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UK Gov't Asks: Is 10 Years In Jail the Answer To Online Pirates?
An anonymous reader writes with a link to this piece at TorrentFreak: Physical counterfeiters can receive up to 10 years in jail under UK copyright law but should online pirates receive the same maximum punishment? A new report commissioned by the government reveals that many major rightsholders believe they should, but will that have the desired effect? A new study commissioned by the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) examines whether the criminal sanctions for copyright infringement available under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA 1988) are currently proportionate and correct, or whether they should be amended. While the Digital Economy Act 2010 increased financial penalties up to a maximum of £50,000, in broad terms the main 'offline' copyright offenses carry sentences of up to 10 years in jail while those carried out online carry a maximum of 'just' two.
What is the rationale for treating real property differently than other property? That's an assumption worth examining.
Is it because real property can be used to generate rent? Then copyright and patents are kind of like real property.
Is it because a person's ownership of real property imposes a burden on everybody else because it restricts what would otherwise be their right to use it? Then again, copyright and patents are like real property.
There's probably no good single explanation, but it might revolve around property tax being something of a usage tax for local government services that mostly relate to property, such as police, fire, and civil infrastructure in the local community.
I think in a lot of ways it's probably an inherited anachronism from an era before income taxes when towns or counties (in the US) needed a source of revenue to provide services. There was no income tax and few other ways to generate funds for local government.
Unfortunately, it's grown very regressive because property owners are taxed on the unrealized market value of the property. If you bought your house for $10,000 and it went up in value to $500,000 (less hyperbolic than it sounds in many places) you're stuck paying a tax on an asset whose value increase you can't realize without selling it and chances are your income hasn't risen as fast as your asset value.
A lot of elderly people on fixed incomes get pushed out of their houses because they can no longer pay the property taxes on houses they own outright -- their fixed incomes don't increase to match the increase in value and taxes.
There's all kinds of ways they try to fix this, like homestead exemptions and income tax based property tax refunds, but it just feels like a bad patch on an obsolete system.