Digital piracy laws in UK

Question

Can someone shed some light on the possible consequences of downloading copyrighted material (pirated movies / music / video games) from the internet in UK?

What I've been able to find is this legislation, that says it's an offense to distribute pirated material, but it does not say anything about just downloading it. That said, a lot of pirated content is distributed via peer-to-peer networks (torrent, magnet, and the likes), which force you to upload the content which you already downloaded (even partially). But it's unclear whether such kind of uploading falls under the definition of "distribution".

Let's consider several different ways of downloading pirated content from the internet:

1. You download pirated content from a file-sharing website (non-p2p download, so no uploading is involved), save it to your computer, and don't share it with anyone else.
2. You download pirated content from a p2p network (torrent), and while you are downloading it, your p2p client software allows other people to download parts of the file that are already saved to your computer. Once you fully download the file, you close the p2p client. But while you were downloading it, several people managed to get parts of the file from your computer.
3. You download pirated content from a p2p network, but this time you mistakenly leave the p2p client open after you finish downloading. It remains open for several days (or even months), and dozens of people have downloaded it from your computer during this time.

Is it possible to face any legal trouble in the UK in these three scenarios? Are the consequences going to differ between them? (Assume that you are downloading the pirated content for your personal use, without any plans to sell or otherwise distribute it).

Answer 1

All your scenarios break the law

You break copyright law when you make a copy or distribute a copy.

Answer 2

There is a distinction between civil and criminal copyright infringement.

The section of the law you cite describes criminal infringement, which is targeted at people who do it for money, or at a large scale. If you do that then you can be arrested.

Merely making a copy for yourself without paying is a civil wrong. It can also be merely a civil wrong if you publish a copy without paying the royalty, but not in a way that creates more harm. For instance, using someone's copyright photograph in a brochure is a civil wrong because doing so doesn't harm the copyright owners ability to claim royalties from any other user. In these cases it is for the copyright owner to sue the infringer for damages.

On the other hand making a movie available for download over the Internet means that the copyright owner doesn't get payment from lots of other people, so that will fall under the bit about "communicating the work to the public will cause loss to the owner of the copyright" in 2A(b)(ii) of the law you cite and hence would be a crime.

Criminal law is about punishment via fines and prison. Civil law is mostly about restitution (i.e. you only pay for the damage you caused). However in cases of particularly flagrant copyright violation the civil courts can impose "additional" damages on top of the actual damages as a punitive measure.