Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
What do you think would justify prosecution? If 2 files is not enough, is 10? is 100? 1000? Where would you draw the line?
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I am not a judge, police officer, nor member of any legislative body. It is not my job to decide where exactly those lines should be, and my livelihood doesn't depend on copyright enforcement.
I can say what I'd prefer, what, as a citizen, I think is a reasonable use of my tax moneys. I think that criminal prosecution should be based on harm--either harm to a specific victim, or societal harm wherein a victim isn't identifiable, but the actions cause damage to all of us if left unmanaged. (Environmental laws come into play here; there's no specific victim if I burn toxic materials in front of my house, but it makes the whole neighborhood less safe.)
And I think the effort of prosecution and the penalties should be based on the harm done. So: no three-year prison sentences for a fistfight in which the end result was bruises, and no spending dozens of hours of cop-time trying to find out who was in the fight. No three-year-investigations into a single case of petty theft or minor mayhem (smashing a car window).
Sorting out *how much harm occurs* is one of the key issues that the anti-piracy activists are refusing to address. They throw around quotes about how many millions of dollars the industry (whatever industry) has lost in the last X years, but they don't talk about specifics.
I can say that driving is unsafe, freeways are dangerous, and point to statistics about auto accidents, and insist that car manufacturers are involved in a "death industry" and should be stopped--but if I can't show the damage as being so much more than the amount of good caused by cars, I'll be ignored. And yet, the anti-piracy industry seems to claim that the "damage" caused by p2p or cloud-storage sites is so immense that the *value* of those technologies is irrelevant... and also, unlike people insisting on safety features for cars, being able to prove specific damage is irrelevant.
If you found someone who'd downloaded & used one of your programs without buying it, what penalty would you like them to face? How big a fine, how much jail time? Would your preferences change if you knew their life circumstances? (If they were a college student living in poverty, vs a CEO who just likes shortcuts?) If you overheard a conversation in a pub that led you to believe one of the people had downloaded some of your books, how would you like that traced--how much effort should which authorities spend to find the person?
And do you want them spending that much effort going after *every* claim of copyright infringement?