Steep damages is in many cases not enough because the likelihood of being found out is so low. The damages then have to be extremely steep for this behavior to not be incentivised. Basically to bring the expectation value negative, the damages has to be larger than the profit gain by this behavior, divided by the probability to be caught. Often this will be more than the value of the company, and then the damages do not matter as they simply bankrupt. In that case, the rational business practice is to go for it and hope to not get caught. Any other behavior will eventually lead to bankruptcy in a competetive market.
How many similar practices actually get discovered? In a way this is the "right" thing to do in a capitalist society. We are incentivising this behaviour by making it profitable. An honest company cannot compete with a company doing this, unless very rigorous regulations and enforcement of them. This gets harder and harder as tech gets more opaque.
Adding more regulation, auditing, hoping that _all_ entrepreneurs are honest, are crutches trying to patch a fundamentally broken economical system.
If capitalism were a software, we would call practices like this code smell. We can try patching it up with some specific legislation and (costly) enforcement by e.g. code auditing in this case. But the real issue is that our economy is not optimizing for global (national) utility, it is optimizing for profits of individual business owners.
From the article: "It’s somewhat hard to outthink a missile headed for your server farm at 800 km/h.". Is it really though? Just copy yourself to another server/activate whatever copy you already made in a bot net. Computers are fast, they are the thing that is guiding the "800 km/h" missile in real time..
Books get different return-by dates based on their popularity in Sweden, so some have to be returned in a e.g. week, some in a month. So perhaps they just meant that none of the return deadlines have been missed so far?
Books get different return-by dates based on their popularity in Sweden, so some have to be returned in a e.g. week, some in a month. So perhaps they just meant that none of the return deadlines have been missed so far?