10 Years in Prison For Online Pirates a Step Closer in the UK (torrentfreak.com)

The UK Government's Digital Economy Bill has moved a step closer to becoming law after its second reading in Parliament. With unanimous support, the current two-year maximum custodial sentence for online piracy is almost certain to increase to a decade, TorrentFreak reports. From the article: Due to UK copyright law allowing for custodial sentences of 'just' two years for online offenses, anti-piracy groups such as the Federation Against Copyright Theft have chosen to pursue their own private prosecutions. These have largely taken place under legislation designed for those who have committed fraud, rather than the more appropriate offense of copyright infringement. Physical pirates (CDs, DVDs) can be jailed for up to 10 years under current legislation. During the past few years, there have been lobbying efforts for this punishment to apply both on and offline. That resulted in a UK Government announcement last year indicating that it would move to increase the maximum prison sentence for online copyright infringement to ten years. They also urge Google to do something about growing incidents of piracy.

Comments

Crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

10 years for piracy? Force them to pay for the pirated content, plus a fine. Why prison at all?

Also, what about google? Why should google "do something"? Not their table . . .

It's the new war on drugs!

[MikeDataLink]

Let's put lots of young people in prison on long mandatory sentences for petty crimes. Sounds genius!

Re:It's the new war on drugs!

[Tablizer]

Let's put lots of young people in prison on long mandatory sentences for petty crimes. Sounds genius!

Plutocracy at work:

      Rape, stab, murder = yawn

      Copy My-Little-Pony vid = SLAMMER FOREVER!

You can stab people, just not profits.

Prison conversations become more ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

PrisonerA: "What are you in for?"
PrisonerB: "I was caught with a potted plant in my home."
PrisonerC: "I couldn't remember my password."

and now,

PrisonerD: "I consumed propaganda without also paying for the privilege."

And many more! Western civilization has gone bonkers.

Used to be a Mandatory Death Sentence

[Roger W Moore]

10 years for piracy?

Actually until 1998 piracy used to carry a mandatory death sentence in the UK under the 1837 piracy act. This was one of the few crimes which still had it after the (almost) abolition of the death sentence in 1965. Mind you it did have to be committed on the high seas so it only applied to those downloading content while on a ship at sea.

in the mean time...

[Lead Butthead]

Nazi war criminals serves five years or less.
Apparently IP piracy is more severe in scope than industrialized murder of six million.

Re:in the mean time...

[Anonymous Coward]

Rape gets you a slap on the wrist because the people and the wallets in whose name filesharers are being imprisoned, tend to like to rape a lot and need the law to have a contingency for them. There's also a lot of kiddie rape among them entertainment industry stars, and from all the years of news articles and controversy with a kiddie rape tradition within Hollywood and labels and those entertainment companies it is only telling why kiddie rape nets so little time in the joint.

On another hand, let us look at the nature of the copyright cartel a little:

