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Comment by joshAg | Hacker News Reader

personally, i think that anyone caught infringing should pay a fine equal to the cheapest retail price (over say, the past year) of the thing infringed(like for like, if you pirated the hd version of a movie, you have to buy the blu ray or hd dvd version. if you took a cam'ed version, you have to buy a movie ticket), iff they do not already own it.

yeah, there's a whole bunch of issues that would have to be ironed out and yes, there's no proof you would have even bought whatever you infringed on in the first place, but i feel like its a much saner starting point than what we have now.

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I must be misunderstanding your proposal, because on the face of it that seems to be so colossally ridiculous that I can't believe it is what you intended. Did you misstate your proposal?

There would be virtually no disincentive to infringement under that proposal. Why not just propose eliminating copyright?

The disincentive is having to pay for the thing you pirated. Not to mention attorney fees if you decide to fight the charge.

Case 1: you decide not to pirate. You pay retail price.

Case 2: you decide to pirate. You pay 0 with above a 99% chance. If you do get caught, you can pay the minimal retail price over the last year.

What exactly do you see as a disincentive for choosing #2, since case 2 beats case 1 in all cases?

Not that I agree with his proposal, but youre assuming that someone wouldn't pirate something that they weren't willing to pay money for. That almost certainly isn't true for a significant population.

Not having to deal with court, which could be a significant time and/or money drain. I agree that that isn't a huge disincentive, though. I think that money and effort would be better spent going after producers of infringing content instead of users or distributors.

I think that making it harder to come by the infringing content by going after the people who produce it is a better way to fight this problem than going after everyone who wants to use it.

That would encourage piracy. If you pirate a movie right when it comes out, that's $20 or so, but after a year, it gets closer to $10. So: pirate it now, pay next year's price in the worst case!

no, past year based on the time of infringement, not time of conviction, so if you pirate it June 25, 2011, you pay the cheapest price between June 26th, 2010 and June 25th 2011.

Either way, you're still left with the choice:

1) Pay $20 to see movie

2) Pirate movie and maybe have to pay $20 sometime later. Maybe.

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 curves.

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?

No, I'm just introducing this to give you an idea of why those bizarrely large fines exist in the first place. The economic theory is that law should incentivize people to act a certain way, and that if the odds of prosecution are low than the deterrent effect has to be made up on the sentencing side instead.

I don't really know what the 'right' policy is.

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