Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Any fine has to be considerably greater than the retail value of the goods obtained in order to act as a deterrent.
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I don't know about research on the civil side, but the evidence from the criminal side is that
certainty of punishment is much more important than severity. At any given level of certainty, increased severity helps deterrence a bit. But a tiny sanction can be imposed much more frequently than a big one, and with less chance of being overturned, and so can be more effective.
One possibility is to book a case, but not use it. Send the offender a letter presenting the strong evidence, but say (I hope sincerely) that we don't want to have to use it. However, if a pattern indicative of heavy downloading continues, we'll need to use the strong booked evidence. This would set up the kind of high certainty that can deter.
Also, if the amount you could be sued for is $40,000, that's a big incentive to become expert in encrypting your internet traffic. But if the penalty will be just $10, or a temporary internet slow-down, maybe it's not worth the trouble to develop that expertise. Instead, someone may choose to drastically reduce their downloading, hoping that is enough to avoid the small penalty.
The previous paragraph is based on trying to reduce illegal downloading rather than eliminate it. But more than that is IMHO unrealistic.
Quote:
Originally Posted by doctorow
It is the usual fallacy of RIAA and others who throw around imaginatively high numbers of supposed damage, while completely ignoring the fact that those who committed the criminal act of downloading something are often not the ones who would have purchased the item to begin with.
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Perhaps people are talking past each other because of having fundamentally different ideas on what makes for right and wrong. In my view, copyright, especially if the creators are still alive, gives them a moral right to decide if they want to give their stuff away. Whether there was financial damage is often impossible to know, and is irrelevant to wrongness.