Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming
tillis.senate.gov
tillis.senate.gov
>The Protecting Lawful Streaming Act would apply only to commercial, for-profit streaming piracy services. The law will not sweep in normal practices by online service providers, good faith business disputes, noncommercial activities, or in any way impact individuals who access pirated streams or unwittingly stream unauthorized copies of copyrighted works. Individuals who might use pirate streaming services will not be affected.
This affects platforms, not users. Illegal streaming will not be a felony. Creating a for-profit platform with intent to do illegal streaming will be.
"profiteering" (vs just covering costs) assumes facts not in evidence.
Here's the full text of what is being prohibited:
> PROHIBITED ACT.
> — It shall be unlawful to willfully, and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, offer or provide to the public a digital transmission service that
> (1) is primarily designed or provided for the purpose of publicly performing works protected under title 17 by means of a digital transmission without the authority of the copyright owner or the law;
> (2) has no commercially significant purpose or use other than to publicly perform works protected under title 17 by means of a digital transmission without the authority of the copyright owner or the law;
> or (3) is intentionally marketed by or at the direction of that person to promote its use in publicly performing works protected under title 17 by means of a digital transmission without the authority of the copyright owner or the law.
From my understanding, this basically means they'll go after platforms (since they are the ones doing the act of offering to the public a digital transmission service).
[0] https://www.tillis.senate.gov/services/files/A30B0C08-FB97-4...
It doesn't take you more than a few hours to go over 5000 pages of text, Right?
It seems like irresponsible journalism to not just include the text in any article written about it.
It’s more of a surprise when it IS linked or embedded to read than not
https://www.congress.gov/member/thomas-tillis/T000476
I've had decent results consulting this site.
The bill in question has not, as far as I can tell, been brought up for consideration yet anywhere so the only text that exists is that which is linked in the submission.
Just looking at the co-sponsors alone, I'd be worried about this legislation.
https://rules.house.gov/sites/democrats.rules.house.gov/file...
Firstly it becomes very difficult to argue your streaming service has no 'commercially significant purpose' other than piracy when you're not making much money.
Secondly it gives the copyright enforcing industry a big amount of leverage to pressure you into doing things as failure to cooperate could easily be argued to make your platform intended for piracy.
It is a bit of a concern, but I see it less of a concern than you.
First, we're talking criminal law here, so the state has to argue their case and prove your guilt, not you have to prove your innocence.
Second, you still get 17 U.S. Code § 512 liability protection (DMCA takedown notices and resulting safe harbor) and if you can demonstrate you followed this in court, it would be a lot harder for the state to argue you deliberate did something wrong, especially if this concerns "user generated content" (harder, not impossible).
Third, you're fucked already anyway, ask Kim Dotcom (from megaupload) about it. If the government wants to come after you, it will, regardless of this law, and even regardless of whether you set foot on US soil ever.
>Secondly it gives the copyright enforcing industry a big amount of leverage to pressure you into doing things as failure to cooperate could easily be argued to make your platform intended for piracy.
Again, the law sets out what you have to do to have liability safe harbor under 17 U.S. Code § 512. If you follow that, it would be hard for the music industry to argue otherwise, and it's also not their place to sue you under this law in the first place. It's criminal law, and therefore only the state can prosecute. However, the music industry certainly would try to nudge prosecutors into bringing charges under this law, and/or bring it up in an civil proceedings to bolster their case. It could backfire for them tho, if the state refuses prosecution, then you have an argument in civil court that what you're doing was not considered illegal and the state decided you are not an illegal streaming service (or at least, that there was no sufficient evidence to make that case).
So I think it's not a great law, especially not if you want to do a (user content) streaming startup, but it's not that bad either.
I'm really not a fan of how much our government bends over backwards to protect Disney's IP.
Kim Dotcom is a great example for how much protection is already enjoyed by copyright holders. It's crazy to expand that.
The other thing that really concerns me about this is how easily it could go wrong. Music, in particular, seems to be filled with legal landmines. Imagine hosting your own webpage for your band covering pop songs. Do you now have to fear federal prosecution?
Cases like this
https://variety.com/2020/music/news/katy-perry-dark-horse-re...
Terrify me for what it'll mean for media. Why? because it wasn't a clear cut "No, don't be stupid, these are totally different songs".
I don't see anything in the law suggesting strict liability applies, therefore the state has to also show mens rea ("guilty mind"), i.e. the act was willful (or criminally negligent). Or am I missing something?
I guess it is worrying that the trial didn't decide if bits that small are protected or not before going on to decide if infringement happened, but I think this is mostly worrying for Katy Perry as it indicates that the hired lawyers are bad at their job.
That was downloads. Commercial download piracy did indeed already have a lot of serious legal penalties. Commercial streaming piracy did not.
Although factually correct, this is not how the system works in most circumstances. If someone in power believes you committed a crime based upon the current law and you get charged for that crime, fat chance you will be arguing semantics in court. You will be taking a plea deal unless you are extremely well funded.
I’m mostly wondering why we need to make these explicit laws to give more ammo to prosecutors. Is this really something that needs to be addressed now? Do we need to further criminal liability because the copyright enforcing industry can shift the expenses of policing their content onto publicly funded mechanisms?
My opinion is that I dislike bringing up Kim as a martyr for this every time it comes around/find it somewhat damaging to the argument. The entirety of the data and all servers were hosted in the US. They had vendors in the US, they had a significant US connection and jurisdiction almost certainly applies.
It was/is relatively obvious to pretty much anyone looking in from outside that their existence was largely based upon infringement, like the equivalent of current 2020 file locker providers streamtape, streamhoe, vidlox, fastdl, mixdl, dropdl, videobin, mixdrop, mystream, abcvideo, or the past days of 2shared, 4shared, filesonic, uploadedto... You really only ever saw those links in a few places and you know what they are for, they magically stayed up for months. It isn't a "personal files" argument, they were pretty explicitly knowingly profiting off this kind of activity, especially with megavideo streaming loading every kind of malicious pop-everything ad known to humankind.
The same files/shows/movies rarely lasted more than a day or two on Mediafire or Box.
If I play a DJ set over Twitch it could be argued that I'm doing it for profit because it's a form of self-promotion.
It also means that anyone who receives a DMCA take-down suit on YouTube can be accused of illicit streaming - which puts a lot of compilation creators into a legal grey area. Not to mention creators of original music who are on the wrong end of an illicit rights grab.
While the intent may be go to after pirate streaming, the reality is that aggressive lawyers can easily broaden the scope.
You're not performing without the authority of the copyright owner or the law.
If it's a peer-to-peer streaming service where media consumers also serve media to other users, then the argument could be made that users themselves are providing the "digital transmission service".
There may not even be an identifiable, centralized "platform".
This seems tailored to kill PopcornTime.
Your defense might be that you thought you were only a user, not a dealer with intent to distribute.
And then the prosecution will enter this HN comment into evidence, proving that you knew exactly what you were doing.
Would a reasonable person with technical knowledge agree that such a scenario falls under this law? No. But do you really think the RIAA isn’t going to put pressure on prosecutors to go after individuals? Do you really think they’ll allow technically-competent jurors?
I don’t trust anyone involved here. There’s no way this won’t be abused to go after average people.
Perhaps simply a monetized streaming channel where I dance to the current hits is enough to put me in jail... it’s certainly seems enough to at least put me on trial.
I think you have to wonder: what’s insufficient about the civil and criminal laws? What is the current serious problem with streaming that this very strong law is needed to stamp it out?
To me it seems inevitable that it will be applied much more strongly than what you are thinking. “Purpose”, “intentionally”, “significant”, “primarily” can be, and therefore probably will be, argued to have wide meanings.
You can always have a podcast that reviews songs, and people have been reviewing songs for as long as there has been music without the need to play substantial portions of the song itself. You just can't be the one distributing songs as a commercial enterprise and then saying that because there's a video of you dancing that makes copyright infringement acceptable.
I, for one, will be glad if these go away. (Plus, get them out of my feed, youtube. I don't watch them.)
