It seems a commercial copyright criminal has an easier time of it in the UK than someone sharing a game who didnt attend court.
http://torrentfreak.com/is-it-time-to-make-file-sharing-a-criminal-offense-080912/If the UK government suddenly announced that it was bringing in legislation to criminalize personal-use non-profit file-sharing, there would probably be an uproar, probably supported by me. The thought of a petty file-sharer up in a criminal court facing a magistrate or judge seems outrageous.
These people simply cannot defend themselves and this is why it might make sense to criminalize personal-use file-sharing. In a criminal case if you can’t afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you by the state and you get the benefit of proper justice at least, a right of reply within a proper structure, not grubby threatening letters designed to wear people down.
The other reason why there might be benefits in bringing file-sharing out of the civil domain and into the criminal is because even fairly large-scale commercial piracy on and off the Internet is treated with extreme leniency in the UK.
In a country like Britain, which prides itself on its sense of justice and fairness, it can’t be right to have such a huge imbalance in the legal system, where an ordinary single mother of two making a single mistake is treated more harshly than a for-profit criminal like Mr Guiness. Equally, how can one set of file-sharers be the subject of a simple ISP ‘warning letter‘, another pick up a £16,000 bill and others get hauled off to the police station for interrogation, fingerprinting, DNA sampling and subsequent trial, for the same offenses?
It’s crystal clear - to the man in the street the legal system to deal with file-sharing right now in the UK seems just about as clear as mud and maybe, just maybe, it’s time for the government to step and decide once and for all. Should file-sharers be warned, bankrupted or jailed? Don’t forget Mr Brown, there are an estimated 6 million of them.
This is an edited part of a bigger article so please go read the rest for the fine details, nice commentry Enigmax
I think the whole topic is crystal clear in what is wrong with the current UK law and the sad fact that the government are not making any clear guidlines because it may block them personally from receiving future recording and movie industry handouts.
