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> No one walking out of a Walmart with a stack of Richard Marx discs under his arm would be subject to such penalties. Penalties are higher because piracy is e
by username3 16y ago
> No one walking out of a Walmart with a stack of Richard Marx discs under his arm would be subject to such penalties.
Penalties are higher because piracy is easier to get away with?
- tptacek 16y agoWhat does how easy something is to get away with have to do with anything? Technology makes certain kinds of securities fraud massively easier to get away with. Should we decriminalize them now?
- paulgb 16y agoI can't speak for username3, but the way I read his/her comment suggested the opposite. If a crime is very easy to get away with (like piracy), the penalties have to be higher to discourage people from doing it.
- wmf 16y agoIt's a bad analogy to begin with. The RIAA is suing people for distributing music, not downloading it. Theoretically, these defendants could have distributed hundreds of copies of each song (although it's more likely they distributed zero copies).
- wildjim 16y agoWorse, the arguments seem to be based on "potential" rather than "fact". It seems to me non-"internet" piracy cases are largely based on hard evidence, and when they try to include evidence for "potential to do" it's also based on some other hard-evidence, e.g. a large-scale CD-copying machine, a pallet of 100,000 blanks. If you'd been convicted before for the same offence, then you're more likely to get more jail-time for repeat offending, i.e. a predilection for continuing that proven behaviour, but the punishment meted-out for copyright offences seems massively, unbelievably out-of-scale. Probably because they're often compensation paid to the copyright owner, rather than punishment for breaking the law.