Apparently they're so successful that other people are doing it now. I saw someone totally unrelated to music reacting to amateur music songs.
I am not certain whether that makes a difference.
> the term ‘digital transmission service’ means a service that has the primary purpose of publicly performing works by digital transmission;
So it probably makes less of a difference than we might hope.
I don't see 'platform' in the text, where did you get that from?
Be careful. That's not what the law actually says. It doesn't mention "platform".
The term used is "digital transmission service", which is defined in terms of the undefined term "service". Perhaps there is some established narrow legal definition of the term "service" that will keep this law from being abused? Let's all hope so!
Whoa. This is crazy. Laws are stupid in that they can't be custom tailored for the situation of the accusation at hand. If I come out with a 0-day that allows me to bypass encryption of say Netflix that allows me a pristine copy of a video source that I then later stream on a paid-for streaming platform, then yes, that would be stealing. Therefore, criminal.
However, if you're some YT streamer, podcaster, etc that happens to receive money from ad share revenue and you have a segment with some copyrighted music in the background, then that is a far far way off from a criminal act. Civil maybe, but come on.
Laws need to be written so the punishment fits the crime/offense.
No, that would be copyright infringement, which is not theft.
If you look at (3), an activity doesn't even need to be for commercial gain if it's "intentionally marketed," and moreover it does not need to actually perform a work to be in violation - it simply needs to be marketed as such and "offer" a service.
Which means that even an individual leeching a torrent (sending no copyrighted material in outbound packets) might arguably be in violation of the act, simply by sending out packets that advertise their membership in the network and the potential for them to upload copyrighted material.
IANAL and this would need to be tested in court. But it's dangerous ground.
> It shall be unlawful to will-fully, and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, offer or provide to the public a digital transmission service that...
The term "private financial gain" typically includes an individual receiving anything of value. I agree it doesn't come after the consumers of illegally streamed content but I don't think it's fair to say it only targets for-profit platforms. And it's certainly much broader than targeting "criminal organizations" as the linked (not HN) headline wrongly suggests. Someone uploading protected content in exchange for reddit gold could easily fall within this definition of criminal conduct. People who "trade" files with one another might fall within it, too. I think the linked press release is intentionally downplaying the scope.
[1] "The Protecting Lawful Streaming Act would apply only to commercial, for-profit streaming piracy services. The law will not sweep in normal practices by online service providers, good faith business disputes, noncommercial activities, or in any way impact individuals who access pirated streams or unwittingly stream unauthorized copies of copyrighted works. Individuals who might use pirate streaming services will not be affected."
[2]https://www.tillis.senate.gov/services/files/A30B0C08-FB97-4...
> and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain,
What if someone starts a streaming service where they get paid in 'tradable' items in a 3rd party game, where the EULA of said game makes it clear that that such items have no monetary value?
(1) is _primarily _ designed or provided for the purpose of publicly performing works protected under title 17 by means of a digital transmission without the authority of the copyright owner or the law;
(2) has _no commercially significant purpose or use other than_ to publicly perform works protected under title 17 by means of a digital transmission without the authority of the copyright owner or the law; or
(3) is _intentionally marketed by_ or at the direction of that person to promote its use in publicly performing works protected under title 17 by means of a digital transmission without the authority of the copyright owner or the law.
Emphasis are mine. It's clear to me through reading this that a service/platform that specifically aims and is marketed as streaming pirating content will suffer the consequences here.
The three paragraphs you've quoted are "or" elements. A person need only violate one of the three to be criminally liable. Paragraph 2 is broad enough to include just about anything.
1 - condition 1;
2 - condition 2; or
3 - condition 3.
Does this mean that condition 1 should be applied all the time (1 and 2 _or_ 1 and 3) or (1 or 2 or 3) in order to be liable?
You can see an example of drafting for (1 and 2) or 3 in paragraph 4 of the definitions section to give you a better idea of how the language and structure would differ in this section if it were intended to be read as (1 and 2) or (1 and 3).
Basically, there aren't any in common use and no non-commercial OSS license was ever approved by OSI as no one could come up with a bullet proof way of defining what is and what is not non-commercial use for free software.
And I'm afraid the same lack of clear definition can get misused here as a result.
This is fundamentally evil. Our senators are a pile of shit-enabling shit.
Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25498551 is also not ok. Could you please review the guidelines and use HN as intended?
Hasn't this been the case since... forever?
That is already a crime. It's called Commercial copyright infringement and comes with rather extreme. This is even in international law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agre...
My read of this proposed bill is that it's not misleading. Illegal streaming by users becoming a felony. No different than what SOPA was proposing. Willful infringement becoming a felony is their goal and they will achieve it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/16/men-plead...
https://torrentfreak.com/movie-pirate-pleads-guilty-faces-fi...
I think it did. The Jetflicks (essentially bootleg Netflix for $10/month) founders plead guilty to criminal copyright infringement and money laundering just recently. There was also a case covered on TorrentFreak of someone in Nevada running a similar scheme who just plead guilty to criminal copyright infringement.
Why not?
This doesn't cover the use of an illegal service. This goes after the platforms offering such content/services, not the individuals consuming the content/services.
> "Hey guys, that relatively new way of dealing drugs is no longer a misdemeanor, now it's a felony."
> "But isn't using drugs already a felony?"
> "... yes, they already have a law to go after users; this new law just reclassifies the type of crime it is for cartels offering drugs."
> "Yeah, I'm not talking about the new bill. If it's already illegal they don't need another law to go after the users."
No laws have changed for consumers. I'm not sure what you're trying to say, please clarify.
The title isn't misleading. You're just providing more details than exists in the title, which is the purpose of the link, which does provide that information.
But more to the point, the most objectionable part of this isn't the specific details of the streaming changes. It's... what business does any of this have in a Coronavirus relief bill? It's preposterous.
I feel like honest legislators should really start using this process against itself. The next time there is an omnibus bill like this, insert a line that says something like "every part of the December 2020 Coronavirus relief act not directly related to Coronavirus relief is repealed" and then let it sail through with that in the same way this did. Give them a disincentive to do things this way because they'll just lose it again next year.
We didn’t have a coronavirus relief bill until yesterday. Bridging votes is part of policy negotiation.
The large majority of people agree that there should be Coronavirus relief. The people refusing are only doing so in order to perpetrate a stick up on something they know everybody wants in order to get something in that not everybody wants.
If you want your stupid garbage into the law, convince the majority of people that it's the right thing to do on its own merits. Horse trading against unrelated legislation is despicable, and doing it in the context of something people don't have time to read before they vote on it is even worse.
I mean, heck, why bring up separate bills in Congress at all? Let's put off all legislation for the entire year and then we'll pass everything as one bill when it comes time for the spending bill. We don't even need to meet during the year, we'll just do the entire process via backroom deals and give people a few hours to sign on before they vote yes or no on everything for the entire year. It's not a broken legislative system, it's just compromise! /s
Yes bills are complicated, yes, compromise is necessary, but also there are obvious lines we can cross where there's no reason for a bill to be so bloated and discordant, and this bill crosses those lines.
I'm not defending omnibus bills here nor was I above. I was defending pork. Even small bills are susceptible to legislation unrelated to the headline title sneaking in. That isn't always a bad thing.
> there are obvious lines we can cross where there's no reason for a bill to be so bloated and discordant
Conciseness takes work. Messes are easy. Rushed bills are heavy because the work of whittling it down hasn't been done.
In this case, I happened to be close to a senior Senate staffer as this bill was getting wrapped up. The way it works is each team takes a section and masters it. Tracks it from start to finish, keeps tabs on interested and affected parties, and reaches out to experts for clarification where necessary. This gets compiled into notes for senior staffers who distill it into policy and negotiating points for the elected. When I asked detailed question about the bill, knowledgeable answers came back within minutes. There is no Gell-Mann amnesia, at least not on this Senator's team. Anybody claiming they didn't have time to review the legislation is lying, unprepared or incompetent.
