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Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
Draconian punishments are indeed popular with the California electorate..
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Our legislature has a history of being very fond of extremely lax punishments. Note that three strikes was passed by initiative, in the aftermath of the brutal rape and murder of a 12 year old girl by a man with dozens of criminal convicions, many of them felonies, dating back nearly 30 years. There's a reason Californians are fond of draconian punishments. If you don't want to die in prison, don't commit felonies.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
I wonder what sort of punishment the average Californian would suggest for the third offense of illegally downloading a bestseller. Not life, but I'll bet a lot of Californians would see illegally downloading a book as a more serious matter than illegally downloading a song*, and would be OK with prison. Suggesting that the judgment of the general public justifies policy is a slippery slope when you don't want draconian punishment.
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* How's that? Mostly I am thinking that if no one you know does it, it sounds bad right that. And most people don't know a book pirate. A lesser factor might be that it sounds worse to rip off an author than a celebrity.
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Every Californian I know would consider that without a commercial purpose, and without a value over a couple of orders of magnitude more than the cost of a book, copyright violation is a civil offense, not a crime.
And most reasonable people
do want draconian punishments for heinous crimes, like raping and murdering 12 year old girls after decades of violent criminal history.
Californians do have a history of responding to stupid and corrupt government going too far in one direction by going too far in the other direcion by way of the initiative system. It's our way of getting the monkey's attention in the legislature. Ignoring the problem certainly doesn't solve it.