Germany restricts fines for downloading unlicensed files to stop the rightslessness of the owners

Germany adopted a law that limits the maximum amount of fines for downloading unlicensed music, films and TV shows from the Internet. The maximum fine is limited to 1,000 euros, while the “warning” fine for those caught for the first time cannot exceed 155 euros.

The law is directed not so much against users, as against rightholders, more precisely, law firms that represent their interests. They recently took the fashion to carry out mass mailings of letters threatening large fines, intimidating people.

Opinion polls conducted by the consumer rights protection society showed that about 4.3 million people, some of whom were 14 years old, received letters with the threat of fines. The average amount of the imputed fine was 800 euros for each case of violation.

“Some law firms have organized a real business on the mailing of such notices. It went out of control, ”says German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger (Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger) in a comment after the new law was adopted.
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For their part, the associations of rights holders disapproved of the adoption of the new law. They believe that it sends the wrong message to the audience. The Managing Director of the German Music Industry Association said that some might misunderstand the law as “a free ticket for illegal file sharing.”

Advocates of freedom of information, however, are also not entirely satisfied, because the law provides for fines of more than 1,000 euros in the vaguely described “special cases”. At the same time, the German authorities recently condemned 3 and 4.5 years, respectively, to the operators of the torrent.to and kino.to websites, who distributed pirated content.

One way or another, but the initiative of German lawmakers to limit the size of fines goes against the general global movement to toughen penalties for users downloading unlicensed content. For example, in the United Kingdom last week a special police unit began to work to investigate intellectual property violations - the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU). To carry out its activities, this PIPCU will receive 2.56 million pounds from the state budget and will fight, among other things, with piracy on the Internet.