Getting caught file sharing in Finland apparently carries far fewer financial repercussions than in the US. A man who was found sharing 164 albums' worth of music (768MB) and had illegally downloaded 1,850 tracks will be forced to pay fines of �3,000, or about US$4,230. Needless to say, that's a far cry from the penalties handed to American file sharers as of late.

A district court had ruled in February of 2008 that the unnamed man was guilty of various copyright violations and would have to fork over the cash for damages. During his appeal, the man argued that while he was aware the file sharing took place on his machine, it wasn't him who did it (was it the cat?). The appeals court in Helsinki, however, didn't buy this excuse and upheld the lower court's ruling.

�3,000 is a not-inconsiderable sum, but it's nothing compared to the $675,000—$22,500 per song—a Boston federal jury recently ordered Joel Tenenbaum to fork over to the RIAA for his piddly 30 songs. "I'm thankful that it wasn't much bigger, that it wasn't millions," Tenenbaum told Ars after the verdict was announced. Indeed, it could have been much worse; Tenenbaum could have been Jammie Thomas-Rasset with her $1.92 million fine for sharing 24 songs. Even the minimum damages in Thomas-Rasset's case would have run $18,000--more than four times the fine awarded in Finland for sharing exponentially more music.

Clearly, Finnish copyright law is not set up in a way to severely punish P2P users in the same way that it is in the US. In fact, the US Department of Justice recently argued that Thomas-Rasset's damages were not only perfectly constitutional, the law was set up for exactly this purpose—to deter other file sharers with massive, crippling damages so long as they're not "so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense and obviously unreasonable." Apparently, $1.92 million for sharing 24 songs fails to reach this threshold.