Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew H.
What are these "measurable costs" of personal safety and psychology? How much are they worth? At what price is investigating burglary too expensive? $1,000? $10,000?
In fact, these claims *are not* measurable at all. Which of course doesn't mean that they aren't real, it just points out that trying to add up monetary costs of enforcement vs. monetary costs of crime doesn't work.
And I would imagine people who have had their hard work stolen and offered for free might feel differently about the costs of piracy than someone who is not a victim.
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You're right, they're not easily measurable in
money (I'm not going to do psych 101 in this thread because that always gets nasty, but there are other systems of measurement than the almighty dollar), which is one of the reasons why there is wiggle room in terms of how, when, and how rigorously burglary is investigated besides simply "how much monetary value was lost?"
When my satellite dish was stolen from my front yard and I noticed in the middle of the day, a very different response was given by the police in their investigation (they took my information by phone and filed a report and that was that) than would have been given to the theft of same from the center of my living room in the middle of the night (where someone would hopefully have been sent out to ascertain my safety).
The fact that the
immaterial costs of home invasion are not easily reduced into a monetary quote does not mean that our legal system does not make a good faith attempt to parse subjective difference.
Copyright infringement seems to be one of the few places where our law does not attempt to reasonably match circumstance with severity. I wonder why that is? (SPOILER: Corporations.)