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Comment by jfoutz | Hacker News Reader

Writing a bad check for more than $20 dollars, being drunk in public, or disturbing others by making loud and unreasonable noises, are all felonies.

It's probably not a bad thing that this stuff would go to criminal court. I think criminal courts would be far less enthusiastic about claiming 1 song is worth thousands of dollars.

Really, the amount of effort to prove something like this is off the charts. It's not like searching a car and finding a bag of weed. How many prosecutors are going to put together the logs to show this actually happend and it was worth more than 5k?

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In most states you need to bounce a significantly larger check to become a felon:

http://www.ckfraud.org/penalties.html

Being drunk in public is a misdemeanor:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_intoxication#State_publi...

As is disturbing the peace:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disturbing_the_peace

Hmm. I must have been mistaken about the check fraud - or things have changed in the last 20 years.

disturbing the peace and disorderly conduct have a felony versions when weapons or drugs are present.

The point is, stealing $5000 is a big deal. Streaming $5000 dollars worth of unlicensed music for public performance could be a big deal too. However, i have a hard time believing a criminal court would value a streamed song at much more than a few cents each. You'd literally be streaming thousands of songs a day.

This isn't (afaik) streaming your stuff to your family, it's cloning pandora and not paying license fees.

You can't compare stealing $5000 with streaming $5000 worth of music/video; they are completely different concepts. By streaming you are not stealing material from anybody nor it can be proven that it affects negatively on sales.

disturbing the peace and disorderly conduct have a felony versions when weapons or drugs are present.

I think that this is a big "if".

The killer here is "the cost of licensing such performances is greater than $5,000".

How it works: They claim the cost of licensing the song you've streamed is 5,001$, and you're jailed. And it's not obvious that they can't name an arbitrary sum as cost of licensing.

I don't know how much it applies to USA, but otherwise this scheme has already been used thru the world.

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