[adamhi]

As far as I understand, there is no criminal penalty associated with patent infringement.

With copyright violations you can in theory get prison time (as the warning on a DVD informs us), but it's very rare — on the order of a couple hundred people a year, and mostly for selling bootlegs, not for downloading movies off The Pirate Bay. I don't believe that the extra prison capacity required to house that many people is really much of an argument (even in small part) for removing all copyright and patent protections for everyone.

Keep in mind that the work of every independent artist — writer, musician, game developer, whatever — is enabled by being able to sell their work, rather than have a perfect knockoff sold on Amazon for $.99 the day after it's released.