The Simpsons, one of the 2007 movies which brought impressive revenues for Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, got a 21-year-old Australian into trouble after he pirated the movie and attempted to distribute it on the web. Jose Duarte was first arrested in August and today he was finally fined $888 which is a pretty small penalty when we think that some other pirates spend years in jail for similar actions. In fact, the Australian's activities were not so malicious, because all he did was to record the blockbuster on his mobile phone and uploading it on the web. Imagine that the movie provided quite a low quality but the copyright infringement was still done so the 21-year-old man has to pay for his actions.

According to the Associated Press, Prosecutor Chuan Ng informed that the pirated version of The Simpsons Movie was downloaded only 3,213 times before it was removed from the Internet. The video was available only for several hours but the users were pretty interested in it. Jose Duarte pleaded guilty on Tuesday for distributing pirated material and received an additional fine of 1,000 Australian dollars.

"It would appear that this young man had the sophistication of a dead fish. I have sat and spent time with this young man, ... and I am quite satisfied that he had no idea what he was doing," Ken Stewart, Jose Duarte's lawyer, said for the Associated Press.

As I said, the fine is pretty low in comparison with other penalties received by the users or by companies that infringed somebody's copyright. Just look at YouTube, the Google online video sharing service which recorded thousands of copyright infringement complaints, all of them accusing the technology for publishing pirated copies of their creations.

A long time ago, a user nicknamed ECOtotal, uploaded pirated clips of "24" and published them on YouTube even before the movie was officially released in the US. At that time, Fox requested private details from YouTube to identify the user and punish him for copyright infringement and distribution of pirated content.