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Digital Economy Act: Illegal Kodi Streams Could Now Land Users In Prison For 10 Years (independent.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: The Digital Economy Act has passed into law, meaning people could now face ten-year prison sentences for illegally streaming copyrighted content. It covers a wide number of areas, including broadband speeds, access to online pornography and government data-sharing. However, amid the rising popularity of Kodi, an increase to the maximum prison term -- from two years to ten -- for people guilty of copyright infringement is particularly interesting. Anyone caught streaming TV shows, films and sports events illegally using websites, torrents and Kodi add-ons could technically face a decade behind bars. However, the new law will most likely target individuals and groups making a business out of selling illegal content, FACT CEO Kieron Sharp told the Mirror. The Independent also notes in a separate report that The Digital Economy Act could allow UK police to "remotely disable mobile phones, even before the user actually commits a crime." The Digital Economy Act "contains a section stating that officers will be able to place restrictions on handsets that they believe are being used by drug dealers," reports The Independent.
Allow me to introduce you to one of the most fundamental principles of justice: the punishment should fit the crime.
Watching Game of Thrones from a dodgy website does not warrant a ten year jail sentence. It does not warrant any jail sentence at all. At most it warrants being forced to pay HBO damages equal to one months' subscription to their own streaming service (which is more than enough to bingewatch every episode of GoT they ever made - at a price THEY set).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Brexit seems more and more like a positive thing for each day that passes. By the time May is done Australia will be sending its delinquents over there instead.
They probably will at this rate. As a NZer who's country has a free trade deal with Australia and China, I can attest to how little such agreements prevent you from being screwed over by the bigger country/better negotiator. Britain is going to get a nasty wake up call when it wonders off to the nations of the world to do deals and ends up tangled up in a mess of agreements that give them far less freedom than they get in the EU.
Some examples: NZ has, for the last thirty years, been trying to get its apples in to Australia. It has a trade deal that should allow this, and it has gone to the WTO (that will apparently give Britain great default access to everywhere once it leaves the single market) repeatedly to try to prevent Australia halting the imports. It has not worked, because Australia keeps coming up with new reasons why the apples cannot be imported on trumped up biosecurity grounds. Good luck. In addition to this, NZ has been trying to break into the Australian aviation market for about the same amount of time. They finally managed it many years ago by buying out Ansett Australia, which was promptly grounded by the Australian Civil Aviation regulator a month later on the grounds of 'safety'. The result was that Air New Zealand had to be renationalised by the NZ government and withdrew from Australia with its tail between its legs. More recently, just months after a new agreement had been reached by the two governments on creating a pathway to citizenship for NZers currently stuck in an immigration no-mans land (due to continual erosion of the free movement provisions that were previously agreed) the Australian government announced new changes that put a whole new bunch of kiwis into a new no mans land. Basically they gave with one hand while pulling the rug with the other.
With China things were not so bad, with the exception that the Chinese put a provision in the agreement that prevented NZ from discriminating against investors from there. This has hamstrung the NZ govts ability to prevent Chinese flooding their money into our tiny country, as it would have to renegotiate parts of the Australian agreement to do this.
This is the sort of great stuff Britain has to look forward too. Already the stage is being set for them to be screwed by both NZ and Australia, which are attempting to position themselves as the UK's allies in their brave new word (even offering to send trade negotiators to help the UK), while lobbying the EU to replace existing UK meat and dairy imports with their own.
If the UK expects to do trade with anyone, then it will quickly realise that doing trade deals always requires flogging off some sovereignty as well.