I agree something is given up by not having any single person with complete knowledge of the bill. But in a crisis, you don't have a choice between a concise non-existent bill and the hodgepodge. It's between the uncased sausage and going hungry. This was a self-inflicted crisis. There were months to do what was pushed against a deadline. In that, I find institutional failing. But given the deadline and the process, a big bill with some junk in it is not a bad outcome.
It's a terrible outcome, you just may have not had a better one available to you. But let's not mince words, a 5500 page bill that no one has read in its entirety and that Congresspeople are blindly voting on because they literally do not have any other choice except to shut down the government during a pandemic -- that is a bad outcome.
> There were months to do what was pushed against a deadline. In that, I find institutional failing.
I strongly agree. I think where we differ is that I'm looking at the end result of that process as the fruits of that institutional failing, not as some kind of heroic last-minute turnaround that saved the day.
I don't mean to disparage the work you or others put in here, but you can have a multi-month project that gets ignored until the last week and you can accurately say at that point that there's no other choice but to throw something together in a few days to satisfy the requirements, and you might even do something incredible to get any finished project at all. But that doesn't mean the result isn't terrible.
I'm not giving anybody kudos over this, people should be looking at this result and saying, "something is seriously wrong with our political system that a bill like this is what we ended up with." That should be the main takeaway. A political system that only works during crisis, and that can only get the legislation passed when there's no other choice except to shut down the government -- that's a broken political system. It's not something anyone at any point in the process should be proud of.
It creates felonies like:
"Hey, if you'll chip in a few bucks, I can run a plex server for the dorm."
or
"Hey, neighbor, sure you can use my wifi to watch Netflix, if you'll pay half."
But look at the actual text; there is enough ambiguity and opportunity here to use this as the launching pad for very questionable prosecution. If you're in a P2P network and getting free media does it qualify as a commercial enterprise and material gain?
Do you really trust that the RIAA won’t pressure prosecutors into targeting individuals? Heck, if you run a home media server, a good team of lawyers could probably convince a technologically-incompetent jury that you’re subject to this law.
> It shall be unlawful to willfully, and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, offer or provide to the public a digital transmission service that...
We found Google’s ad tracking code in your server! (No need to tell the jury how ubiquitous Google Analytics is.) Something like that.
Wasn't this already a felony? I clearly remember getting into legal problems with MPAA when I was 15 years old and made an online version of Popcorn Time, and that wasn't P2P.
Locast is a non-profit platform that streams local channels. It’s been sued left and right by broadcasters. So far unsuccessfully. Is this law the next step in putting pressure on them and others?
/s
Although I am a bit surprised since this law also applies to movies that are not profitable. In such cases producers should be happy that someone wants to give access to them despite loosing money while doing it.
One notable example of such unprofitable movie is "Return of the Jedi", which, after 40 years, has not provided any net income. Not even one cent. I am really impressed by heroism of all those movie producers that keep working so hard even though they earn nothing.
Or maybe it is not true that those movies are not profitable, maybe, for some strange reason, law enforcement is able to track all those pesky pirates, fish them from New Zealand hideaways, but is and was not able to retrieve a single tax dollar from movie studios for the past 70 years.
That's a puzzle which is apparently somehow missed by venerable members of US Congress and Senate.
The difficulty in doing so is a big part of the problem. As per AOC's comments on twitter yesterday, at 2PM Members of Congress got 5000 pages of bill dropped on their desk with a vote call at 4PM.
The whole thing needs to be much more transparent.
I don’t know why the behavior would exist otherwise..
The supreme power of the leadership more a symptom of the 50/50 political split, which empowers the party machinery. The legislative leadership weren’t household names at most points in time.
In my state the senators are democratically elected, is that not the case in yours? Or is your statement lamenting the fact that the country gives representation to states as distinct entities?
One of its nadir points in terms of accomplishments was preventing anti-lynching legislation from having a floor vote for 40-50 years.
"Senator so and so refused to support the end of violence against babies!!" or other such nonsense.
There's two major reasons I see why that doesn't happen. First, a 'no' vote is still taking a position. It requires additional explanation to differentiate "no because I couldn't understand it in time" and "no because I think it's a bad idea." That's a fair bit of nuance, which these days is... well often difficult to accurately and easily convey to others.
The second reason is that it's not just a matter of one vote per issue. It's not one massively complex issue that requires 5k+ pages to fully flesh out. It's a bunch of different stuff all jammed together, and votes can only cover the entire thing. Some of those things are often simple enough, and some are very time critical. Do you want to hold up the time critical bits for the rest of it?
If you do, can you get constituents to understand why, and agree with your decision to hold things up? For every voter that you can't convince, your political opponents now have an easy in. Can you afford that?
This is very true, but why, in the year 2020, is it still true?
Why does it seem like we can argue only about object level matters, and almost no one [1] can see that the framework we run politics on top of is fundamentally flawed? Would it maybe help if we were to consciously force ourselves to conceptualize society/humanity as a video game, that has parameters and behaviors, and the state of the system can be acted on, but our actions will only be effective if the game allows it?
[1] A rare exception to this in my opinion is Jimmy Dore's initiative to force a floow vote on Medicare for All
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Medicare+for+All%22+%22ji...
What I like about this approach is that it kind of pulls the "invisibility cloak" off of political claims and rhetoric, exposing the truth that lies inside. It appears that he's going to lose this battle (a vote will not be held), but even so it has forced a new level of propaganda to be deployed into the memeplex on very short notice, making it much easier for the average Joe to see through it. I think this is a good strategy: take away control of the playing field, so politicians can't use pre-written and memorized rhetorical talking points to dismiss obvious desires like affordable healthcare, which has fairly bi-partisan support among voters.
https://www.newsweek.com/69-percent-americans-want-medicare-...
It doesn't really matter if M4A is not achieved (that's where we're at anyways) - the main strategic goal imho should be to bring awareness to the public mind of the notion that politicians are not being truthful (notice I am not saying they are lying) when they say that their goals and actions are to execute "the will of the people", or do what is "best" for the American population. Politics, as it is, is largely all theatre, although even the participants themselves may not actually be consciously aware of it.
"All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players."
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56966/speech-all-the-...
> Would it maybe help if we were to consciously force ourselves to conceptualize society/humanity as a video game, that has parameters and behaviors, and the state of the system can be acted on, but our actions will only be effective if the game allows it?
For those interested in the first question, and the answer to why the second question is not the right way to go, check out Adam Curtis's most recent film, HyperNormalisation [0]
I think you're maybe misinterpreting his message - he describes our reality as if it is a video game that's been created for us to live in, which is my very point. Thinking of it this way allows one to see the system more clearly, and in turn manipulate it to one's own ends (and very easily, provided those embedded within it are unaware of the situation, which is very much the case).
If (even for the sake of discussion) one assumes this to be the case, then availing oneself of this very same technique (and do it better, leveraging superior thinking & magnitude of compute (via crowd-sourcing), lower requirements for stealth, etc) to fight back seems like a no-brainer to me.
Getting those who live within such a system to even consider this possibility on the other hand, this is not an easy task. I see no no-brainer way to go about this, other than just talking about it explicitly. I'm essentially proposing that we apply the very same systems analysis techniques that we would use at work to the very system we live within, but it seems this is a very non-intuitive idea.
More importantly though, you can’t reasonably budget more than a trillion dollars without some horse trading. AOC’s real problem is that she doesn’t trust her party leadership, and they don’t trust her. If she trusted her leadership there’s no need to complain before making her yes vote.
The complaint isn’t against a 5000 page law, it’s a 5000 page law with 2 hours to determine the vote. Regardless of party lines, whenever this happens we should rightfully hear complaints.
Why? If the relief is federal, which I understand to be the case, no state or local level relief, then why must there be horse trading? Do the international relief in another bill. Do the illegal streaming is a felony in another bill. Etc.
It's like creating a massive program around a god function with globals instead of setting up sane module boundaries based on data structures and their relationships. You're gonna have a bad time.
Choosing what industries, etc get relief is very political.
We should outlaw bills like these.
