He's talking about criminal case penalties. Aren't all the big $ penalties from civil court damages? Jammie Thomas's was.

The US family median net worth is <$100k, so what does it matter if it's $150k or $150m? Isn't the net effect bankruptcy either way?

Criminal penalties are far worse for individuals: similar effective monetary penalties PLUS possible loss of rights and freedoms.

Yes, you're right. This article doesn't make any sense. Any one of the actions it contrasts with file sharing could easily get you sued in civil court for seven figures, after you paid fines and did prison time.

Not to mention the pretentious tone of the article, it's clear the author has both an axe to grind and absolutely no insight to offer. He just has an opinion with little intelligent arguments to back it up.

> First, let's look at the fines in the only two music piracy trials that have taken place to date.

Damages, not fines. Fines are a punishment, damages are to correct damage done to the "victim". There's a difference and it's important.

> I'm going to equate one year of prison with a $50,233 salary which is the median household income as of 2007.

This is ridiculous. Freedom's price is not the opportunity cost associated with it. He mentions it in passing but brushes it off as something to make light of. Hand-waving the central part of your argument is just dumb.

Of course, there's also the ridiculous fallacy of "what they do is wrong toooooooooo". Didn't work with my mother, doesn't work with me. This article is a waste of time.

His point is that the sum total of all the things they do to you when you do a "serious crime" is less than the sum of the things they do to you if you pirate music. This doesn't seem like a common sense notion of justice. Even if you don't like the details of his treatment of the subject, his basic point stands.

(Of course, it might be rational to deliberately punish music pirates more than murderers, if there's a very low chance of catching a pirate and a good chance of catching a murderer, but this doesn't square with most people's sense of justice.)

Startup Idea!

An extremely small proportion of file-sharers get stuck with massive fines. Illegal file-sharing insurance?

Brilliant! So, instead of going bankrupt, you arrange to have the RIAA paid the full amount of their judgement. Just like with professional liability insurance, the RIAA now has more incentive to sue, which creates more incentive to buy insurance. Pretty soon, almost everyone's paying a little bit of money every month to download music.

You sure showed those RIAA guys! And they thought they had this whole thing worked out.

"Pretty soon, almost everyone's paying a little bit of money every month to download music."

I.e. cheap licencing, which is what they should have don in the first place.

First problem is that you'd have to put up quite a bit of capital as loss reserves. Then you have to worry about people who buy your insurance taking on extra risks now that they're insured against the costs. Finally, the RIAA/MPAA would do whatever it took to get your client list, then sue all of them, bankrupting you.

The problems aren't problems per se, the insurance business has those pretty well figured out (you hedge the risk on a reinsurance market like Lloyds of London). Only question is if you can get some rates/terms that clients would accept.

If *AA got such a list and started suing using is as a base, well, at least you'd have a well-funded entity fighting on you side.

Surprisingly http://www.tankafritt.nu/uk/ seem to be doing that, the main site is in Swedish so I'm not sure what the actual deal is.

Could be implemented as contracts in a prediction market.

Abducting a child is waaay cheaper than the hideous crime of stealing music from hard working music industry execs.

This is an interesting exercise for people who think that anything can be measured in dollars and cents. A one dimensional scale does have some trouble coping with the real world.

The author could've tried to make the one-dimensional scale work by polling people how much they'd pay to get out of a 1 year prison term, or alternatively, for what sum they'd be willing to go to prison for 1 year (most likely the two sums aren't equal). Maybe there are studies to that effect somewhere?

You still have the problem where crime X (let's say stealing a car) and crime Y (maybe shooting someone in the leg) result in the same prison term, when normal people would say that one of the crimes is a lot worse. Prison plus fine is barely multidimensional, and converting prison to money reduces it to one dimension again.

In a study like the one you propose, they should also see what effect the crime causing the prison term has on the valuations - will time in prison for rape cost more or less than time in prison for murder?

What do you propose as a better metric for decision-making? Or are you from the "if it saves only one child then it's worth it" school of thought?

In my opinion the justice system should aim to convert criminals into productive members of society, and protect the rest of society from said criminals until they're fit for society again.

Since it's not a simple problem to solve, I don't have a better solution than "use common sense and take as many aspects as possible into consideration, and dont' forget to look at the big picture". Saying that money is the only thing that we can measure and so it has to be the basis of any decision is to pretend that it's a simple problem.