no, past year based on the time of infringement, not time of conviction, so if you pirate it June 25, 2011, you pay the cheapest price between June 26th, 2010 and June 25th 2011.
Sure but how is that different from now? aside from the cost of the fine, there really isn't, and I'd argue that the specter of a large fine is having little effect on piracy anyway.
A lot of the time, the size of the fine (or the prison sentence) is a function of the probability of being caught.
As an example, let's say the economic gain of a single instance of movie piracy is $25, only 1% of all pirates are caught, and the cost of prosecuting someone is $1,000. So you charge a $250,000 fine, and that gets people's attention. Economists talk about indifference curves in place of regular price curves.
No, I'm just introducing this to give you an idea of why those bizarrely large fines exist in the first place. The economic theory is that law should incentivize people to act a certain way, and that if the odds of prosecution are low than the deterrent effect has to be made up on the sentencing side instead.
