The Price of Justice

The government tell us that 7 million people in this country share files. It's hard to find any precise data on how many individual files each one of those people are sharing, but 100 seems like a fairly conservative guess.

In the Digital Britain report, the government also tell us that they want to reduce file sharing by 70% within a year. Leaving aside the obvious question of why they don't commit to a 100% target if they really think that file sharers are doing something morally wrong, let's look at what would be involved in reaching their target.

Justice for those accused of file sharing will naturally require the opportunity for those accused to have an opportunity to see the evidence against them and challenge it in a court of law. To reduce file sharing by 70%, assuming 7 million people sharing 100 files each means dealing with 70% of 700,000,000 files. That's 490,000,000 fair trials, or if, as has been rumoured there are to be two different offences, one for uploading, another for downloading, nearly 1 billion fair trials.

Her Majesty’s Courts Service say in their annual report that they dealt with 150,000 criminal cases and 2 million civil claims last year. Can they realistically be expected to cope with an additional 1 billion next year, and has their budget of £1,766,222,000 been expanded 500-fold to do so? The answer, quite simply is no.

The inescapable conclusion is that the government are not intending to fund the expensive luxury of justice for those accused of file sharing. We can only afford to have a system without justice, where simply being denounced by a copyright-holder is sufficient for summary punishment to be dealt out, and that summary punishment will be dealt out to 70% of 7 million people.

If you believe that denying a fair trial to around 5 million people in this country is wrong, maybe it's time to join the Pirate Party?