Cut off his hand!

So here's a thought. When I was younger, I spent a lot of time thinking about the Middle Ages, as young people are wont to do. Now, when I read and learned about their legal system, it struck me as odd how steep the punishments were for stealing, as opposed to - in our view - much worse crimes, like murder or rape. Stealing was considered one of the worst crimes, punishable by gruesome execution, maiming, and the like.

Now, a lot of people attribute this to cultural differences and talk about "honor" and stuff, but I think the reason behind the steep punishments for stealing is actually far simpler: In a society of medieval tech level, killing or raping people - at least people who matter - is actually kind of hard, especially without anyone finding out. Even just murdering your oafish neighbour requires you to actually get close to him and try to hit him with a club or something, which means that murder is inherently pretty dangerous to pull off.

Stealing, on the other hand, is really, really easy. In a country with medieval tech level, the only thing that'll stop you from stealing is if someone is physically blocking you from it. Medieval locks could basically be picked with anything vaguely toothpick-shaped, and it's not like they had any more sophisticated burglar alarms than - usually poorly trained and mistreated - guard dogs. And that's just trying to steal valuable, expensive things - trying to nick some guys' fancy bronze knife that'll fetch you food for a week is as easy as reaching a hand into his coat pocket when he isn't wearing it.

So, to compensate for how easy it was to get away with theft, people made the punishment really, really steep, to try and discourage people from pulling off what was arguably one of the easiest crimes you could commit. Gradually, security improved and peoples' situations improved, so there was both less of an incentive to steal, and a lot more work involved in doing it. Today, you wouldn't steal a car or a TV because it's a lot of work, and there's a high risk of being caught.

...you see where I'm going with this?

Stealing a car or a TV is hard. It requires prep-time and a well laid out plan to get from "see car" to "sell car to shady guy in Poland". On the other hand, downloading a movie or a song is ridiculously easy. It requires no work, there's a minimal risk of being caught, and it's overall just not terribly dangerous.

So society has responded by going medieval on our asses. Sure, there's no killing or maiming of pirates, but that's just because our legal system is nicer overall: The punishment for piracy is still highly disproportionate. So we're back to the same morally confusing system: Surely it's worse to beat someone up and steal their stuff, than it is to download their music? Surely people in the middle ages thought it was worse to murder someone in cold blood than to take his shiny knife and leg it, but people weren't very likely to just randomly murder someone outside a wartime situation ("war" in this case also including family feuds, which were basically wars between small-scale nations). They were, on the other hand, probably tempted to nick shiny stuff all the time.

The punishment for theft was so steep precisely because it was so common. It is the same with piracy in our age.

And it's a retarded system. It didn't work for the Middle Ages, and it won't work for us.