In other words the court should not be only there to fix harm, but also to teach a lesson.
That's not what they're intended for. If all harms are efficiently deterred and compensated, it's only our base animal instincts that suggest there's something more that needs to happen. Civilisation, of which the legal system is a subset, is there precisely to tame our baser instincts.
Just to head off a foreseen objection: the correct amount of deterrence isn't to prevent a harm from ever happening (trivial, just bankrupt everyone who does any harm), but to provide a negative incentive on the perpetrator equal to the harm they will cause by doing some act. If the chances of someone being caught are low, then it's proper to multiply the eventual fine by the inverse of the probability, which creates the required incentive. If someone showed malice, then that's evidence that the incentives were insufficient, and a reason to increase the fine. But none of that, from a legal theory perspective, is to punish them or bring fairness - it's to create the appropriate economic incentives.
Read up on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient_breach for an example of this kind of thinking.
Punitive damages are a longstanding feature of civil law.
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.
A class action on behalf of content creators who are being abused combined with federal antitrust action might persuade it otherwise - especially if actions were brought simultaneously in the US and EU.
Someone tried suing Amazon over basically this theory and failed, same lawyer that I'm using in an antitrust case against tp-link for false infringement notices to Amazon.
See https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6169804/mordys-applianc...
And https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16562550/thimes-solutio... for my tp-link case, I've mentioned it on HN several times. I have a list of similar cases, some of them use antitrust theories, but it's almost always against the brand/rights owner and not against the platform.
Personally I think the liability should be on the party submitting the complaint, not the platform. As long as the platform is permitted to reinstate the content after an appeal (which is what the DMCA counternotice safe harbor is about), that's enough. The DMCA framework works well [0], and I would like if it was extended to patents and trademark/counterfeit accusations as well.
[0] with the caveat that the standard for liability for false claims should be lowered, and they should be treated as per se antitrust violations.
Google has been trying to hide behind the "Oh dear our algorithm is experimental and fallible and sometimes it gets things wrong and that's very sad" defence, and it's obviously nonsense. You don't even need explicit evidence of collusion to understand why.
The "failure" of the algorithm has been happening for years now, and Google appears to have made no effort to correct the failure. But the real tell is that these "failures" disproportionately benefit large corporations which Google will have some relationship with - as opposed to small content creators who are disposable.
Ultimately, these actions are not mandated by law. So what's the legal - never mind moral - justification for them?
Sorry what.. are you arguing against the concept of criminal law?
Because western states have happened to have chosen over the centuries to protect the general welfare by justifying its methods as "teaching people lessons" is neither explicitly permitted in any charter so far as I know (admittedly a small subset) nor necessarily desirable. I think it's not a n unfair argument that over the few centuries of modern history you can point to several incidents, sampled across many different nation-states, where particularly disgusting injustice has been promulgated under the cover of "teaching lessons", as if the general cover of "greater good" weren't bad enough.
As CS lewis quipped, "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."