To be clear: the fact that theft and copyright infringement both relate to interference with alienable rights does not mean that they should be treated the same way. A good legal system takes into account that different kinds of infringement on different kinds of rights should be handled differently.
Here's a cool example that includes both civil law and criminal law: in America, if you trespass on someone's property without being told not to, that's a civil violation, and the only thing the owner can do is sue you for any actual damage you caused. But if you trespass after they tell you not to, it's also a criminal violation and they can ask the state to prosecute you. That's why you see warning signs saying "no trespassing - violators will be prosecuted." It skips the first step.
Point being, sometimes the legal system even treats infringement of the same alienable right under entirely separate branches of law, depending how many times you've done it. And with trespass, it's calibrated pretty well.
Copyright in America is calibrated terribly. It's mostly civil rather than criminal (you can tell because it's "RIAA vs." instead of "United States vs."). But unlike most civil suits where you're basically compensated in rough proportion to the harm you suffered, there's this incredibly punitive fine of up to $150,000 for each mp3, which is collected by the civil party suing rather than the government. So it looks a lot like criminal enforcement. It's grievously weird.
(Actually, there is an analogous law I can think of, the Clean Water Act. Under that law any citizen who lives in a polluted area can sue a polluter and recover a large bounty for winning the case, even if the actual damages that citizen suffered are trivial. This basically offloads the work of enforcing pollution laws from the government to private citizens, which presumably made the Clean Water Act cheap enough to pass. And that Act has been incredibly successful -- we've gone from like 2/3 of America's waterways being impaired to 1/3. So maybe the copyright laws are just the right tool for the wrong job?)
Anyway! What's going on is: (1) copyright laws are all screwed up because only one side is at the bargaining table, and that side is panicking; (2) the internet makes copyright laws impossible to enforce, while also (3) greatly increasing the societal cost of copyright laws in terms of lost value to consumers. So we need a new deal. The better you understand the nuts and bolts, the better you can take part in crafting it.
>"Copyright in America is calibrated terribly. It's mostly civil rather than criminal"
We get a distorted view based on things like the current extradition of a British man to the USA for having a listings site with links to copyright material. And the whole Kim Dotcom business operated at the international level by USA Government's agencies.
Here's a cool example that includes both civil law and criminal law: in America, if you trespass on someone's property without being told not to, that's a civil violation, and the only thing the owner can do is sue you for any actual damage you caused. But if you trespass after they tell you not to, it's also a criminal violation and they can ask the state to prosecute you. That's why you see warning signs saying "no trespassing - violators will be prosecuted." It skips the first step.
Point being, sometimes the legal system even treats infringement of the same alienable right under entirely separate branches of law, depending how many times you've done it. And with trespass, it's calibrated pretty well.
Copyright in America is calibrated terribly. It's mostly civil rather than criminal (you can tell because it's "RIAA vs." instead of "United States vs."). But unlike most civil suits where you're basically compensated in rough proportion to the harm you suffered, there's this incredibly punitive fine of up to $150,000 for each mp3, which is collected by the civil party suing rather than the government. So it looks a lot like criminal enforcement. It's grievously weird.
(Actually, there is an analogous law I can think of, the Clean Water Act. Under that law any citizen who lives in a polluted area can sue a polluter and recover a large bounty for winning the case, even if the actual damages that citizen suffered are trivial. This basically offloads the work of enforcing pollution laws from the government to private citizens, which presumably made the Clean Water Act cheap enough to pass. And that Act has been incredibly successful -- we've gone from like 2/3 of America's waterways being impaired to 1/3. So maybe the copyright laws are just the right tool for the wrong job?)
Anyway! What's going on is: (1) copyright laws are all screwed up because only one side is at the bargaining table, and that side is panicking; (2) the internet makes copyright laws impossible to enforce, while also (3) greatly increasing the societal cost of copyright laws in terms of lost value to consumers. So we need a new deal. The better you understand the nuts and bolts, the better you can take part in crafting it.