Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
Making copyright infringement a criminal offence is exactly what the RIAA and MPAA want! That way they won't have to pay for the prosecutions, and can disclaim responsibility of the fines and other punishments.
One of the problems is that the statutory damages were set assuming that the infringer was doing the infringing commercially and on a large scale. They are completely disproportionate for small-scale non-commercial infringement.
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Making it a criminal case will fix that. Can you imagine the outcry the first time someone gets a bigger fine for downloading an mp3 than someone gets for mugging an old lady or something else that people actually care about? At worst the downloader would get a small fine they could pay off monthly, and most likely just a warning for a first offence.
In the UK there has been a few attempts to prosecute people for this sort of thing, but they tried to call it "fraud" instead of copyright infringement and obviously they failed to get a conviction for that reason.