They aren't forced to, except by their own (collective) consent. They could vote to split the bill, propose smaller bills and vote down the bigger ones in preference, etc.
Conglomerate bills are a tool to reach mutually tolerable compromise.
This is just politispeak for quid-pro-quo. If conglomerate bills are outlawed then maybe we can vote on issues instead of on whether everyone's back is sufficiently scratched.
And what I'm saying is this never happens in America. Politics is a team sport and voters just blame the other team. We've just had the worst pandemic in living memory and the worst economic contraction in a generation and nearly every Senator won re-election despite months of inaction.
Yes, compromise and quid-pro-quo are the same thing. So what?
> If conglomerate bills are outlawed then maybe we can vote on issues instead of on whether everyone's back is sufficiently scratched.
You are voting on issues either way, and, cynically, voting on whether everyone's back is sufficiently scratched, either way. A single subject rule, such as is in place in the California legislature and several other state legislatures, simply reduces scope within which compromise can occur (or, alternatively, just makes the legislative compromises more complex and opaque as mechanisms are found to obey the technical requirements of the rule while evading its substantive intent, such as building in contingencies in one bill that are triggered by the passage or not of another bill.)
Quid-pro-quo isn't the problem, being able to trade-off across issues is a good thing.
The problem is legislators serving powerful narrow interests rather than the broad public interest, but narrowing the permitted scope of individual enactments doesn't do anything to help that.
It can be a good thing sometimes. But it can be also used for "do the thing you'd otherwise never agree to for your thing to pass" which is more of an ultimatum. Or even, "yeah, and add an aircraft carrier to that" to block some effort completely. (I think that was a recent relief bill, but can't find the link now)
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Laws_governing_the_initiative_proces...
The title of this post is: Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming
Are you sure? Why are we passing completely new laws in our yearly budget bill? What does streaming laws have to do with paying forestry service janitors?
Maybe we wouldn't have a government shutdown emergency every year if our representatives didn't try to shoehorn their pet laws and their <strike>customers'</strike>lobbyists' favorite regulations in at the same time.
Since most of the bill is presumably the same as earlier drafts, we’d be mostly just looking for red flags. Heck, in theory you could even run it through a diff tool!
It was hurried, yes. But hardly unusual.
I could even see clever presentations like a pie chart illustrating how much of a bill is actually related to the topic at hand. That would make a fantastic tool for an opposition member to use in order to illustrate the absurdities of these omnibus bills.
This looks like a case of Snopes trying to make Nancy Pelosi look good without justification. Their "important context" doesn't actually improve anything.
a) quite literally factual - she said those exact words b) semantically similar in and out of context - Even if you read the whole speech she gave, she still seems to be implying that you need to have the act passed so that you can see what it looks like when implemented. She gives a rough draft of important desired outcomes (many of which ended up being false), but the point of that one one sentence remains the same: to establish that the bill needs to be passed in order for it's real implications to be understood.
To be honest, I half agree with Pelosi here, but snopes is definitely trying to provide her with some unwarranted cover here.
It will be both chilling and pointless and sad, all at the hands of pro-corporate legislators who can't see the people for the dollars in the way.
The law doesn't set a threshold of gain by the perpetrators and that will make it broadly abused: 16-year-olds tried as adults for terrorism and streaming due to videogame habits; security researchers revealing vulnerabilities; the poor trying to share an MMA fight with their friends.
Streaming companies seem to be doing just fine.
The question of "did they profit" is a pretty low bar to clear. And in an era where people mindlessly exchange money via Venmo and similar platforms, it's probably not going to be difficult to find a union of the set "was granted access to plex account" and "has exchanged money in the past." I've seen prosecutors try to sell some rather asinine arguments, so there might not even be a requirement for money to change hands to be considered selling "for-profit," maybe bringing over some pizzas once or something is enough.
> for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain
I'd not be shocked if the argument for "financial gain" is "I didn't lose money paying a viewing fee".
"One study," funded by people who also -- just by mere coincidence -- gave a lot of money to Thom Tillis' election campaign.
Playing only a single song just long enough to earn a copyright strike means this feature doesn't exist. Instead, it's an implementation of a checkbox on a settings screen that enables some side effects that are not what the text next to the checkbox describes.
Register a company in Brazil!
Doesn't that require having employees in, having facilities in, taking payments in or making payments to residents of said country?
Most of the streaming services this legislation is aimed at don't rise to that bar relative to the USA, as low as it is.
It's not a crime. What criminal law is being broken?
Original music is created by the game creators and streaming rights are included in the software EULA.
Licensed music is created by third party artists and is usually not included in the software EULA because the music artist/publisher does not grant that type of license to the game creator/publisher. A gamer streaming gameplay that includes the copyrighted song will trigger automatic copyright protection on the streaming service they use and is subject to DMCA takedowns.
Modern games often include a "streamer mode" which replaces or mutes the licensed music.
In the US copyright infringement is unlawful but it's almost always civil law.
Can you point to the section of DMCA that you think turns this into a criminal offence rather than just civil infringement?
Twitch already has mostly DRM aware content creators - I hear them talking about 'rights' quite a lot in their streams.
It's the worst listening experience ever. It's much easier to just go to YouTube and listen to the song uploaded by an official channel.
Baseball, which I like, seems to be a pretty good deal to me, ends up being about .97$ a game for 3 hours of content. So I choose to pay for it. My only real complaint is I can't watch it offline.
I will say that nfl does have a nice feature (it's like $25 for the end of the season so I can watch stuff delayed) where about an hour or 2 after the game (editing time) they actually just auto-cut the broadcast so there are no commercial breaks.
"The law will not sweep in normal practices by online service providers, good faith business disputes, noncommercial activities, or in any way impact individuals who access pirated streams or unwittingly stream unauthorized copies of copyrighted works. Individuals who might use pirate streaming services will not be affected."
Companies will lose free marketing and word of mouth.
Companies will have to work harder to persuade the populace to acquire commercial flicks/sports. Youtube and cheap magnate streaming services win. Small studios or independent film makers, lose their free marketing distribution channels (personal opinion)
Felony though, wow, that's just evil.
I see it happening with digital game stores: my friends refuse to buy anything outside of Steam. It goes as far as not even getting free games from Epic, Ubi or GOG, because they'll have to create another account in another service.
The problem, and the concern from groups like EFF, is that on the other hand people who are not really pirates (ie. their purpose is not to serve a substitute for buying the work) but who may violate copyrights in the process (ex. streamers who don't have distribution rights to music playing in the background) could be covered as long as they are in some way monetized, and it would not be hard to play this as a "major infringer" with a number of songs.
We have that in the French Constitution and it's very useful to take down this kind of thing we call a "cavalier législatif".
That's on the way to my hope that eventually we can create a formal model of the text to allow spotting inconsistencies (or even edge cases), but I don't know if that's even possible
I don't see any discussion in the thread - and find that the recent dust up over this type of DRM gray area use is more than correlated with this type of new legislation.
After the obligatory IANAL [1]: the fate of `dl-youtube` would be tied to your ability to construe `dl-youtube` as a digital transmission service based on §2319C.a.2.
To me seems like the the risky clauses of §2319C.a.2 are : `primary purpose` and `publicly performing`; where primary purpose is tough because their is author intent, and then the proportions of real-world usage, and `publicly performing` is actually a pointer not to common usage of the phrase, but to definitions set forth later in the document.
Read the actual law [PDF]: https://www.tillis.senate.gov/services/files/A30B0C08-FB97-4...)
[1] - I Am Not A Lawyer
Truly. I purchased Murfie, and am attempting to re-build their business. It's a streaming service that leverages media people own to give them access to that content.
This feels like a targeted attack on my business plan by Disney. I can't see another reason it would be so targeted.
BUT... I believe the service I'm providing is legal and I'll fight this battle to the end.
Basically some congresspeople wanted to pass the $600 stimulus check, and others bundled on the CASE Act with it. And this will pass because anyone opposing it "doesn't love America".
Why vote against it or veto when you can just never bring it to a vote?
