I know those that have money to be made want to define piracy as exactly the same as theft as much as possible, but they are different. The difference being: when you steal something, you've deprived the owner of its use, whether that's actually using it, selling it to make money, etc. You steal a car from the dealership, that dealership can no longer sell it and has lost its property. You steal candy from a baby, that baby can no longer eat its candy. Make sense?
When you pirate something digitally, you deprive the owner of nothing; they still own the product, can still sell it, and have lost no money on the manufacturing of it. All you've 'deprived' them of is the assumed money you'd have paid for the product (or in this case, others would have paid if you're uploading it). This particular film still made hundreds of millions of dollars, despite being spread on the internet 'like wildfire'. And if the downloaders are anything like myself, they wouldn't have paid for it anyway. I don't; I find my movies on the 'net or get them from the library. And for those who like to go for the 'what if everybody did that and movies made no money to make more movies' argument, I've two rebuttals: A) That's a ridiculous presumption that will never come even close to happening and B) If it really did, I simply wouldn't watch movies. *shrug*
So with that all said, I think a year in prison is probably far too long, costs the taxpayers loads to keep him there, and will probably release him either useless to society or worse, a danger to society.
