Our Constitution begin used against ourselves

Well if you have been following my posts you will notice that my comments are purely my own opinion and I write what's on top of my head.
The topics I write about are things that really make me mad, or disappointed, or things that make absolutely no common sense. Unfortunately it would seem that common sense is something that this Country and the rest of the world is missing a great deal of.
To quote a page from Thomas Paine's "Common Sense", a pamphlet of which I highly recommend reading, "A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom."

So how do I tie that in with what I am writing? Simple really. The latest buzz on the Internet is about a women from Minnesota who file shared nearly 1702 tracks, but only 24 were targeted. Now, I think that we all know that downloading copyrighted material is indeed against the law and know all about pirating. However, this is where common sense has flown the coop.
Jammie Thomas, who happens to be a 31 year mother, had been tried for a copyright infringement case back in 2007 and was charged with a total of $222,000 in fines. She appealed and now it's 2 years later and the fines were multiplied by nearly 8.5% for total of 1.92 million dollars.
Say What?
So for a case that targeted only 24 songs, she is being charged $80000. Yeah that's FIVE zeros.
Now I know that she may have been found guilty of infringement and should be punished, but for a total of $80000 a song?!?

There's very few people who even make that amount in span of four years, but assuming she could make $80000 in four years and didn't make any other payments on anything...including necessities such as rent, electricity, FOOD, KIDS... It would take her 96 years to pay it off.

Take some time to think that over. 96 years. In less time than that our world went from riding in horse and buggies to landing a man on the moon.
Can our society have evolved at such a rapid pace that we have forgotten common sense? Is it possible that in the day and age of instant satisfaction, that things that we knew were wrong have been overlooked and now have become such a common occurrence as to make it right?

This case definitely shows how twisted our courts have become. I use the term twisted, because I cannot definitively say corrupt, though I would highly suggest that term.
The fight over any form of produced media has become so convoluted that the courts have become agreeable to the whims of the media moguls. By moguls I am referring to recording companies, movie companies, and even book companies. These are the ones that stand to loose profit by having their products spread out into the ether that is the Internet. Since they have no way to stop a person from going to the store and buying a DVD or CD and then taking the songs or movies from that media and making it available for sharing to others from their own computers, they have sought to make examples out of those that they can catch doing it.

Problem is that by doing so, only angers those who already do it, and creates doubt in those who don't understand it, and righteous vigilance for those who have never done it and feel that those who have should be punished to the fullest extent possible.

Yet here we are, looking at this poor woman and her fate of 96 years of lining the pockets of....Who?

Either way, the war is on. The problem is the war on whom? Those who download against those who don't? How do you prove that someone has downloaded something that they do not already own?

I will end this one by saying that yeah, I too have downloaded songs and movies, and other material. Though here's where I want you to think. What if I already owned some of those works that I downloaded and couldn't find my originals for some reason? What would you think if that by downloading something that I went out and purchased it because I thought it was so good that I wanted a "Legal" copy of it, would that make the download still "illegal" since I purchased the right to play it how I wished? Then again, what would you think if I had some form of media that I have had for years and was starting to fade and generally become unusable? Do I then have to go back to the store and purchase it again? I though I already purchased the rights to use that media, why do I have to buy it again?
You can see that just in these questions alone that the courts have gone too far with this sentencing. It's just common sense.