Not that it's not worth fighting but this is clearly an attempt to garner clicks/votes and we should be fighting back here.
Streaming a felony? Madness.
Newsom closing outdoor dining while allowing Hollywood to film is making more sense now. Sorry for going political on HN but this really bugs me.
IOW: We try to mitigate and reduce. I am not one tiny bit interested in 'getting back' at the individual. Prison as 'punishment' is fundamentally stupid.
Mitigation and reduction is already being done. Punishment is a fundamental deterrent that has been used by societies around the world for thousands of years.
And somehow you contrived a solution in your imagination that you think is so correct that you can judge everyone else as dumb.
> is a fundamental deterrent that has been used by societies around the world for thousands of years.
Lots of things have been done for thousands of years, and we now realize that some of them were bad ideas. I believe that punishment should absolutely go in the bucket of last resorts. IMO it represents an absolute failure of the imagination of our society.
Your last sentence doesn't make any sense, doesn't address any point I made, no matter how briefly. It's just you insulting me. I don't think that is likely to convince anyone. Like punishment, we do it because it feels good. I think we can be better than that. This is a point that we might not agree on.
Also, It will be interesting to see how “THEY” go about picking away at Section 230.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_In...
In those days it was just one of the many ridiculous moments associated with the rapid 1990s Internet situation in California. I was annoyed but only slightly, knowing that this guy was personally instigating legal action on millions of others. However, this is all true.
how so?
> bipartisan legislation that would punish large-scale criminal streaming services that willfully and for commercial advantage or private financial gain offer to the public illicit services dedicated to illegally streaming copyrighted material.
> The Protecting Lawful Streaming Act would apply only to commercial, for-profit streaming piracy services.
I'd argue the current trend towards exclusives / market fragmentation on video is one such example. Having to buy, then search through 5-6 different streaming services to get what I want is a form of friction, which is non-existent on pirate sites that have everything, for free.
The music industry has got it mostly right, IMO. There are a few players (Youtube Music, Spotify, Apple Music) but they all have mostly the same catalog. They compete on service, not catalog. I'd like to see a similar shift for TV & movies, but it doesn't look likely.
If Netflix was working so well, all those other services wouldn't exist, because they'd have no customers.
You undermine your own argument by saying
> Piracy is not a price problem, it's a service problem
and then say
> for free.
What can be done on the other hand, is to figure out what are the main reasons for piracy (ie, on average, what are the driving factors), and what can be done to remove them.
Packaging in the music industry took a while to adjust: they first fought really hard against Napster and the like, when the customers were quite ready to accept digital content, but the DRM solutions were mostly in the way, or the network technology wasn't quite ready. Nowadays, everyone takes for granted that music is bandwidth cheap, and content owners realized that removing the packaging issue did remove a large part of the piracy, because those who pirated for lack of good delivery didn't have to anymore, and with this market share acquired, the revenues increased, which meant that prices could go down, and thus another chunk of the piracy crowd became customers as well.
I guess that my point is that price isn't a completely solvable problem, but it's not entirely orthogonal to the other issues.
Clearly, price cannot be reduced down to zero, there will always be people finding this or that to be too expensive for what it is. Note that ads do not reduce cost to zero for the consumer in the case of digital streaming: they still have to pay in ad view time, which leads to ad blockers, yet another form of piracy.
> If Netflix was working so well, all those other services wouldn't exist, because they'd have no customers.
Even if Netflix is working perfectly well, they can't have the monopoly of creativity. They might produce good content (something you seem to disagree with, I personally don't have an opinion on that), but they cannot prevent other distributors to do the same. The main reasons for this are that:
- again people cannot be put all in the same bag: what one will be interested in might bore the next,
- "topics" can be exclusive (GP alluded to that): For instance, Disney owns "Star Wars", and if you want to watch some of that stuff, you'll have to go to them.
You won't ever get rid of piracy, but you can reduce it to negligible levels by offering what people want: a reasonable price & a good user experience. Music offers this currently, and piracy is pretty much a solved problem for them: only 2.9% of piracy is music [1]. I'd argue most people prefer having access to all the music they want on the device they want just a click away, for 10-15$ per month, than tracking down & downloading a good-quality torrent that won't give you a virus. Ad-sponsored versions are also an option here, and broadcast TV & radio's rich histories would indicate that's a pretty good business model. Just don't get greedy & do both (looking at you, Cable TV).
[1]: https://brandongaille.com/21-shocking-music-piracy-statistic...
Deciding to buy Netflix is a one-time decision, and then you have access to the full catalog, without any friction. I added "for free", meaning that I don't have to decide whether or not I want it enough to pay, and then enter my payment details, manage an account & password, etc.
When Netflix was the only game in town, it actually made a measurable dent in pirate traffic; a fact which was widely reported at the time. Now that content owners want to have their own Netflix (thus draining its catalogue), piracy rises again [1].
It's true that there's a certain limit the "it's not a price problem" statement. I'm perfectly willing to pay up to a certain amount per month on entertainment services (and I do), but at some point, enough is enough. That certain amount will vary from person to person, the industry just needs to find that sweet spot and stop trying to turn potential clients into criminals.
[1] (https://www.sandvine.com/inthenews/netflix-falls-to-second-p...)
Doubtful. If other US policies are anything to judge by, it is a way to brand normal organizations as criminal organizations for media purposes and to be able to use other tactics against them (civil forfeiture, 'throwing the book at them', etc).
See: US Drug War re: Heroin
Say, a BLM chapter has a copywritten song playing in the background and is taking donations on stream, that would check the boxes of:
- for profit - streaming copywritten content
It may not be written exactly like this, but I have zero doubt it will eventually be used this way.
Streaming is only going to become more pervasive and copyrights are extremely broad + can be basically infinite extendable which allows the justice system to roll up and brand orgs as criminal.
How can companies say they lose profit when the only realistic way I see for that is someone getting a refund and spending it on a competitor?
Either the price is too high [0] or I can't trust the company to put out good media.
[0]: For instance, paying $30 for a limited license to stream Mulan a month early. You don't own it (Disney can and will take it off Disney+), the only benefit is seeing it early and it costs Disney nearly nothing to distribute to another person.
You can't ask people. Very few people will admit "I pirated this because I didn't feel like paying for it like I normally would." People always find ways to justify their actions, so every response would just be some variation of "I pirated this because the legal options are too inconvenient that I normally wouldn't bother so I didn't hurt anyone."
And you never will be able to totally eliminate piracy nor will you be able to definitively attribute gains or losses to changes in piracy. Maybe the quality of the content changed, maybe the economy had a downturn, maybe an advertising campaign was really effective, etc.
This is a self-inflicted wound by media companies, and they are attempting to solve the issue by sending people to prison, instead of taking the money people are ready to spend on their content.
Want to watch show X? Oh, you need Amazon prime. Show Y? Netflix. Show Z? HBO Max. Live sports? You need some BS cable package that costs a ridiculous amount.
Media companies get all mad about IP and yet create walled gardens everywhere. They get no sympathy from me.
Not to mention the Draconian DRM. I can play 4K games at 60fps on Linux, but I cannot play a 4K film from Netflix or listen to music from TIDAL with certain browsers. Fuck that.
[1] https://kodi.tv/
I just want some GoG-like store for movies. Have sales like Steam, price competition, keep what you buy, "complete your collection" bundles, etc.
THis could really work with federation: each rightholder sets up their own shop on a common marketplace. Transfer encryption keys. Maybe even use torrents for distribution? But final files should have no DRM.
Not even for "higher" quality versions. I have an AVI of my LotR movies ripped from DVDs from whenever people bought DVDs and ripped AVIs. The quality is still very good, even played on a 4K TV. I've never sat thinking, "I wish I had the 4k Bluray remaster" while watching it.
But of course that would send even more to piracy....
It makes you wonder if Steve Jobs was correct that people that pirate (songs, Napster back in the day) would be willing to pay for music if it was easy (iTunes) and cheap ($0.99).
I'm not sure if I agree but it is an interesting foil.
