William Adams's beating of his child Hillary Adams (made infamous by covert videotaping and posting on Youtube) could have been prevented if non-commercial copying had remained legal (as it has been through most of history).
As Judge Adams was likely aware, statutory damages for even non-commercial copyright infringement can be as much as $150,000 per song. There are few other actions comparable to file-sharing that a child could do to seriously, completely destroy a family as much. This is far worse than playing with fire and burning down the house -- even after that, you would still have the land the house was built on.
The fear of such damages (later affirmed in initial decisions to court cases) might have prompted the beating and its severity.
Years ago, I had an insight that copyright law was deeply wrong, and that fixing it would tremendous impact on society far beyond the obvious realm of copyright.
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