The Bible talks about convicted thieves paying back multiples of what they stole.

I think we already have enough moral high-horse-ism going on in this thread. The Bible also talks about selling your daughter into slavery in other countries, and stoning people for heresy, so maybe let's just not bring another confused moralistic argument into it. If you wanted to bring up the idea of treble punitive damages, just go ahead and do so directly.

Personally, I think this whole thread is a lot of hullabaloo over very little. Let's look at the real costs:

• Some unimaginative twit got some extra XP
  maybe this will help the twit get a local job as a perl guru; the rest of perlmonks keeps saying this mythical number is not important, but apparently it really chaps our collective hides
• Someone else's question or poem got posted twice
  Man, the roof will cave in if somebody doesn't get their proper attribution, right? And it was a COMPLETE waste of time for everyone to expend some brain energy trying to comprehend the question and think of a solution and post their thoughts in response. Well, except now somebody else with a similar problem has more grist for their google search mill.

Some people just need to release a little steam every now and then, and look at social issues with a bit of detachment and perspective.

In the end, I do commend liverpole for his detective work, it can be a challenge and a bit of extra legwork. I also think it's right that the twits have been exposed and confronted. My all-time highest-ranked node is when I do a bit of searching around for the "evil" perpetrated by Wassercrats. Big whup. I kinda wish it weren't, since I would like to be remembered more for, oh, I dunno, the Perl I have contributed. Let's not lose sight and go back to mob psychology about the episode here.