Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
That's kind of tough on the person who's lost the $3, don't you think? Aren't you effectively saying "you're losing money due to crime, but the law's going to abandon you"?
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If it takes $5 to track down a thief who's stolen $3 or $30 or $300, it's worth the cost to society to enact that law. If it costs $5 to track down every $3 worth of theft, it's not.
Of course, there are non-financial aspects; it's harder to set a fixed value on "feeling of personal security" and "willingness to carry money in public." If the state decides it's not worth finding your thief, you may stop carrying money--and all the local businesses suffer thereby. So it's in their interests to arrange to catch thieves, even if the cost of catching one is more than the money retrieved, most of the time.
So to enact a new law against [undesirable behavior], in this case, "piracy," the state needs to balance both the cost of the enforcement against the value of the return--how much more money will be spent if the piracy is prevented--and also consider how being strict or permissive will affect other activities.
If piracy is prevented by making the internet almost unusable, there won't be any gains from that. If Google must filter its searches by gov't demand, and this takes so much time & effort that its search engine becomes a pay-per-month service, the media companies won't gain from that. (Won't happen, of course; nobody wants Google's search engine behind a paywall.)
If students can no longer use the internet in libraries because a legal ID is required, and many people under 18 don't have one, the media companies might be happy but parents will not, and we won't be better off because of the new rules.
Making a law to prevent widespread, easy-to-commit illegal acts is complicated; it takes considering how many other people will be inconvenienced or downright harmed* by enforcement, and what effect that will have on the marketplace and society as a whole. And for that to take place, first there'd have to be an evaluation of the actual damages being done--and the media companies that are pushing for new laws are fighting tooth and claw to avoid any such evaluation.
They promote the idea that "piracy is bad, ergo any measures taken against it are good." Certainly, car theft is bad, and we'd have less car thefts if cars came with expensive equipment that requires a blood test which takes five minutes to ID the registered driver before the car will start... but we wouldn't be better off with such a measure. And saying so doesn't mean a person is in favor of car thefts.
* In the case of false accusations, mistaken identity, and so on.