Quote:
Originally Posted by markbot
The cost of enforcement is high, which is why there needs to be a very large fine to deter people from breaking the piracy law. If they only fined you the amount of economic harm you caused by stealing then everyone would pirate music...since the probability of getting caught is so low and if you do get caught you only get charged $1 per song. Thus they have to make the fines very steep to deter people from even thinking about pirating.
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But where's the relation? Using public transport without paying is quite similar - risk of being caught is about the same. But they will charge you 40 Euro (even if the ticket would have been 2 Euro) and if you are caught about 3 times in one year, you will be taken to court.
Of course you will have to be fined more than the cost of one song. But not several thousand times the cost of that song.
If you download a chart sampler and get fined 2000 Euro for each of the 18 songs, that might ruin you. And I guess in many cases, if they really wanted to deter people from piracy, making them doing social work for about 20 hours for each of the 18 songs would teach people and would help society. But of course that would not help the music industry in the short run, but maybe in the long run. (Then again, maybe not...)