Not strictly true. What can be lost as a consequence of the theft of the car is not necessarily confined to the value of the car or what the owner paid for it but also in the value attachable to the owner's use of it, so it is not necessarily a merely hard and fast matter of a specific number of pounds, dollars or whatever but something that would have to be assessed in a court of law (for example, its value to someone who uses the car only for the occasional shopping trip is obviously much less than its value to someone who depends upon it for business); likewise, damage arising from copyright theft is not a specific sum in each and every case but an amount that would have to be determined by a court in accordance with the best available evidence submitted to it. Once these facts are duly appreciated, the differences in both effect and application are seen as much smaller than you might initially have assumed to be the case.
But surely you don't actually believe that's how the numbers are calculated. Do you think it's possible for someone to make a case that a single $15 CD on a store shelf was worth, to that store, a million dollars? Of course not, you could never make that claim. But for some reason, you can if it's pirated.
Also, as far as the car thing is concerned, it doesn't really matter how much you used the car. Even if you didn't use it very much, you would still have to replace the car. Do you have a source on that, because I have a lot of trouble believing a court would decide that the exact same car is worth significantly more to one person than another when either way, the person would have to replace the car.
It is vital to make and fully understand a specific distinction between (a) the law that defines what constitutes theft, piracy and other forms of misappropriation and (b) the manner in which each individual court applies such law. This, however, is no different to the situation with any other law, since one court might, for example, sentence a murderer to 10 years and another in the same country to 20 years when the crime committed is precisely the same. Whilst I accept that the application of the laws of copyright when infringement cases come to court may well vary substantially from case to case and court to court, the same is true in respect of the application of any other laws when cases are brought before a court. I do not agree that the punishment for pirating an album should be the same as for physically stealing a single copy of one because, in the latter case, the owner of the CD has been deprived only of the amount that he/she paid for it (unless, of course, it is no longer replaceable) whereas, in the former, the copyright owner of the CD's contents has been deprived of royalties whose value is dependent upon the extent to which the CD will have been subjected to unauthorised distribution. Whilst there have indeed been some cases in which the punishment for copyright infringement might appear to have been disproportionate to the crime committed, this can also be the case in other areas of the law when a court decides to exercise its rights to make an example of the miscreant in a bid to discourage future cases from coming to court; this is a familiar phenomenon of long standing in legal circles.
It's not a matter of it varying from case to case. Yes, I understand in two separate trials for identical murder cases, one might get 10 years, the other 20. But that's not what this is. This isn't a difference of a factor of 2, it's a difference of a factor of thousands. And it's not random. It's always pirates get ridiculous charges, shoplifters get very little.
As for the value of the contents of the album being recopied, surely that would fall under the next person. If I make a make a copy of a $15 album and give it to my friend, and my friend takes it, we are both charged with equal rates by that logic. So if they could actually charge every single person that has pirated an album with the amount they charge the people they catch, they would make millions of times more than the cost of every single person buying the album, because they'd be double charging, and not only that, but charging at already ridiculous rates.
Also, these ridiculous rates have also been applied to people who only downloaded music but didn't upload, meaning there is no redistribution whatsoever. So that argument falls out the window right there.
And no, it's not a right to make an example of someone. It's abuse of power, and it's a direct violation of the US 8th amendment.
There are some who seek the abolition of all intellectual property rights and the entitlements to royalties that are enshrined within them; whilst I am not suggesting that you hold such a view, what would you say about those who do and about what you would expect to happen if all such rights were indeed abolished? How would you anticipate the creativity currently covered by intellectual property legislation be rewarded in such a climate?
I'm not in support of completely doing away with these laws. To do so would most likely hurt cultural growth significantly because all artists would have to do their work as a pastime instead of as a job. However, I think the laws are far too far in the other direction, and as a result, have stifled creativity in many ways just as much as a lack of any laws would.
If theoretically, they were abolished, creativity would be stifled the most in cases where big business is involved, eg pop stars, but less in the cases of musicians who actually enjoy creating music. The vast majority of musicians I admire outside of classical music began playing music with no hopes of making it big, and when they did make it big, still have very little interest in the fame except that it allows their art to be given to the world. Of course, the money is nice too, but most of them were not expecting to make any money when they began their bands. Also, bands make most of their money from concerts and merch, an experience and an object, two things that cannot be pirated.
Film, I believe, is where we'd see the biggest change if the laws were done away with. Movies have astronomical budgets and it would be difficult for them to make a profit with piracy available as it is. Movie theaters would be the only place they could make their money. I'm not sure about the numbers, but I don't think box office sales alone are enough to pay for most films' budgets.
Innovation in technology would continue about as normal, I think. Because the patents refer to specific tiny parts of a product, no individual part is enough to do much of anything. Nobody buys a phone because it has a chip fused to a wire, or whatever stupid obvious idea people are trying to patent these days.
Medicine, this would be the most catastrophic. Biotech companies pour tons of money into research into medicine that will most likely never amount to anything. As a result, they have to have very high prices on the medicine that actually
does amount to something. Surprisingly, this is the one people are most upset about. But the reality is, if the moment they released their medicine, anyone could copy it, they would have absolutely no motivation to develop new medicine since they would just be pouring millions of dollars down the drain and seeing absolutely nothing in return.
What would I have happen? I would have laws be less strict, as I mentioned above, but mostly, what I would like to see happen is something I believe is already happening and has nothing to do with laws. I made a rather lengthy post above about what is wrong with the music industry and how it is obsolete in the modern era and how I see the situation changing. If you're interested, go read it, otherwise, here's the TL;DR: Record industry is dying as a result of $.99 songs and piracy. Not the way I would have it die, but I'm glad it's dying either way. Artists are self-promoting and self-releasing albums, keeping close to 100% of profits for themselves, and have complete rights to their own music, instead of record companies owning it.
I see value in intellectual property laws and think we'd be screwed if they ceased to exist. But in their current state, they are not working.
Topic: What do you guys think of pirating?