Steve literally proceeded to launch a software app store that had DRM out of the wazoo, so even he didn't believe it.
But even it weren't, content creators unwillingness to let Apple sell DRM free media is not evidence that Jobs agrees with them.
[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2541387/itunes-starts-... [2] https://www.macworld.com/article/1138000/drm-faq.html
Personally, I don't think consumers have a right to tell creators, "You have to sell that to me for $x or I will take it without paying." Companies certainly aren't good, but they're not typically stupid either. They're not going to price things to a point where people can't afford them. I think pirates just lie to themselves a lot to justify their actions.
But its not 0% of face value either.
And a lot of piracy battle is to ensure the movie/tv industry does get "Napstered." Napster annihilated the public's perception of the value of songs because even my tech illiterate mother could pirate.
Right now my mom pays for netflix and cable. But if a pirate streaming service was as easy to find and use as netflix is, she'd start using it. So the current laws and enforcement do protect a lot of value now.
There’s also the flipside of some pirates turning into paid customers (think Photoshop).
Then there’s the fact that the number is vastly inflated as some people use the $150,000 maximum fine as the cost of a pirate copy. Never mind the fact that it was actually $5 (or whatever) of “lost” revenue.
Movies and TV shows, all pirated. I'd buy some DVDs if I was really obsessed with something.
Eventually I got a job, and streaming / affordable PC games caught up with reality and met me half-way.
If you put a price on everything I pirated before that time, I'm not sure if I could have afforded that even if I stopped paying rent and buying food completely.
Too bad streaming is getting more fractured again. If I want to watch 6 TV shows, I have to subscribe to 5 streaming services.
I used to think it was beneficial in the old days when most useful software was proprietary and few decent open alternatives existed.
A teenager who wanted to make a custom 3D model for a quake mod needed an extremely expensive 3d animation package from maya or 3dstudio max. A teen doesn't have 3ds or maya money. So they pirate it and learned to use 3ds max or maya and in the process build up an actual skill. Later on when they go on to work in the industry their skill now creates actual demand for said software. In a way it was a gain.
Just a random thought.
"Last year, one study reported that digital video piracy costs the U.S. rich people yatch money $29.2 billion a year."
I figure there are more people who enjoy doing silly things to bother other people than who enjoying yachting.
You can say what you want about IP law; you wouldn't be able to enjoy many big-budget productions if it wouldn't exist. Many jobs, high-paying and low-paying, wouldn't exist. Of course, the business model for content distribution is somewhat nonsensical and the time until content gets in the public domain should be 10 years, but that doesn't mean that IP law shouldn't exist. Not to mention that the 29 billion number is probably also BS.
This is more like me buying from store A than from store B. Am I robbing store B?
Surely not giving to charity is worse than any other economic reallocation?
What do you mean by your first sentence? I am fairly sure that movies do actually cost quite a lot to produce.
That does not even matter since looking at marginal cost of a movie makes no sense. Do you want to see movies? If yes then pay for them, if no then simply don't watch them. Justifying stealing isn't the way to go.
I would guess that a lot of the jobs that are discussed in this thread are fairly specialised ones and if that industry would disappear they would be out of work.
That is an awful lot of time wasted of their lives.
Until we see publishers closing doors due to lack of profits this argument doesn't really work.
I'm not a copyright abolitionist, but I'm curious what the second-order effects are to giving money to companies like Disney that are using that money to expand IP laws, buy up competitors, and impose one specific view of cinema on the entire market?
People should obey laws because generally it's a good idea in a functioning society to obey laws. But to the extent that people can deprive companies like Disney of revenue without breaking the law, I kind of feel like they should do so. Not just by avoiding their products, but by making it harder for them to make money in general. It would be good at this point for companies like Disney to fail and for the media ecosystem to become more diverse.
There are extremely negative effects that come from allowing one corporation to own so much culture. I'm not going to break the law, but I'm also not going to lose sleep over Disney the corporation losing profits, because I want Disney to lose money, and I want them to produce less content. I don't want Disney to be the biggest media producer on the market, they're crowding other people out and using their leverage to control things they shouldn't be able to control.
The byzantine logic here on a supposedly 'smart site' really goes sideways on ideological issues were people have a) some ideology and b) they want it for free.
The failure of your comment is really quite evident: basically 'every purchaser' could make the same statement about 'marginal revenue' in which case, if nobody bought the content, then, there would be no content and no yachts.
Pay of individuals working on set, which the exception of huge name actors, is not really impacted by total movie revenue and they don’t often get dividends. Once the fixed cost is covered, which for most big movies it easily is, the rest is the gravy train for the investors.
I'm also finding very little relation between production budget (which mostly goes into things like SFX) and my enjoyment. Some of my favorite films were very low budget, from Dr. Horrible to some Bruce Campbell flicks.
Good writing makes a huge difference.
Decent acting and performance makes a bit of difference.
Replacing all the SFX with sixties-era Star Trek SFX wouldn't make a wit of difference to my enjoyment.
There is a correlation between finding good writers and having big budgets -- if you're dropping $300 million to make a film you might as well hire good writers -- but it's not a super-strong correlation.
If your enjoyment of big-budget movies doesn't infringe on that, go ahead and enjoy them. Since it does, I'll fight every step of the way. Perhaps I'll lose, but I'll fight.
It's an interesting case in that the internet has caused big media to push for stricter copyright enforcement and experiment with giving people less and less rights on their products, but at the same time the internet has made people much more aware of the downsides of copyright.
When my parents were growing up, they could take things apart, tinker, and understand them as deeply as their hearts desired and intellects allowed them to. They could modify books (with pencils), archive them (in their basements), and even quote exerts. Building radios or modifying cars were mainstream hobbies.
I'm okay if your IP laws restrict my right to distribute copies of your work. I'm not okay with a copyright regime that makes it illegal for me to reverse-engineer and understand the software which controls my life, to tweak my car, or to understand my phone.
There's a possible dystopia where elections are de facto controlled by secret algorithms at Facebook, where all my information comes from a Google phone with a locked-down infrastructure I can't peak at or understand, where I can't record a 30 second clip of a movie to discuss it in my classroom, and where my car shuts down if I do an after-market repair.
At the time the DMCA came in, the RIAA and MPAA became major enemies of my personal freedom and my child's ability to learn.
Truth is most (practically all) people want to watch Game of Thrones and are willing to pay for it.
My claim is that if MPAA profits went down even 50%, society wouldn't be any worse off at all. On the other hand, we are worse off for DRM.
I think most people would say were worse off if game of thrones was produced any different. You don’t like visual effects, but you’re in an extreme minority.
Criminalising people isn't going to turn back this fundamental sea change.
What is also a problem is that prosecuting copyright infringement presents a nasty threat to privacy protections.
- Making private information available as a common activity is not inevitable.
- Staling private information is a crime by any account.
- The underlying economics are against your logic: it takes many workers, doing real work, to make those things. If they don't get paid, it doesn't get made.
- The 'yacht' analogy wrong - the entertainment industry is full of money losing projects, and zillions of people working really hard on stuff because they care and not earning a lot of money. There surely probably more arbitrarily rich people in tech than in entertainment.
Username checks out.
You can't just take that $4 price tag for streaming a movie through Apple TV or wherever, and multiply it by the number of movies people illegally stream, and get a number that makes any sense. The idea that American households would spend an extra $230/year on average on movie rentals, if only those nasty content pirates would get out of their way, is just absurd. Especially when you consider that most American households were never using these illegal streaming sites in the first place. Most of that average would have to be propped up by teenagers and college students who simply don't have an extra $2000/yr of disposable income to spare.
Remember all those pictures of drug busts we used to see? Police take the weight seized (including packaging) then multiply it by the the highest price they could justify as an estimate of the "street value". That's how a table full of weed gets valued at $100,000,000.
I remember pirating video games about 10-15 years ago to see if they were worthwhile, since the demo scene had pretty much died down. I'd end up buying the games I played through to completion as well.
Roller coaster tycoon 2 and kotor for example.
