In Japan, you can now get 2 years in prison for downloading "pirated" files

In many countries, the work of "pirates" is looked through with your fingers. Yes, in Germany, France and some other countries there are all kinds of laws that should reduce the activity of pirates and sympathizers, but these laws either do not work at all, or work, but badly. In Japan, they decided to tighten anti-piracy legislation, if I may say so, and introduced new laws on October 1, providing for rather harsh punishment for troublemakers of copyright holders. From today, the Japanese, who downloaded the "pirated" files, can get 2 years in prison.

Yes, you read it right: a Japanese Internet user who uploads “counterfeit” files to his PC now faces 2 years in prison or a fine of $ 25,700. Until now, the law provided for rather stringent measures against users who upload illegal files (music, games, programs) to the Network, but nothing was threatened by the “rockers”. By the way, those who upload the mentioned files face a fine of 128 thousand US dollars and 10 years in prison. Now everything has changed.

Laws were revised after independent researchers found out that in Japan they download pirated products 10 times more actively than they buy legal software, films, and music. Actually, who would doubt it. In general, Japan is one of the few countries where such harsh measures are envisaged against those users who download pirated products for themselves, and not upload files to the Web.

Probably tougher measures were taken only in the USA, where for a couple of downloaded tunes they could be fined many tens of thousands of dollars.

Via Mashable