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4 comments

[–] fusir 0 points (+0|-0)

It's important to note that when it is only posession tha prosecuting it is equivelent to copywrite in policy.

There is a misconception that it produces demand but we wouldn't say the same thing about downloading music off of the pirate bay. Supply/demand interactions involve a dynamic price for negotiating a scarce good.

For example if you buy a tooth brush from Walmart. Your purchase changes the state of walmart in two ways. They now have cash and they now have a vacency in their inventory. These two things make them an intermediary for the manufacturer and in general real supply and demand satisfies the "information problem".

In non paying media markets it does not because there is no vacency and there is no money and so there is no reason for the "pirate" to communicate back to the producer to ask him to produce another one. It also confuses first order goods and second order goods.

What does happen however is that it creates a risk distribution and risk distributions can be computed into demand curves with some other key distributions as input. Producers are able to select a price along that demand curve and sell at a particular volume and extract value from that demand curve.

The formula for a demand curve in a media market is.

P = CV*min(1,FR/FV)-CR where CV is the distribution of percieved value for a commercial interaction. FR is the percieved risk distribution of a non-paying interaction. FV is the percieved value distribution of a non-paying interaction and CR is the risk distribution of a paying interaction.

All of this can be derived from
CV/(CR+P) > FV/FR, P < CV-CR.

Basically that says that what you get from a commericial interaction needs to have more bang for the cost than a free interaction, and that you aren't willing to pay more than the difference between value and risk for a commercial interaction.

We can see that the demand curve quickly goes to zero when there is zero risk in FR. This is why we have copyright.

What happened is about two of these cases of CP hit the internet and the law said we need to respond to this. Then predictably it took off. Then the law said boy were we smart for instituting these laws when we did, because we couldn't have known it would have taken off like it did. Then it got worse and they said we need to do more, so they did more and sentencing rates have gone up. Well now production is through the roof. And it has started to turn into snuff.

Judges are incapible of getting that if you punish someone who fails to pay for something and fail to punish someone who has what will happen.