UK government is pressing towards strict measures against online copyright infringement

Creative industries contribute over £84 billion to the UK economy each year with intellectual property assets protected at over £60 billion. The Government is committed to ensuring the legal framework supports the creators that produce the content that we all value, and who make a valuable contribution to the UK economy. An important part of that framework is to have provisions which deal with those who infringe on a criminal scale, and which provide for appropriate sentences to be levied. As a result, in July 2015 the Government consulted on increasing the maximum custodial sentence for criminal online copyright infringement offences from two to ten years. The Government is very grateful to everyone who responded.

“The Government believes that a maximum sentence of 10 years allows the courts to apply an appropriate sentence to reflect the scale of the offending. An example where copyright infringement was deemed to warrant longer than a 2 year sentence is where five defendants received sentences totalling 17 years for releasing more than 2,500 of the latest films onto the internet. They were prosecuted under the Fraud Act, where the highest sentence was four and a half years. Capping the maximum available sentence at a lower level would unnecessarily limit the ability of the courts to apply appropriate sentences in the more serious cases of copyright infringement”.

Source: https://www.gov.uk