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Sweet sanity: 75% of Americans say infringement fines should be under $100

arstechnica.com

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Re: Sweet sanity: 75% of Americans say infringement fines should be under $100

#41

Post by masterzora »

wvenable wrote: post #39
masterzora wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Goddammit, I knew someone was going to trot that line out. You see, I never said copyright infringement was shoplifting, or related to shoplifting, in any way. Just because someone uses the words "copyright" and "shoplifting" in the same post doesn't mean that they are saying copyright infringement is shoplifting. In my above post shoplifting was only an example. My post makes just as much as sense if I replace shopl…

Your argument demands an obviously immoral crime in order to work. You used shoplifting because everyone agrees that is immoral. You are begging the question. If you replaced shoplifting with cannabis possession then the line "If everyone started smoking pot, for example, it wouldn't indicate a problem with the laws that people are now criminals" isn't nearly true. In fact, you could argue that alcohol is legal, whil…

I disagree, for a number of reasons.

1. I don't agree with the statement "shoplifting is necessarily immoral" so it makes no sense for my own argument to hinge on such a fact. 2. My argument does not only work for an immoral crime; it is merely illustrated by an example of a law people think is not wrong. Shoplifting is merely a counterexample to the logic "If X is a law that a lot of people break then X is a bad law". I do not take this on to conclude that X is not a bad law which would be begging the question. 3. The original logic was begging the question, not I. The statement "If X is a law that a lot of people break then X is a bad law" only holds if X is already a priori a bad law (and, even then, it requires a few more statements to actually work).

Re: Sweet sanity: 75% of Americans say infringement fines should be under $100

#42

Post by wvenable »

masterzora wrote: post #41
wvenable wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument demands an obviously immoral crime in order to work. You used shoplifting because everyone agrees that is immoral. You are begging the question. If you replaced shoplifting with cannabis possession then the line "If everyone started smoking pot, for example, it wouldn't indicate a problem with the laws that people are now criminals" isn't nearly true. In fact, you could argue that alcohol is legal, whil…

I disagree, for a number of reasons. 1. I don't agree with the statement "shoplifting is necessarily immoral" so it makes no sense for my own argument to hinge on such a fact. 2. My argument does not only work for an immoral crime; it is merely illustrated by an example of a law people think is not wrong. Shoplifting is merely a counterexample to the logic "If X is a law that a lot of people break then X is a bad law…

> Shoplifting is merely a counterexample to the logic "If X is a law that a lot of people break then X is a bad law"

Perhaps if 90% of the population shoplifted, then any law against shoplifting would be bad. What is missing from the question is why the majority of the population would shoplift.

Re: Sweet sanity: 75% of Americans say infringement fines should be under $100

#43

Post by joshAg »

anigbrowl wrote: post #38
joshAg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but how is that different from now? aside from the cost of the fine, there really isn't, and I'd argue that the specter of a large fine is having little effect on piracy anyway.

A lot of the time, the size of the fine (or the prison sentence) is a function of the probability of being caught. As an example, let's say the economic gain of a single instance of movie piracy is $25, only 1% of all pirates are caught, and the cost of prosecuting someone is $1,000. So you charge a $250,000 fine, and that gets people's attention. Economists talk about indifference curves in place of regular price cu…

if that's the case, then are you suggesting the fines should be bigger, since 46% of the population doesn't seem to care about the current fines?

Re: Sweet sanity: 75% of Americans say infringement fines should be under $100

#44

Post by joshAg »

wmf wrote: post #33
joshAg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so then why not go after the people producing the infringing copies instad of the people using/buying them? weren't the original copyright laws created to prevent book publishers from printing a book that they didn't have a copyright to print and then selling them? producing infringing content, be it physical or digital, is a completely separate matter from using infringing content.

I was thinking of P2P file sharing, where regular people are the ones making the infringing copies. In P2P I think downloaders should have some responsibility since they request that copies be made. But it goes without saying that professional infringers should also be punished.

I would argue that distributing is a different issue from producing. In the p2P case you used, I see the producer as the person who prepares the data and/or originally seeds it. Everyone else is just a distributor.

"In P2P I think downloaders should have some responsibility since they request that copies be made."

why do you just limit it to P2P? Are people who buy pirated movies or pirated books guilty of the same crime?

Re: Sweet sanity: 75% of Americans say infringement fines should be under $100

#48

Post by masterzora »

wvenable wrote: post #42
masterzora wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, for a number of reasons. 1. I don't agree with the statement "shoplifting is necessarily immoral" so it makes no sense for my own argument to hinge on such a fact. 2. My argument does not only work for an immoral crime; it is merely illustrated by an example of a law people think is not wrong. Shoplifting is merely a counterexample to the logic "If X is a law that a lot of people break then X is a bad law…

> Shoplifting is merely a counterexample to the logic "If X is a law that a lot of people break then X is a bad law" Perhaps if 90% of the population shoplifted, then any law against shoplifting would be bad. What is missing from the question is why the majority of the population would shoplift.

That is a very valid line of reasoning and one that I would implore everyone to explore in such a situation. But, as you said, "perhaps". It does not directly follow that it is necessarily a bad law.

Re: Sweet sanity: 75% of Americans say infringement fines should be under $100

#49

Post by redthrowaway »

wmf wrote: post #20

While that is just plain common sense, there are still problems. If the fine is no great hardship and your chance of getting caught is less than 1%, it's rational to always infringe rather than pay. Raising the rate of enforcement would be hard since $100 doesn't cover the court costs and thus the industry would be losing money on every case — even ones they win.

As we know, however, people simply aren't the rational economic agents that the economic giants of yore held them to be. Most people would be happy to pay if the legitimate product was better and more convenient than the pirated version. It isn't.

See Gabe Newell's take on piracy. Valve's certainly done well in that respect.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLC_zZ5fqFk (piracy bit @1:05, whole interview is worth watching)

http://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-service-n...

Re: Sweet sanity: 75% of Americans say infringement fines should be under $100

#50

Post by nazgulnarsil »

anigbrowl wrote: post #32
ugh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

?

I am lampooning a widespread bias that exists on HN against 'soft' sciences.

bias implies people are unfairly disparaging the soft sciences. most of what I see seems pretty fair.
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