The ministers claim that violation of copyright on the Internet on commercial scale should be punishable by up to 10 years in jail. The Intellectual Property Office and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills recently launched a consultation, which suggests to significantly increase the present maximum sentence of 2 years.

The consultation aims to equal online offences with equivalent large-scale copyright infringement of physical products.

The UK Intellectual Property Minister announced that the government takes copyright crime extremely seriously, since the local creative industries are worth over £7bn to the UK economy and should be protected from online criminal enterprises. Apparently, toughening penalties for commercial-scale infringement is supposed to offer greater protections to businesses and send a message to deter criminals.

In the meantime, the head of the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit points out that advances in technology and the popularity of the worldwide web push more and more criminals to online criminality, so the UK prosecution system should reflect the unit’s moves to a more digital world.

It should be noted that the British creative industries, including movie, TV and music, provide for more than 1.6 million jobs. The consultation aims to offer them further protection from large-scale copyright violations and provide a deterrent.

According to the Director General of the Alliance for Intellectual Property, the consultation in question is very welcome as the industry feels a clear anomaly in the way that Internet copyright infringement is treated by the current UK justice system. At the moment, online copyright violation is covered by the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 and is punishable by a maximum of 2 years in prison.