a. Drug trafficking (Vytas Simanavicius case[http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-chief-pleads-guilty-to-drug-trafficking-130421/])
b. Defamation (Prenda/Malibu)
[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/01/porn-troll-prenda-law-sanctioned-in-defamation-lawsuit/]
[http://torrentfreak.com/accused-movie-pirate-sues-for-defamation-120723/]
c. Uploading torrents and copyright material themselves unlawfully (Megaupload case, file-lockers, and honeypot schemes).
http://www.brutalattack.org/index.php/2013/08/15/copyright-troll-ran-pirate-bay-honeypot-comcast-confirms/
[https://torrentfreak.com/voltage-pictures-sued-for-copyright-infringement-150520/]
This leads to hypocrisy.
d. Breaking the 8th Amendment of the USA under the justification of example making. (Fining people hundreds of thousands per song or movie, instead of fair fines of the exact price of the pirated products + a reasonable percentage addition based on the product cost which doesn't go beyond 100%; Aaron Swartz case)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz]
e. Actual cybercrime of spreading malware and trojans on the Internet (https://torrentfreak.com/30000-pirates-receive-fake-fines-with-trojans-attached-140708)
f. Unwarranted and unlawful incarceration beyond what the law regards as a legal period (Piratebay founder Gottfrid Svartholm), or in other words subversion and undermining of the justice system and causing the loss of trust in the system and the twisting of the term "justice" itself into a worthless term.
g. Bribery, blackmail and perversion of the justice system (Piratebay founder, KimDotCom, Prenda,
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/19/google-internet-censorship_n_6354518.html]
h. Wasting more tax-payer money than artists lose to piracy over unlawful use of police forces (KimDotCom case,
[http://torrentfreak.com/can-pirate-bay-make-comeback-141210/] and many more) when the police could be saving actual lives...
So anti-pirates are also potentially indirectly responsible for civilian deaths due to siphoning police reserves.
i. Filing millions of false DMCA notices and taking down many legitimate sites while hurting many businesses in the process. Censorship.
[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071010/162619.shtml]
j. Creating money out of thin air by making up piracy/download numbers, exaggerating them vastly, and thus undermining the economic system. Using this fraudulent way of getting money and passing it off as legal also constitutes money laundering. There's also the issue of false advertisement in the digital economy not being punished [see gaming, EA and Ubisoft just for some examples]. False advertising being helped by the nature of digital products not being capable of being ostensibly evaluated by an individual like material tangible products, and the attempt at monopolizing this "blindness" by scamming with rigged demos, paying up reviews and attacking negative reviews [see 4. bellow], paying up let's play videos and using the DMCA to take down any negative critique that may appear, and generally trying to monopolize the ability of people to know what they may pay for and scam on a massive scale, and removing the ability of consumers to have a return guarantee on products in any way possible. All summed up, piracy is the only tool currently in existence that gives power to consumers over the corporations trying to scam them in full scale, and trying to destroy the "consumer is always right" principle that existe

"What are you in for?"

[npslider]

Prisoner 1: "What are you in for?"
Prisoner 2: "I posted a low grade copy of "Spock's Brain" to YouTube."
Prisoner 1: "What!? Are you mad? How many views did you get?"
Prisoner 2: "Zero."
Prisoner 1: "How long is your sentence?"
Prisoner 2: "They are giving me 'The Chair' tomorrow morning."
Prisoner 1: "Dude, I'm sorry. That sucks."
Prisoner 2: "Yeah... well, my brother-in law did the same thing; only it was "Threshold".
Prisoner 1: "Star Trek Voyager? The Wacko Amphibians??"
Prisoner 2: "Yeah. That one. He died in a drone strike, an hour after it was posted."
Prisoner 1: "Who killed him?"
Prisoner 2: "It's a toss up between Trekkie's and the government. I'm leaning towards the government."
Prisoner 1: "Well... I'm out tomorrow. I guess killing 12 people isn't what it used to be. Your president really means business in clearing this Cuban prison."

The sign above the door reads 'Guantanamo Bay'

6 months for rape or a decade for copying a file?

[MooseTick]

I know its US vs UK, but Brock Turner (http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/06/us/sexual-assault-brock-turner-stanford/) received a 6 month sentence for raping an unconscious woman, yet someone else could spend 20 times that length of time imprisoned for copying a file?

And people wonder why we question our faith in the police, government and the system!

Proportionality

[GeekWithAKnife]

When will these type of crimes become proportional FFS??

Here's some average jail times for crimes in the UK to put this into perspective:

Administering drugs to obtain intercourse Sexual Offences Act 1956 s4 2 years

Abuse of trust: sexual activity with a child Sexual Offences Act 2003 s16 5 years

Burglary with intent to commit rape (non-dwelling) Theft Act 1968 s9 10 years

Distributing copyrighted material Dumbass Act 2016 10 years?!

Who is "demanding justice" in this case to require 10 years for "piracy"? It's not for the people...you know, the individuals that make this democracy thing work.