Isn't everyone missing the point?
Which is that this is the first _criminal_ conviction for filesharing under section 107(1)(e) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Well, certainly in Scotland, but possibly in the UK as a whole (could be wrong on that though).
Until now, copyright infringement was generally handled through the civil courts, rather than criminal. There is a huge difference though between civil law and criminal law. For one thing, companies (except for the bully boys of this world - you know who you were) didn't actually bother suing people all that often because it was usually more trouble than it was worth. For another, it was very difficult to actually force an ISP in the UK to divulge your name and address based on just a record of an IP address, because a judge ruled that, for the purposes of a civil lawsuit, you cannot automatically associate an IP address with a single person. Now that the police can be assured of an easy conviction under the CDPA (given that in the future they will be the ones deciding whether to prosecute and not the CPS) they can simply issue a warrant and the ISP has to cough up.
The Act says that "A person commits an offence who, without the licence of the copyright owner (...) distributes otherwise than in the course of a business to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the owner of the copyright, an article which is, and which he knows or has reason to believe is, an infringing copy of a copyright work." It all hinges on the phrase "affect prejudicially", which is not defined or interpreted in the wording of the Act, and so it was pretty much up to the first judge handling such a case to decide what it meant.
There was some debate at the time as to whether filesharing by an individual could ever "affect prejudicially" a multi-billion pound industry, because some people expected that the Crown would need to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that a significant number of people would have purchased the copyrighted works in question rather than downloading them. Clearly, the judge (or whatever they have in Scotland) has interpreted this phrase rather differently, and in doing so has set a precedent for similar cases.
So, it's open season for filesharers now. All a company anywhere in the world has to do is to harvest IP addresses from a tracker and then if it finds they are located in the UK, send them over to the police as evidence of criminal activity. Job done. The police will then follow up with their customary tact and subtlety, and if the worst comes to the worst, you get 10 years in prison instead of a bill for damages that you can pay off in easy installments.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
