Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
What should the penalty be? It should be in line with other such "non-payment" offences, I think. I was on the subway recently, and noticed a sign saying that you'd be fined 50x the price of a ticket if you were found not to have one. That's probably the right order of magnitude for such an offence. Fine a few dozen times the commercial value of the downloaded material. That would be my personal preference.
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That's what most of us think... should be "the price of the item, and enough more that there's a solid incentive to buy it legitimately next time, and to convince people considering the same thing that it's not worth it."
Fines of $50,000 per downloaded file just convince the public that the law is so ridiculous that it can be ignored. Especially since what counts as a "violation" includes actions many of us think are entirely reasonable--like DRM-stripping, or sharing an ebook with one's spouse or children.
But the penalty amount is just part of the issue--the other part is prosecution. When should it be considered to cross the line from civil to criminal, requiring gov't action, and how much effort should they spend tracking down which offenses?
I'm not against prosecuting copyright violations, neither at the civil or criminal level. I *am* against loss of privacy and liberty in order to go after violations that, for the most part, I'm not seeing the damage from.
I hope the whole Dotcom case gets thrown out, and that legislative forces get the message that they *can* go after copyright infringement--but they're just as bound to follow the law as they are in murder cases. That if they can't be bothered to get their facts straight and comply with judges' requirements, they don't get to prosecute, because that's how the law works.
And there is *no* reason I should accept, "the feds don't need to follow the technicalities of the law" at the same time they're preaching "well, we can't pin down how much damage is actually done by this filesharing, but they damn well broke the law and we're going after them for that." If their argument for spending all the time and money on these cases is "that's the LAW, and if the law is unjust, change it, but for now, we enforce the LAW"--they need to be just as firm about following the law on their side of the activities.