England has the concept of arrestable offences. There are criminal laws which go in front of a magistrate (or a judge & jury if severe enough).

Theft would be a criminal offence. Shop-lifting would be counted as theft.

Violating copyrights is illegal, but it's not a criminal offence. You're not going to be arrested for it. The Crown Prosecution Service won't do anything.

The rights holders can sue for loss of earnings - that's 79pence per track. They can try and sue for the stuff you've shared.

Copyright violation becomes criminal offence if done as part of trade - burning movies to DVD and selling them, for example.

I get the distinction he's making between civil and criminal liability, as I pointed out in my other comment (I just don't think it's useful to keep asserting). I was pointing out in that comment that he was making an unreasonable claim that someone could expect to go to prison for stealing a CD in Canada.

And unless the UK has draconian shoplifting laws I've never heard of, the same holds true there.

People get arrested for shoplifting. So they spend at least a couple of hours in police cells while they're getting booked.

People get fined for shoplifting. Sometimes they don't pay the fines. They go to prison for not paying fines.

It seems you in turn are having difficulty distinguishing "arrest" and "prison". The former involves being put in a jail (or "gaol") for a short period of time, while the latter involves being put in a prison for years on end.

Not for one CD, no. But many people who pirate music have amassed collections worth tens of thousands of dollars (had they been purchased legally). If you were to steal merchandise worth $20,000, yes, I think our laws are pretty strict about that.

Aren't you shifting the framing of the issue right there, suddenly going from "downloading an album" to amassing "collections" worth tens of thousands of dollars?

Also, Canada is signatory to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights; having collections of pirated material deemed to be of "commercial scale" is a criminal offense.

I get that you're trying to distinguish between what are often civil vs. criminal matters, but it's a bit of a stretch. "Stealing" is a term that gets used for a lot of things other than literal theft in criminal law.

> Aren't you shifting the framing of the issue right there, suddenly going from "downloading an album" to amassing "collections" worth tens of thousands of dollars?

No. While the large numbers illustrate my point better, the small ones hold true as well. Steal one album: arrest, criminal record. Download one album: nothing.

> Also, Canada is signatory to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights; having collections of pirated material deemed to be of "commercial scale" is a criminal offense.

I'll have to look into that - thanks.