We read lots about federal agencies involvement in corporate troubles.
Where is the threshold of involvement? What makes corporation eligible for such a care?
Likewise with your startup's trade secrets.
But Microsoft or Goldman Sachs will get the attention of the FBI right quick when they complain. You would get some attention if you showed up dead with a gunshot wound instead of just missing a teevee -- if you're white, anyway. But if you show up dead in a car crash, the cops won't care once they scrape you up so traffic can flow. Police have a complicated set of social criteria they use to decide what to care about. Mostly they correspond to social priorities.
Not for nothing, but a significantly less serious crime than a B&E got an undercover police officer stationed in an apartment behind my house. I'm sure you're right that the average TV theft isn't going to make a federal case, but part of the reason for that is that most people don't make that much of a fuss over having their TV stolen.
Microsoft isn't putting any trade secrets into Windows that are worth millions of dollars; they publish the object code to 500 million PCs, each one of which can decompile it all. A few hardware manufacturers may have contracts demanding M'soft protect their trade secrets -- the secret usually being all the patents they infringe -- by keeping driver BLOBs obscure, but I doubt that's at issue here.
I don't think there will be tens of millions in fines, either. Maybe thousands and a few months in jail.
Tens of millions (billions, really) may be all the salaries of employees that make M'soft a big name company that can call up the FBI and USA to get attention. But that's what I said before. It's a matter of social priorities.
Also, congrats that your local police cared and had the resources to look out for your neighbor. Most departments don't have that level of resources. We had to work for months to get ours to pay that much attention to a convenience store that had some armed robberies in a residential neighborhood.
Incidentally, I tried to make a fuss over a stolen teevee and nice camera once. Didn't help.
What you said is similar to the MPAA commercials. It even has your stolen television analogy in it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZm8vNHBSU I hope you only watched entertainment that you paid for. Otherwise you broke the law.
How much control does the state and corporations have over people?
The harsher the penalties are for trivial things, like copying data, the more of a stranglehold corporations & the state have over people. IMO, copying data is a copyright issue, not a criminal matter. Freedom should not be taken away. In recent history, there have been a flood of laws that take away freedom from the American people to enforce corporate "property". If you open your eyes, you can see the direction that this leads.
To take your jaywalking example further, if jaywalking involves life sentences, it gives the police the option to selectively enforce the rules. Most people have jaywalked in their lifetime. The police & criminal justice system can arrest & prosecute people they don't like & leave the people they do like alone.
The RIAA tried to make downloading movies a criminal matter. They lobbied hard. It was only the vigilance of the world's citizens that prevented mass arrests.
We see this happening with the war on drugs. The war on drugs is used to oppress African Americans and for the profit of the prison & police industrial complex. Companies that build & operate prisons make a lot of money from taxpayers because there are a lot of prisoners for things that should not be crimes. The war on drugs was never about the health & safety of Americans. That is just slick marketing.