The other big thing is that the illegal streaming site has everything. So part of the whole "Okay I want to actually pay for the HD version of this" is "Okay now is this on Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, or...?"
I've honestly mostly just gone back to dvd.com. It has everything (except for digital only stuff that never got a Bluray/DVD release), you can actually get 5.1 or 7.1 sound, and since I live 45 miles from the San Jose facility it's 1 day shipping.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying every purchase needs to pass some utilitarian moral litmus test; and sometimes luxury spending can have positive externalities, particularly when it incentivizes innovation. But we shouldn't pretend that gold-plated helicopters are inherently a win/win/win just because some subsistence wages got paid along the way, when we could have collected the same revenue as taxes and paid those wages for building infrastructure instead.
Netflix and the Studios profit margins are similar to other distributors, and after all is said and done, most of them are not 'rolling in it', at least not any more than the local pharmacy chain corporation operators are - those are regular jobs as well.
FYI: Even studio heads are not rolling in it, they make less than the biggest talent/starts, and there are only literally 5-10 of them, one layer below, and those people are earning the same as senior devs at Google with a small amount of stock options. The rest of the distribution machine are not paid so well.
This 'yacht populism' is ridiculous unless, maybe, you're referring to 'Jim Carrey' or 'Tom Cruise', but even then ...
The content is made by people, just like physical things are, if they don't get paid, it doesn't get made, it's that simple.
This is patently not true. Maybe it's true for a subset of the high end content like Netflix series, but the vast majority of creative content e.g. music or paintings are not made with the primarily goal of being paid. Some good examples are how Myspace gave way to thousands of artists, the works on Deviantart or how Open Source is made by volunteers.
a) Wildly inflated estimates of views.
b) That the viewer would have purchased the content if the pirated content were not available.
c) All purchases in "b)" would be at the highest price the content was ever offered at.
When there is money at stake, laws en enforcement can accomplish things that are unthinkable when it is at the expense of the common good.
Recognition of an exact pattern is computationally very easy. Examination of often subjective truths is objectively very hard?
Of course there are corner cases that are really hard, but that is no different than audio/video recognition, where a 95% solution (that also has many imperfections) gets forced on users anyway.
I'm sure that it's basically impossible. I think it's impossible even with full, proper general intelligence AI at scale, and that won't happen in my lifetime even if humanity collectively downs tools and works on nothing else.
Facebook has thrown a lot (lot lot) of resources at this, and it's clearly totally ineffective.
Certainly it's not about generating money ex nihilō, so what is the standard?
Similarly, pirated content does not represent lost retail sales. People who pirate content would not necessarily purchase it legitimately were it available to them.
But the quote you are replying to makes no sense anyway. It doesn't "cost the economy". This is that same old fallacy that says if the economy has "grown" and there's more bits of paper moving around that we are somehow better off. If anything a bigger economy just means we spend too much of our finite lives trying to make sure others don't get more than we do. It doesn't correlate to a better way of life at all.
When citing a study like this, it would be wonderful to see something like "Based on this research, we expect to the economy grow by X additional dollars in this area, using methods XYZ" If the legislation fails to achieve the actual result with a proposed amount of time, then it gets scrapped.
Our legal system is missing a feedback loop - adding complexity is cheap (and profitable if you're a politician) but removing it expensive and there's generally not any reason to without SIGNIFICANT public outcry (marijuana legalization, for instance).
Most torrent sites are based overseas, people can just use VPN to torrent.
Even if they ban the DNS record, you can get the IP address, from a reddit forum or something.
If ISP's start to ban I.P.'s then the internet is truly broken at that point.
Doesn't seem practical.
> Under current law, only violations of the reproduction and distribution rights of copyright owners can be charged as felonies, while criminal infringement via streaming (or “publicly performing”) can only be charged as a misdemeanor. This is known as the streaming loophole – and it is particularly harmful to the U.S. economy because streaming has become the most common form of criminal copyright infringement.
This has nothing to do with torrents which would already be covered under the existing law. My understanding is that neither apply to non-commercial activities which instead fall under civil law.
It's good to keep abreast of what congress is considering in this regard, but this is nothing more than a wish by the Senator and the handful of lawmakers that are co-sponsoring it.
A useful headline would be `Senator introduces bill to make illegal streaming a felony` but to say "it will happen soon" is misleading.
IIUC, this legislation was included in the $2.3 trillion spending bill (900 billion for COVID "relief" and 1.4 trillion to keep the government running until next September) already passed by Congress.
If it hadn't been passed (or Trump vetoes the bill) the government will shut down in a matter of hours.
Good job, I'm glad to hear our legislature is still "getting things done" during the lame duck congress.
Curiously, the President finally gets some money for his wall, so that's at least plausibly for the good of the people, though I doubt it will ameliorate any damage done by Covid-19. Actually, Covid-19 made it less useful than before, but whatever.
Says a lot about who these people represent when they're closing the streaming "loophole" while the corporate tax loopholes remain unchanged.
$30 billion per year? For context, that’s roughly equivalent to the combined revenues of Netflix and YouTube for 2019.
Is there really another Netflix + YouTube sized subscriber base out there that would be willing to pay for these services if only some of the same content weren't available for free? Seems unlikely.
YouTube has every show you can think of, including live streams. Will this somehow make it more of a problem for content hosts to screen for ownership?
If I watch copyrighted content from someones Plex server, do I go to jail?
It went away for reasons, one of which was the fact that people want to monetize ads and they can't do that if they can't control the stream.
As a technology however, it worked perfectly.
- Keep changes limited in scope for easier review.
- Open the process to the wider public for inspection.
- Transparent revision history.
If these are already covered by existing law, then we don't need a new law just for prosecuting streamers.
If group A wants a policy that B doesn't want, and B wants a policy that A doesn't want, then combining those policies into one law is an easy and reliable way to compromise. You know that the whole bill will either pass, or it won't -- Congress votes on entire bills rather than parts of it, and the president doesn't have line-item veto power.
I'm curious what companies/websites they are targeting with this?
Isn't that already illegal?
Is this typical of all governments with elected representation? Are they solving different organizational problems that most people are not aware of? I am curious how such a system arises, maintains itself, and is resilient to change.
But I think the biggest problem is centralization of media control.
Copyright allows the media to be controlled by tiny fraction <1% of the population.
Control the media and it becomes a lot easier to get away with lying.
We need to #AbolishCopyright
> Is it the high barrier of entry that limits these businesses?
No. Entering isn't hard, it's surviving, particularly if you are good. It's the near impossibility to compete against the big players because of copyright and patent laws.
Without abolishing these unfair laws, you cannot disrupt them. You cannot displace them.
When I was at Microsoft I saw the advantages first hand. If I had the blessing of the C-Suite, I could go and squash any business I wanted to as long as they weren't Apple, Google, Amazon, or Facebook.
Look at Slack, GitHub, LinkedIn, etc. Huge successes, and yet at the end of the day realized they couldn't be viable without joining one of the big dogs.
The problem is those big dogs are black holes sucking up an enormous amount of information, that you cannot take with you if you leave because of #imaginaryproperty laws, and hence you are always at a huge information disadvantage if you try and compete against them and will get squashed.
Come up with a great new Saas app? At some point if you're successful you will have to sell to one of them, or some exec will decide they'd like to take over your market and leverage their information advantage against you—good luck hanging on to your top talent when the big players offer them 3x the salary and job security; good luck building your sales pipelines when the big dogs have access to your customer list and purchasing decision makers with a snap of their fingers; good luck hanging on to your suppliers when the big dogs offer better terms; good luck acquiring customers when the big dogs have 1/10th the CAC.
I loved and was in awe of the talent of the people at Microsoft. But they don't need the #ImaginaryProperty protections. It makes them do shittier work and makes us all worse off (and the only affect is a redistribution of wealth to the top 1%).
I suppose without copyright laws, the small players could coexist but remain small...
