Obligatory Jon Stewart paraphrase: you do realize that, in the original quote, "they came" is actually an euphanism for "round up and kill," right?

You have my word that when the government starts rounding up and mass-murdering 4chan users, I'll speak up.

This is, for the first time, a Slashdot article that I am incredibly qualified to comment upon. I graduated from high school last year, and when I graduated, I was named one of the top 40 science students in the nation through the Intel Science Talent Search, where I met leaders of industry, Intel's top scientists, education policymakers, and President Obama himself at the White House.

I can speak to the fact that these science "competitions," especially the major ones (ISEF, STS, JSHS, Siemens), are basically misnamed. They aren't so much competitions as they are organizations who try to determine which students have best displayed future potential for their fields. It's not like a one-on-one "science off" where two students try to one-up one another with their mastery of arcane mathematical facts; it's a bunch of students, all of whom are amazing in their own right, versus panels of distinguished judges. You don't "compete" beyond the fact that an organization can't give an award to everyone - in fact, some of my best friends are the ones that I met through these competitions.

Also, I want to add my two cents about why I do science as an undergraduate, now, at Stanford. I fancy myself a pretty smart guy, and yet I'm going into this field that just about every commenter here is poo-pooing. Why? Frankly, because I'm young and idealistic. I think everyone is overestimating the impact that money has on how high school students plan their lives - it's only one of a great number of motivators for us. Certainly, I know I spew platitudes because I've never been poor, but I've seen people who came from poverty do incredible things at science fairs at the high school and college level, and who continue to be interested in basic chemistry or physics. I know from direct experience that young students were inspired when they saw the picture of me with Obama, circulated in my state newspaper and widely across my K-12 school.

I haven't done the calculations to figure out what I'm going to earn when I do science, and in my experience, neither have most high school students today. I think that a lot of commentators are speaking down from their post-college clouds and trying to say that money motivates adults, so obviously it will motivate students. That's true, but there's so much that you're missing by reducing motivation to money only. What's "cool" is a huge deal in high school; what role models inspire you is another; and the opportunity to meet Obama - OBAMA - is probably as much of a motivation as all the money in the world.

I don't understand this. You would have a corporation stop all its business due to a ruling about, say, WGA? That is one of the most crackpot things I have ever heard.

Let's say that an individual person would get 11 years for installing spyware on my computer (that's what the "spam king" got for spamming my inbox). Do you honestly believe that Microsoft should have to stop business, with all its assets frozen, for 11 years? You do realize that means that Microsoft would not be able to live up to its support contracts, would not be able to sell new copies of Windows, and would not be able to pay its 90,000 employees during this 11 year time. It is NOT the same thing as locking someone up!

When you take action against a corporation, you aren't incarcerating one person who is proven to be a menace to society; you are ruining tens of thousands of innocent people's lives, breaking literally millions of contracts, stopping R&D in a major way (Microsoft Labs is actually a major research force in the industry - say what you will about their patent restrictions), and probably completely destabilizing the world's computer infrastructure - after all, Microsoft can't patch Windows if they aren't in business. How you think this is a good idea simply baffles me. I'm not a Microsoft defender by any means; I use Linux and Mac because I frankly don't like the company, but really, you have to realize how many millions of people the company touches, how many hospitals and schools and other completely innocent organizations rely on their work. Freezing assets is not a first-line defense against corporate wrongdoing, and frankly, it's not even a last-line defense in my book. It's a totally disproportional response to pretty much any case at all, Bernie Madoff excluded. It's signing the death warrant of the entire company, and probably signing the death warrants of many of its innocent employees.

As other posters have said, the "corporate umbrella" does not apply to intentional fraud on the part of the managers or directors of a company.

Actually, reading through the actual jury ruling (sorry, scribd is the best I can find), jury question #12 explicitly asks:

the jury answered "no" for all three parties, including the service provider. They considered the DMCA and rejected that defense.

It looks to me like this is a lot of people getting upset over nothing; to the best I can tell (without access to other court documents), the host blatantly ignored DMCA-like steps to mitigate the situation, acted willfully to support the copyright infringers, and got financial compensation for doing so. Justice was served.