Ignorance of the law may not affect guilt or innocence, but does it have any influence upon the penalties handed down by judges?

I'm curious because so many laws are a mess, particularly when there are international treaties involved. Just take a look at copyright. Someone could easily download a book from these forums with the reasonable expectation that it is in the public domain in their country only to find themselves prosecuted for copyright infringement, simply because they don't know how the public domain works in their own country (let's face it, copyright law is usually discussed from the American perspective online).

Even if they "knew" the law for their own country, it is quite possible that they would make an error while researching the copyright status because they do not understand the law fully or how copyright is affected by international treaties. In these days you probably aren't even safe buying a public domain work from an online book store, thus trusting the "experts" to make the judgement, simply because online retailers don't put enough effort into researching the origin of their books.

In other words, because of the complexity of copyright laws, it is quite possible that you are committing a crime simply by reading. And it simply doesn't sound right if a judge wouldn't take that into consideration.