The entertainment industry believes there need to be new laws and punishments to protect their intellectual property. Entertainment ‘content theft’ is a crime and those who commit it should be punished. Current punishments for analogous ‘real-world’ crimes should be used to scale penalties that the entertainment industry can claim on infractors. Downloading a movie or song is akin to not paying rent, not feeding a parking meter, or jumping a turnstile on the subway. These crimes all have punishments attached. Andrew Bridges, a copyright lawyer, crunched the numbers and noted,
“If we take copyright law’s maximum-penalty-to-price ratio as applied to an illegal download, and apply that same penalty-to-price ratio to the New York subway, the maximum penalty for jumping that turnstile and avoiding the $2.50 fare would be $375,000 instead of $100.”
These numbers make it clear the entertainment industry is seeking punishments that far exceed the crime. 
I love the quote that you included in your post, it paints the perfect picture of what entrainment industry is trying to do.
ReplyDeleteI had never thought of it in those terms. That is quite a penalty that they are trying to enforce. Thanks for sharing that quote.
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