You're just misreading the post. The "victim" doesn't calculate the damages, but a rule that makes the damages depend on actions the corporation voluntarily chooses to take allows them to vindictively maximize the penalties on someone who merely embarrassed them. Which is a perverse incentive that should be removed.
Yeah, I guess you’re right. It would be more fair to the defendant to let him specify the damages. After all, he is the only one who knows what harm he intended to inflict. Without that knowledge, how could we establish causation?
If you leave the door open to your building and some kids get in and spray paint graffiti on the walls and steal the building manager's library book, you pretty clearly have damages in the amount of the cost to clean the graffiti and the cost of the library book.
If you then go spend $50,000 to pay a contractor to sweep the building for bugs on the off chance the kids were actually Russian spies, that's on you for leaving the door open. Even if you have a legitimate fear of Russian spies.
Likewise, if the way you clean the graffiti is not to pay someone $50 to paint over it but to bring in a demolition crew to implode the whole building and then build an identical one in its place at the cost of a million dollars, this was your choosing and not the doing of the miscreants.
