A purpose of fines & other punishment is to .deter
Very broadly speaking, two things go in to deterrence: (perceived) Chance of getting caught * (perceived) Cost of getting caught = deterence. To improve deterrence you need to increase one of these. There obviously isn't enough deterrence to stop illegal downloading/distribution. Higher fines are an easier option then more fines.
That would be a pretty good argument except for this woman's particular circumstances. She's a mother of 4 children and works at an Indian reservation. So chances are, she has very little disposable income, and wouldn't buy the songs otherwise. So what message is the RIAA trying to send by going after her? That they are ruthless bastards? They should go after people who can pay for the stuff.
They want people to either pay or not listen. Not listen & pay if you can. They want music to be the same as milk or shoes. You either buy it, or you don't have it.
They want the laws, which are on their side, to be enforced to the point where the great majority of people do not break them. That means harsher penalties, more penalties or both.
They don't want to send the message that they are ruthless bastards, necessarily. They want to send the message that the it is not in people's best interests to download free stuff. Doing this by making it risky in the way that speeding past a cop shop is risky (very likely to be caught), is too hard. So they opt for making it like not having fire insurance a one-in-a-lot chance of being ruined.
I don't agree with the law, with the ruling or their morals. I think that this kind of enforcement is immoral. Deterence is not the only thing behind enforcement of laws. Punishment/deterrence should not be concentrated in one person. It's like saving money on police patrols by catching only 1/4 of burglars we currently do but shooting them to make up the difference.
I'm just arguing that the RIAA are rational. Her capacity to pay doesn't interest them.
They're using her to send a message to people who can pay, the message being something like "if you steal our stuff, we'll make things very expensive for you".
The "excessive" penalty and the resulting publicity helps get that message out.
I'm not arguing that it's good to do that, but that is the idea. (Yes, whether it is good and whether it is effective are different questions that may have different answers.)
> That would be a pretty good argument except for this woman's particular circumstances.
Should her circumstances also be taken into account if she robs a bank?
Justice is personified as being blind for a reason. You break the law, you pay the price. There's no: you broke the law, but factor X and Y should increase our leniency. That's a recipe for chaos I'm afraid.
There's no: you broke the law, but factor X and Y should increase our leniency.
Actually you're completely wrong. The legal system is there to look at factors X and Y and determine if and how they should affect the ensuing penalties or awards.
Definitely. However, I don't see how financially destroying someone's life such that they might never recover from it is in any way a reasonable way to deal with a one-off copyright infringement on 2 dozen songs. My understanding is that she wasn't selling them or passing them off as her own.
ignoring the fine (it is excesive) the person I was replying to was inferring the RIAA should have chased her because she isn't well off. Which sounds like a poor argument to me :)
She did need a lesson - not one quite so extreme but still.
That's absolutely right. So you want to deter everyone according to the severity of the "crime", right? Why do you want to deter poor people more than rich people? The damage is the same. If you punish one person with life long poverty and the other with a small reduction of pocket money, you won't achieve what you want. I don't want wealthy people speeding just because they can afford it as their speeding is just as dangerous as everyone elses.
It comes down to the concept of cost that you are using. What is cost? Dollars? I don't think so. It's how much of your living time you have to spend in order to pay for something. That's what fines should be related to.
Finland, Norway issue speeding tickets based on a percentage of income, see e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3477285.stm where a €170,000 was issued in 2004. I don't know of any studies of the effects of that. But there's certainly a nice Schadenfreude effect when you invariably read about slightly rich guy in Finland getting a giant fine in just about every news publication in the world.
(If they made that the law in e.g. US I wonder if some sheriff's department would get the idea to have policemen exclusively to follow around wealthy drivers -- in the style of drug property seizures and overtuned red-light cameras)
I like that law. To avoid the kind of "social profiling" you describe you'd have to make sure that police don't have any incentive to make as much money as possible. Also, I suspect that rich people might sue and thus deter police from doing things like that.
And another point. I also want to deter companies from frivolous law suits. If big corp sues a small startup for patent infringement and that startup's existence is on the line, I want to be the suitor's existence to be on the line as well. Equals risks, that's what civil law suits require, otherwise it's a market and not justice.
Very broadly speaking, two things go in to deterrence: (perceived) Chance of getting caught * (perceived) Cost of getting caught = deterence. To improve deterrence you need to increase one of these. There obviously isn't enough deterrence to stop illegal downloading/distribution. Higher fines are an easier option then more fines.