>This happens all the time, not just with copyright law, so doesn't that seem to imply that the penalty for the larger party is insufficient? Not necessarily.

>This happens all the time, not just with copyright law, so doesn't that seem to imply that the penalty for the larger party is insufficient? Not necessarily. With copyright law there's practically no penalty, and I think that should be changed as I said elsewhere in the thread. But the optimal penalty level should be the amount of damages, plus some amount of punitive to account for the probability of a case getting that far, if it's low. If a big company decides that it's worth paying that amount in expectation in a standard tort case, then it is, in fact, efficient to allow that to happen and to have them compensate the other side in the instances where it does happen. At least when we're talking civilly and not criminally, where different concerns apply.