Quote:
Originally Posted by Ramen
There are two main areas: Illegal vs legal (dependent on local laws, special cases) and heavy crime vs civil offense.
For the second area, I'd like to see the following added: - Severity of offense and fitting punishment. The idea is to gauge where to place the offense and then going by that to choose a fitting punishment.
- Worse than murder?
- Worse than physical assault? With a weapon?
- Worse than speeding in a residential area? School area?
- Prison sentence or money only? (barring the absurd US money awarding system)
- Worse than online-predators? (re: internet access)
- Worse than cracking?
- Worse than shop-lifting?
- Worse than physical stealing? Break-in?
- Worse than armed robbery?
- Worse than syndicate crime?
- etc
- What are acceptable counter-measures to copyright infringment?
- Cost to society? (Big Brother/1984)
- Effectiveness?
- Efficiency? Overkill?
- Alternate approach to prohibition? (Taxes, ads, ...)
- etc
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I think the first section could be shortened a bit and possibly split into two parts, as you've combined severity with punishment in one case. If I were really worried about statistical validity, I'd have to rank the choices and make sure most people thought they were listed in descending order of severity to use "worse than" wording. I might use "as bad as" instead.
I'm not sure what you're suggesting with the second section, at least in terms of a survey, though I agree these are issues worth discussing.