberg of what the newspaper company is on the hook for.

The UK legal system damage calculation actually requires some justification of the damages sustained by the claimant.

You mean "judgment", not "conviction".

Yes it’s important to state that the tabloids don’t have any convictions, just some highly questionable judgements.

I might have missed it, but I don't recall seeing anywhere that they identified a specific person who was doing the hacking so I'm not sure who they would criminally charge. I believe it was definitely illegal as they had a computer misuse act in 1990.

I would expect, in a just system, jail time for every "reporter" who did this, and every executive who approved of it.

To stop the business I would expect a minimum payout of the entire revenue (not profit) of every published article and paper, payable to in its entirety to each individual victim.

Instead none of the criminals are in jail, and the financial penalty was negligible compared to the income that came about from the crime.

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