Les Bonnes Choses

My parent's lawyer once told me I'd make a good lawyer. I know a few, and think they're a smart bunch, which I can appreciate. The problem is their work falls within the scope of the legal system, which unfortunately has been largely engineered by people who don't quite think things all the way through.

Here's today's intellectual property law example (in a nutshell, the company owning the copyright to The Hurt Locker are going to strike down upon file sharers with great vengeance and furious anger, just as soon as they find out who they all are).

This might not seem to be a problem until you consider how peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing works. Let's construct a toy example, assuming the copyright holder's accusation at face value: each time a person shares their intellectual property, they are deprived of revenue corresponding to its retail value (this is debatable for a number of reasons). Suppose we have 100 people making available a copy of The Hurt Locker using a P2P client. When I use P2P to download a file, my client finds out who is making the file available, and downloads the file, 1 chunk at a time, from everyone who has chunks to offer. Suppose I am the only person on the internet interested in downloading The Hurt Locker. My computer connects to 100 seeding computers and downloads chunks from each of them until I have the whole movie. There are now 101 copies of The Hurt Locker on the internet. But each of the 100 people from whom I downloaded the movie are assessed damages equal to the retail value of 1 copy of the movie. Net loss for Voltage Pictures, LLC: $27 (today's list price on Amazon.com). Claimed damages: $2700.

Now, I'd wager most people would think twice about going out on a business dinner, paying $27 for a meal, but filing an expense claim for $2700. That would be fraud, right?