Legal Scholars Warn Against 10 Year Prison For Online Pirates

An anonymous reader writes: The UK Government wants to increase the maximum prison sentence for online copyright infringement from two years to ten. A number legal experts and activists are pushing back against the plan. One such group, The British and Irish Law, Education and Technology Association (BILETA) has concluded that changes to the current law are not needed. "legitimate means to tackle large-scale commercial scale online copyright infringement are already available and currently being used, and the suggested sentence of 10 years seems disproportionate," the group writes.

Comments

Won't do a thing.

[SuricouRaven]

Pirates do not fear prison, because they know that their crime is so commonplace that their chance of being caught is very remote indeed. Why would the threat of a longer sentence change this?

Re:Won't do a thing.

[alvinrod]

Seriously, jail time for a non-violent civil offense is asinine.

I'd suggest a small amount of monetary related to the local cost of the media that was infringed (around 2.5 times the actual cost seems reasonable for non-commercial infringement) and then a small amount of community service that's tied to the duration (impractical for some software and other digital goods, but works well for most things) of the infringed content.

This way if someone ever does get in trouble, society doesn't have to bear the cost of imprisoning someone for something that's about as harmful to society as jaywalking. While we're at it, let's get formatting shifting legally codified into the law and return the copyright duration to a more reasonably limit in line with what was originally proposed.

Hmm..

[Anonymous Coward]

Manslaughter... copyright infringement... they should both get about the same sentences, right? Nothing weird about that at all, is there? ~