The City of London Police's Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) claims to have "dismantled a gang suspected of uploading and distributing tens of thousands of karaoke tracks online." However, it turns out that this "gang" is actually three blokes, aged 60, 53, and 50: one man is from Barnstaple, Devon and two men live in Bury, Lancashire.

PIPCU's press release says "hundreds of albums have had their copyright uploaded by the men, leading to thousands and thousands of tracks being accessed illegally and depriving legitimate music companies of a significant amount of money." That sounds dramatic, but once again the reality is rather different.

An online list of the karaoke titles provided by the "gang," which calls itself KaraokeRG, says "they were created primarily because they are not available from any professional karaoke manufacturers." This means that far from losing "a significant amount of money," music companies were actually deprived of little or nothing, since there were no legal copies that people could pay for.

As Ars has previously reported, when legal offerings become available piracy is reduced, and the converse is also true. When legal offerings are unavailable people turn to unauthorised versions.

The KaraokeRG website emphasises this is not about money: "These tracks are NOT FOR SALE by KaraokeRG... The tracks are made available for private use only and not intended for commercial use." Despite that fact, the PIPCU press release quotes John Hodge, the British Phonographic Industry's (BPI) Internet investigations chief, as saying, "Instances of commercial-scale copyright infringement are not exempt from investigation and anyone found to be facilitating such illegal activity is not immune from prosecution."

The details of the current case make it clear that this is in no way a "commercial-scale" operation—it was run by three people not for personal gain, but to serve the needs of fellow karaoke enthusiasts that were not being met by music publishers. So why is Hodge calling what seems to be an extremely low-level operation "commercial-scale?" It's probably because "commercial scale" is a key legal concept that the recording industry has been trying to redefine to include activities that don't involve financial gain.

The phrase cropped up in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which was thrown out by the European Parliament in 2012 and in the recently-completed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. According to the TPP rules, "any act of willful copyright infringement on a commercial scale renders the infringer liable to criminal penalties, even if they were not carried out for financial gain, provided that they have a substantial prejudicial impact on the rightsholder." That is, you can be sent to prison for sharing files online even if no money was involved—exactly the kind of disproportionate punishment that the copyright industries have been calling for.

Fortunately, this approach is unlikely to be included in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), currently being negotiated between the EU and US. That's because the TTIP negotiating mandate drawn up by the European Commission explicitly excludes "criminal sanctions" in this area. However, the KaraokeRG lads might want to think twice before visiting the US.