Here is the basic flow:
- Get elected by lying to voters and/or suppressing the vote
- Use power to choose your own voters / write laws to suppress voters who are against you
- Repeat
So in effect, many elected officials can safely ignore constiuent's wishes because either: not enough can / will vote against you or you can use your power to make sure they can't vote against you.
Then you have the issue of politicians being given bribes... I mean... lobbying money to do what corporations want.
https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-pas...
'that rich people and organizations representing business interests have a powerful grip on U.S. government policy. After examining differences in public opinion across income groups on a wide variety of issues, the political scientists Martin Gilens, of Princeton, and Benjamin Page, of Northwestern, found that the preferences of rich people had a much bigger impact on subsequent policy decisions than the views of middle-income and poor Americans. Indeed, the opinions of lower-income groups, and the interest groups that represent them, appear to have little or no independent impact on policy.
“Our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts,” Gilens and Page write:
Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.
In their conclusion, Gilens and Page go even further, asserting that “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover … even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.”'
compare this to actual oligarchies where opposition parties actually can't accomplish anything because they're denied access to elections, or there's legitimate election fraud, or serious voter intimidation, et cetera.
and policy outcomes being determines by random people is actually awful, the average person has absolutely no understanding of basic economics. it's not even desirable.
That the average American has approximately zero influence in politics is a mathematical, deliberately orchestrated truth.
The primary reason that dollars have such an impact on elections is because dollars get spent on advertising and on canvassing and on outreach, and the impact of those things is that it gets your candidate more votes from more people who otherwise wouldn’t have bothered to vote. The way that dollars buy elections is via people voting.
There’s plenty of rational debate to be had about gerrymandering and campaign finance and a whole host of topics, but to throw our hands in the air and say that votes don’t matter is nonsense.
The alternative is that you can't make documentaries about a candidate's bad climate change policy and monetize it as you would a non-contentious issue.
> That the average American has approximately zero influence in politics is a mathematical, deliberately orchestrated truth.
Neither does the individual "economic elite", defined as anyone in the top 10%.
People can complain about the two party system all they want, but ranked choice voting was just rejected in Massachusetts, the most liberal state there is (and I'd be correct to assume that Democrats have more reason to desire this than Republicans).
Gerrymandering is bad and needs to be disposed of. We aren't an oligarchy because there's some gerrymandering.
Money in politics is vastly overrated, and there isn't even that much money in the field to begin with. Bernie Sanders didn't lose his 2020 primary because of money, Trump didn't win his 2016 primary because of money.
That does not seem correct based on the study. 100% popular support increases chances of a measure passing by 0%. If even a small percentage remains politically active, 100% population support should make some difference, and it doesn't.
Secondly, I believe it confuses cause and effect. At some level, people have cognizance that their efforts make no difference, so they don't bother.
Denying access to elections and legitimate election fraud seem worse. However, I feel this underestimates invisible power. It doesn't take overt violence or the threat thereof to thwart democracy. In American politics, money does the trick. We need lobbying outlawed, and to prevent the revolving door between government and big industry allowing for things like regulatory capture. Pointing to lack of overtly violent means used to thwart democracy proves nothing.
As for regular people determining policy, you might have a point. However, between regular people and ultra wealthy people making the laws for their own benefit, I'll take the flawed-from-ignorance laws of the common man over the flawed-by-greed laws of the elite. We should also perhaps try democracy before writing it off. We haven't gotten there yet.
People say a lot of things. People mostly agree with universal background checks for guns. It isn't the Evil Rich People preventing this from happening, and the NRA isn't particularly rich itself even though it's a popular bogeyman.
People talk a lot about climate change until it's time to shape policy on it. Someone answering a poll question doesn't matter, what people vote for matters.
Your argument comes from a fantasy where most people actually agree with you, but the lobbyists just prevent things from changing. In reality, many people are very poorly informed. People don't understand just how powerful political mobilization and voting is. I agree that they think voting won't do anything, but they'd be wrong about that.
If you think what someone answers to an opinion poll matters here, you're just wrong. Show me people voting based on these issues as a primary factor and not seeing results because politicians magically change their minds after winning.
"economic elite" is literally defined as anyone in the top 10% of income by that study. Guess what income group always votes? Those same people. And they're going to be the ones pressing for action the most. [2] And they are more educated, so it's stupid to compare public opinion like this. You need to compare expert consensus to policy and public opinion.
Not to mention the Electoral College and Senate.
What data do you expect?
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/obamacare-vs-affordable-care-... [2] https://econofact.org/voting-and-income
> some voter disenfranchisement
> denied access to elections
> legitimate election fraud
> serious voter intimidation
I don’t completely disagree with you: people do have agency at the end of the day in the US. That said, let’s be careful not to fall into Scotsman fallacies where we don’t accept more subtle forms of oligarchy because they don’t fit our “1984”-esque imagination. Southern states have long histories of subtle voter disenfranchisement (requiring licenses or certificates that Black Americans have in lower percentages, placing polling stations in strategic locations, requiring money to discourage the poor from voting (who lean left), etc.) and it’s short-sighted to “No true Scotsman” that and say “well, it’s not an actual oligarchy because technically people still can vote.” One, in the vein of Niemoller’s “First they came...”, it ignores warning signs or red flags difficult to reverse until it’s too late. Second, it puts the focus on the individual. Sure, people can still vote. They can take off their $#!@ job for a few hours even though their boss is an @$$#@!€ and they need every dollar they can get, take the bus to the voting station 30 minutes away, wait in the line for potentially hours (I waited in just the primary line for 8 hours and I lived in West LA (Democrat, richer, etc.) at the time), only to be told they need a driver’s license which they’ve never had because they’ve never been able to afford a car. Or they actually do have, but this is just one person and most of their friends aren’t voting. Sure, this is possible. But then I ask you to reflect on the purpose of a democratic government if not to enable fair, free, and accessible elections? Especially now that the incumbent president is sueing and refusing to accept the results in a - I don’t way to say decisive, but clear perhaps - election, I guess I would like to know what it takes to consider that “legitimate election fraud”? Is it simply missing the f@$cist aesthetic of red, black, echo-y microphones over a rabid crowd, tanks and semi-automatics down the streets? Once again, once things progress to that level, it might be too late, but that doesn’t mean our current circumstances are any “less” of an “actual oligarchy” just because theyre not as obvious. IMO
All and all, donors have a huge role to play in determining the outcome of an election as securing funding and political connections with a major party is essential to a successful election. As such, US representatives tend to focus heavily on big donor wishes.
Also, insider trading appears to be somewhat of a problem in Washington these days. There is likely a lot of behind the scenes stuff going on. Why else would an already wealthy individual take a 174k/yr job?
Play on a particular grievance or issue of a voter and they'll let you do almost anything else. Be anti-immigrant and you can destroy social wellness programs, stomp on unions, etc.
The average person votes on rhetoric not actions, like voting record. All you got to do is give them a reason to vote for you, and it helps to have an excuse for your actions to prevent political attacks (like the quote above) and your voters will turn a blind eye to everything else.
Universal healthcare -- illegal immigrants!
Robust social safety nets -- the classic "black welfare mother with a Cadillac" canard that comes up every time, where trillions in corporate welfare get a pass by angering people about some hypothetical minority "taking advantage"
Universal income -- black mothers with lots of babies taking advantage
It's incredible, but the modern GOP plays it like a fiddle. It is extraordinary, and the public is willingly complicit.
How are we even supposed to know what got crammed in there? You'd need a 100 person team, fluent in legalese, reading through 50+ pages to simply learn what comprises this monster in the 1 day they gave them to vote on it.
People complain about do nothing congress and stagnation, then vote in hardcore right wing conspiracy theorist QAnon candidates who are unlikely to pass real legislation.
I feel like in this instance, the number of people who would say "congress should make cracking down on streaming a priority" is near zero, but maybe the number of people who would say "it should be illegal to intentionally host copyrighted material" might be pretty high.
Due to the nature of what Tor is and provides it’s unfortunately somewhat expected that bad behaviors happen significantly more from Tor exits than from users on an IP address from residential providers like Comcast.