Japan enacts two-year jail terms for illegal downloading

Downloading pirated material in Japan can now earn you two years in prison and a fine of two million yen ($25,600) for each purloined file, with uploaders facing 10 years in the Big House and a fine five times as large.

The laws – some of the toughest ever enacted against illegal downloaders – were passed in June after strong lobbying from the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ).

In addition to the new penalties, the RIAJ is lobbying ISPs to install software to identify and block illegal uploads at the source. However, such software is buggy in the extreme and has been blamed for numerous outages, including interrupting some of the coverage from NASA when the Curiosity rover was landing, and a recent streaming of the Hugo awards.