I happen to live in Romania, which (still) has lower income. I'm also freelancing right now and not very hard, so my income this year is lower still.
So I could pretty much go up to your driveway, take your car, and if caught pay back $500 or less. Because of course this is what I can afford to pay.
No, there is a much simpler way. She should pay to the order of magnitude of the loss she caused RIAA. A bit more actually, for deterrence. Which could be something like $1 for each song downloaded and $1 for an estimate of each song uploaded from her computer. This is not the real damage, because of course not every song downloaded would have been bought, but as an order of magnitude it's pretty much ok. You don't need to go counting incomes to make it right.
The consequences for car theft are the same for everyone. If you go to prison, you lose x months of your life time. If Bill Gates goes to prison, he loses the same amount of time. Expressed in money, he's paying a few million dollars in lost productivity whilst you may only lose the equivalent of a few thousand dollars. I think that's fair.
Sorry, I should probably have said "hit your car with a sledgehammer", then the comparison would have been better. It's still confusing because of the whole virtual vs real goods - and I just slipped in a "theft" frame of mind even if it's not really correct at all. RIAA PR at work, I guess.
And if you're going down the "justice not blind" route, why even stop at income? "Your honour, I may have just killed a man but let me assure you that my high school years were very traumatic. I was bullied and got bad grades."
My point is that the law treats all individuals equally. Your link was interesting, but nowhere therein did I see any mention of this basic tenet changing when we move from a criminal to a civil case. Justice is portrayed as a blind person for a reason; and it doesn't matter an iota if you're talking about civil or criminal law.
And, in any case, the comment I was replying to used the example of car theft, which manifestly would involve a criminal case. My analogy is perfectly valid; it is you who ought be emabarrassed!
So I could pretty much go up to your driveway, take your car, and if caught pay back $500 or less. Because of course this is what I can afford to pay.
No, there is a much simpler way. She should pay to the order of magnitude of the loss she caused RIAA. A bit more actually, for deterrence. Which could be something like $1 for each song downloaded and $1 for an estimate of each song uploaded from her computer. This is not the real damage, because of course not every song downloaded would have been bought, but as an order of magnitude it's pretty much ok. You don't need to go counting incomes to make it right.