eBook Pirates in the UK to Get 10 Years in Jail

Most of us are likely guilty of pirating the odd e-book or downloading a few songs from the internet. If the United Kingdom gets their way, the maximum jail sentence could be increasing from two years to ten years. The proposed measures are mainly targeted at the distributors of pirated content – the people creating copies of movies, sometimes before release, and uploading them to be downloaded by thousands upon thousands. It also is targeting large scale piracy operations where they host the content and either give it away for free or charge monthly subscription packages. The new law will not throw the average user in the slammer who pirates e-books, so you don’t have to worry about stripping the DRM or visiting the Pirate Bay, but it will chiefly target large large commercial operations. Intellectual Property Minister Baroness Neville-Rolfe said: “The government takes copyright crime extremely seriously – it hurts businesses, consumers and the wider economy both on and offline. “Our creative industries are worth more than £7 billion to the UK economy and it’s important to protect them from online criminal enterprises. By toughening penalties for commercial-scale online offending we are offering greater protections to businesses and sending a clear message to deter criminals.”

URL: http://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/ebook-pirates-in-the-uk-to-get-10-years-in-jail