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Originally Posted by SleepyBob
Even if I am 100% guaranteed to be caught and fined, it's still cheaper for me to pirate my books, if the fine is only a fraction of the purchase price. That kind of fine gives no incentive for people not to pirate as a matter of course.
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If you were %100 guaranteed to be caught you would only download what you wanted and were willing to pay for. In fact, with 100% possibility of getting caught there would be no difference between a legitimate purchase and an illegitimate download, since you are inevitably going to pay either way. If there was absolute guarantee of getting caught, you would not download thousands of files that you only have a modicum of interest in, unless you somehow value only marginally valuable digital goods over your ability to pay for rent, food, housing, retirement, hardware, relationships, transportation, vacations, insurance, and so on.
Your hypothetical simply furthers the point that it is not the size of the fine that is the most important determinant of deterrence, but the possibility of getting caught and punished. i highlighted the absurbidity of the notion that only a fine greater than the retail value of the goods downloaded can be a deterrent or that a person would be profitting in a post a few pages back, which no has been able to rebut
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By this logic, someone could lose their home, their car, their retirement, all their discretionary income, but would be "profiting" if the value of the fine didn't exceed the retail value of the information illegally obtained.
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Really, what this thread demonstrates is that shockingly many people don't even have even an intuitive or common sense understanding of opportunity cost and diminishing returns, that what someone values at zero they might not value at any price above that, or that even if someone values something above zero, they still are not willing or able to sacrifice other goods for it. At zero a person could value almost any book enough to at least download it. But even at .99 cents for 100$ books they might not even be valuable enough for them to spend money on what they could or need to spend on something else.
It is one thing to argue that it is only fair that someone pay for the the goods they downloaded. That is a legitimate argument which i have no bones with. But when someone goes from "it is only fair that" to asserting a downloader "profits" from having to pay for goods that they only value at zero as long as they don't pay retail price then we are entering into a realm of irrationality highlighted in the quote above.