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If you took away all the parts that make her an unsympathetic defendant (blaming it on the kids, destroying evidence, lying about actions under oath), would you
by defen 16y ago
If you took away all the parts that make her an unsympathetic defendant (blaming it on the kids, destroying evidence, lying about actions under oath), would you still support this outcome? After all, the exact same thing could have happened to her if she hadn't done those things, but still refused to settle. In other words, do you support making an example of a guilty person by punishing him in a way that far exceeds the damage that he caused? If so, in what situations is it justifiable? Would $150,000 be an appropriate fine for single graffiti tag?
- tzs 16y agoWell, if I perpetrated graffiti, got caught, and the building owner said to pay him essentially the cost of painting over the graffiti and he'd consider the matter settled--otherwise he'd take me to court, and then I found out that the anti-graffiti law had been written with major offenders who cause massive damage in mind, and so the minimum I'd be out if it went to court is $150k...guess what? I'd freaking settle, and write to my legislators suggesting that the law needed to be tweaked to allow for small time graffiti, where a reasonable penalty would be the cost of clean up plus enough to sting enough to discourage repeat offending.
- defen 16y agoWell that I agree with. I don't think nearly as many people would have a problem with this if the statutory penalty were in the $1,000 per song range. But $1.5 million dollars just seems absurd. One problem with my graffiti analogy is that there's a precise way to measure the actual harm to the victim from graffiti, whereas with file sharing it's very nebulous and almost entirely centered around punishment as opposed to restitution.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]