A pint of wine to a vintner is as a pippin to a costermonger
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File sharers sued in Blighty
MORE THAN 100 people who shared a pinball game online have been sued by the games maker.
Topware Interactive has already claimed the scalp of a woman who was fined £16,000 for illegally uploading the game Dream Pinball 3D on the Interweb.
Now it wants to get cash out of the 100 people suspected of illegally sharing computer game files over the internet who are to be sued for copyright infringement.
Speaking to The Times, David Gore, a partner at Davenport Lyons, which has been appointed to fight for Topware, said that illegal file-sharing was a serious issue resulting in millions of pounds of losses to copyright owners.
He said that as downloading speeds and internet penetration increase, this continues to be a worldwide problem across the media industry which increasingly relies on digital revenues.
In the past five years, 150 prosecutions have been brought against Brits who have illegally shared music over the internet. µ
L'Inq
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You always here of file "sharers" being sued. What about those downloading a file? Are they sued, too?

The fine seems stupidly high for sharing a pinball game! The penalties/fines are way too stiff! 

By the way, can anyone name some good file sharing sites for me?
http://valoom.com/valoom/Dream-Pinball-3D.vm?page=ProductDetail&productId=94978 <-- So £16,000 for a Game that costs ~$9. 

O_o 

I guess logic isn't their strong point... However, if I go on a murderous rampage, I look forward to the prospect of being sentenced to 4000+ life sentences. "Justice" system FTL.
that people would actually download a Pinball Game per se...
I would like to make a point of information after watching the interview between BBC news and the person representing the software company. He said the money ordered to be paid by the court was not a fine because criminal law was not broken, it was to cover costs. This article brands those who share files as criminals when in fact they are not (yet).
Whilst I think we must all accept that filesharing of copyright material is a civil wrong and should be punished, I think that there should be a detailed and realistic evaluation of damages conducted. 

£16,000 seems to be totally beyond any damage that this user could have actually inflicted on the company. I accept that the damages should be higher - perhaps significantly so than the value of the game, but three orders of magnitude seems too much.

If the logic is based on an evaluation of the total number of users that she sent a few bytes of the game too, then problems clearly ensue. On this logic, if the company were able to successfully sue every single person who pirated the game, they would yield a sum far in excess of the total damage to the company through loss of profits on individual sales, as multiple people upload to the same person etc.

In the UK we have three types of damage available - restitutionary, exemplary and aggravated. The latter types are generally only awarded in limited and specific circumstances. I don't think copyright infringement should be such a circumstance.