14 DAY TRIAL // British pirates now face up to ten years in prison for online copyright infringement. Two years after the plan to hike up the maximum prison sentence for this crime from two to ten years was announced, the Digital Economy Bill is now law.
A few days ago, this particularly controversial bill was promoted into law, despite tough opposition from Internet users.
The idea behind the bill was to "harmonize" online copyright infringement sanctions to those available under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act from 1988. Basically, by toughening penalties for commercial-scale online offending, they are offering greater protections to businesses and sending a clear message to criminals, TorrentFreak reports.
While the government has insisted in the past that regular members of the public would not be subject to harsh punishment, the legislation reads differently, TorrentFreak points out. The law states that anyone who makes infringing content available to the public while merely putting a copyright holder at risk of loss is committing a criminal offense.
Thanks to the way the legislation is worded, regular file-sharers are at risk for downloading content, as much as those who upload are. Given how most torrent sites work by asking users to "feed" the content, you keep uploading files even after your download is complete, unless the BitTorrent client is shut down.
Open for abuse
While there's no argument against the fact that penalties need to be steeper for some crimes, many voices have argued that a "commercial scale loss" threshold should be set, as per the suggestion of Open Rights Group. In short, they want to revise "risk of loss" to "serious risk of commercial scale loss," which should weed out a lot of BitTorrent users.
While the government assures the population that there should be no concern over such steep punishment, it remains to be seen what the courts will ultimately decide. One thing's for sure - there are going to be some interesting conversations going on in prisons between people going in for downloading a movie and those in there for crimes that are a lot more serious.