It seems so strange to me that everyone buys the bullshit that personal data is worth very little.
The data brokerage industry is a multi-trillion dollar industry. Yet, there are only ~8 billion people in the world, many of whom don’t have internet access or have very little data being traded. Thus it’s reasonably safe to assume that an average regular internet user’s data is worth somewhere in the region of $1,000 per year.
These companies don’t do anything with the data. We create the data, they collect it and sell it, then whoever buys it is the one that actually makes something from it. If we allow the brokers a very generous profit margin, they are still stealing $500-700 from every one of us, every year.
It’s a bigger problem in the States than elsewhere. In the US, awarding legal costs is the exception, not the norm, so someone with a lot of money and access to lawyers can basically intimidate a defendent into avoiding court. In the rest of the world, courts are much more likely to award costs to a defendent who has done nothing wrong - if you file a frivilous lawsuit and lose, you’ll probably have to pay the costs of the person you tried to sue.
This guy’s in Germany, so I think he’d be alright if he clearly won. The issue, however, is that courts aren’t really equipped for handling highly technical cases and often get things wrong.
No. Regulate and offer known recreational drugs pure.
Very few people take fentanyl on its own or intentionally. Even tranq (which I hadn’t heard of but just looked up) is primarily harmful because it’s often tainted with fentanyl or other potent yet potentially fatal additives. Fentanyl does not need to be legally sold, because there is no real market for it.
Hell, even fucking weed is tainted, primarily with silica-based desccants, in countries where it’s still illegal (cough UK cough).
However if people could get pure, laboratory tested recreational drugs then these issues could disappear overnight. Heroin is bad when you fall deep into addiction, but most heroin users wouldn’t get into that state if they could take the drug legally without taboo or victimisation of illicit dealers. 100 years ago opium dens were a thing, and there were some people deep in the poppy - but there were also people just as deep in their alcohol suffering worse. Alcohol is less of a problem today, and back in the 90s there was a study funded by DARE (and subsequently unpublished because they didn’t like the results) that determined most heroin users were in fact business men and women earning large salaries with enough income to support their habit with high quality product.
Just like digital piracy is a service problem, drug addiction is a societal mental health problem, and criminalising it only allows the problem to fester to extremes.
Decriminalise possession, keep supply of the most fatally harmful drugs illegal, legitimise and tax known recreational drugs.
Digital piracy is not theft, by definition. Theft requires taking something with the intent to deprive the owner, copying things does not deprive the owner.
Digital piracy is copyright infringement, which (in the vast majority of cases) is not even a crime. It is a civil offense.