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Those found guilty of online piracy and copyright infringement in the UK will face an increased maximum prison sentence of 10 years, with the UK government having confirmed that it is going ahead with its controversial legislation.
The new ruling would place the punishment for online piracy in line with physical piracy. In a foreword contained in a document outlining the proposed changes, Baroness Lucy Neville-Rolfe, the Minister for Intellectual Property, wrote: “The pace of technological change has been breath-taking, enabling all of us to access a large variety of content from anywhere at any time. The number of global internet users has increased threefold in the past 10 years to 3bn1 and the number of UK citizens’ now online stands at over 90 percent.
“Every day we are seeing the new opportunities this has created for criminals with wide-scale infringement of the valued rights of those who create content. Creative industries add £84.1billion to the UK economy each year, and to ensure we can protect this investment, there must be effective and appropriately targeted laws.”
She continued: “Last year the government consulted on increasing the maximum term to 10 years. We received over a thousand responses, which have played a significant part in helping to shape the discussion.
“As a result we are now proposing changes that include increasing the maximum sentence, but at the same time addressing concerns about the scope of the offence.”
However, Neville-Rolfe confirmed that those guilty of privacy that has a “minimal effect” on copyright holders will not face such harsh punishment, adding: “Criminal offences should not apply to low-level infringement that has a minimal effect or causes minimum harm to copyright owners, in particular where the individuals involved are unaware of the impact of their behavior.”
Though this new legislation is vague, which is partially the reasoning behind the level of complaints it has garnered, this would likely mean that those who infrequently download illegal copyrighted materials would not receive such a lengthy punishment, but those found guilty of illegal file-sharing or who download mass amounts of illegal material would potentially face the 10 year maximum sentence.
