I just got a chance to read that article.
<< McOwen suspects the state settled because its case was falling apart. The $415,000 restitution was derived from the claim it cost 59 cents per second for bandwidth, times the amount of data sent from the RC5-64 client. "We're in the wrong business. I'm going to change my profession if they are making that kind of money," joked Joyner.
In the discovery phase, he found out how they came up with such a figure. The school took its entire $18.6 million annual IT budget, which covered everything from T1 lines to maintenance contracts to employee salaries, and divided it by the number of seconds in one year. It made the 59 cents for bandwidth look ludicrous.
Also in discovery, it was learned that in a six-month period, the 524 RC5-64 clients running at DeKalb sent a grand total of 704 kilobytes of data, around half the capacity of a floppy disk. The school had claimed in its original complaint that the RC5-64 clients degraded performance not only in the whole school, but around the state. >>
Well, to restate the obvious, and underline what we have been saying, it's apparent that the school and the Georgia AG's office HAD NO CLUE as to what they were doing, and how to go about it. They were relying on their strong arm, bullying, and intimidation techniques to work on a "geek". They had NO case. They will still probably use this as an example of how they are "tough" on cyber-crime.
*sheesh*
[rant mode off]