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Music pirates and illegal sharers could face a sentence of ten years inprisonment in a new shake-up in government.
A call for the sentence to be increased from two years to ten years emerged as a 'significant deterrant' to copyright infringement offenders, especially to those who use it for 'large-scale financial gain,' according to Music Business Worldwide.
These new proposals will see the sentence for digital copyright infringement aligning with those prosecuted for physical goods.
Intellectual Property Minister Baroness Neville-Rolfe spoke in favour of the change: “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.
She went on to descrive the message they wish to send: “By toughening penalties for commercial-scale online offending we are offering greater protections to businesses and sending a clear message to deter criminals.”
Notourious music pirate website The Pirate Bay experienced a police seige at their main office in Stockholm back in December 2014, as reported by Wired at the time: “There were a number of police officers and digital forensics experts there" Swedish prosecutor Fredik Inglad explained. "This took place during the morning and continued until this afternoon. Several servers and computers were seized, but I cannot say exactly how many.”
They went on to make a comeback in February where their logo changed to a phoenix rising from the ashes.
