Just for the sake of completeness: you could also have used the commandline switch -C.  In your case, to set the UTF-8-ness of the filehandles STDIN and STDOUT:

#!/usr/bin/perl -CIO

use utf8;  # the script's encoding, i.e. literal strings, regexes

# ...
[download]

(or, instead of -CIO, you could have written -C3, if you like it shorter...)  See perlrun for the details.