With recent and possible changes to IP crime laws, your Katonomist turns her third eyelid to criminalisation and the economics of crime. Criminalisation throws up a number of questions. Do existing laws cover the area to be criminalised? (For example, trade secret theft in the US is often covered by wire fraud laws.) Will criminalisation have the desired effect on incentives? Is it an appropriate use of police and public resources? Does harm exist? Is there a victim? How do magnets work?It is easy to compare criminalisation of IP infringement to violent crime, and question the allocation of public resources. Instead, compare IP crime with white collar crime. The last 15 years of white collar crime, from Enron, to the wonderfully named Madoff, and our current Fifa, have highlighted the billions that white collar crime can cost. A lot. Yet Golan suggests criminalisation of white collar crime over-deters otherwise desirable…
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