Senate Voting to make Unauthorized Streaming a Felony | Hacker News Reader

Senate Voting to make Unauthorized Streaming a Felony

pcworld.com

48 pointsUrgo39 comments

IANAL and I haven't seen the original text of the bill, I believe this sensational title omits one crucial piece of information: unauthorized streaming for commercial purposes (for profit) will become a felony, not "personal" streaming.

So if you embed a YouTube video on your blog (that you have adwords on, of course) and it turns out that someone claims copyright infringement, you could be looking at jail time and a felony records.

IANAL, and I haven't read the original text of the bill either, but I really don't like the idea of the government playing cop for the media companies. I think there are probably bigger problems that our government could be focusing on, that's all.

I agree. It seems like all of the sudden copyright infringement is on the Government's priority list, just under terrorism. No doubt the lobbyist kept telling them that if they don't do something about copyright infringement "hundreds of billions of dollars" and millions of jobs will be lost.

"If passed, the bill will make illegal streaming for commercial purposes a felony punishable by up to five years in prison -- if the streaming in question involves ten or more instances of streaming copyrighted works during a 180-day period, and if the retail value of the stream exceeds $2500, or the licenses to the material are worth more than $5000."

If you penetrate these limits, odds are pretty good that the copyrighted material was obviously copyrighted material and you were being pretty wanton about it.

I'm all about small government and keeping their hands off things they don't understand, but I'm not sure how anyone can be opposed to them enforcing laws.

But it's a felony.

...and?

If you don't want a felony, don't illegally stream? You don't get to do whatever you want just because it's easily done sitting in front of your computer without pants on.

As much as the media companies have done to villify themselves in the past decade (and more), that doesn't change the fact that their claims to material are real, and are worth some amount of money. Those are facts. In many cases, such as PPV fights or sporting events, much of the value comes via exclusivity.

By illegally streaming such shows, you are, in real terms, diluting the value of their rights to that material. I realize this isn't a popular opinion among many people. However, it doesn't change the reality you're not entitled to take whatever you want from companies simply because it's socially acceptable. There are consequences to your actions. In this case, the consequences turn out to be a felony charge.

One final edit before this post becomes completely invisible:

Read the amendment, for fuck's sake. The vast majority of respondents here are having a knee-jerk emotional reaction that doesn't actually reflect what's in the amendment.

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112s978is/pdf/BILLS-112s9...

You're not going to jail for watching Hangover 2 a couple of times. You're going to be facing potential jailtime and fines for streaming it to a sufficient number of people with the intent of making a profit off of it.

Still not worth a felony.

Exactly. To treat someone who streamed The Hangover 2 with more strict criminal repercussions than someone who committed attempted rape seems really really stupid. Also, an I the only one who wishes that the government would hand out some of the 5 year felony prison sentences to the bankers who have been committing fraud the last couple of years?

Also, the more time and resources they spend chasing "copyright infringers", the less they're going to spend preventing and solving the crimes most of us worry about.

(And since the "entertainment industry" is hardly going to rescue the U.S. economy, I really don't give much of a cr-p about its fortunes -- which it already bolsters by producing things in Canada, Ireland, now Eastern Europe or wherever else, whenever it can.)

Why is this voted down?

On what basis do you justify laws which illegalize socially acceptable behaviors, and why do you start what people are entitled to at the law?

Surely the law should follow society, rather than society following the law.

Sure, but I was speaking of lowercase 's' society, not "society-at-large". Friends, acquaintances, family, etc.

Despite what we all may wish would be the case, it's not socially acceptable to deprive rights holders and content producers of the financial value of their rights/content. The notion of rights to content takes primacy over the notion of streaming UFC 500 or whatever they're up to now.

There's a much deeper debate over abuse of copyright that I won't get into, but it seems to me that if we can say something like "despite what we all may wish" with any level of veracity, then you're in very shaky territory when making declarations about what rights people or entities should have.

Not that there aren't first principles to evolve laws from, but those first principles are very bare, and most of what we decide people should do, and most of the rights we grant (key word) to persons or entities are decided by interpretations of situation based on what we want society to be shaped like.

I don't believe even a bare preponderance of people want society to be in such a shape that government provides no protection to companies who wish to protect their rights.

This is not to say that the government ought to serve as business's proxy in all cases.

What I've been trying to express is not that this law in particular is nessisarily wrong, but that laws have no value beyond their place as instruments of our societal will.

To put it in in entirely vulgar terms it's a class III misdemeanor (aggravating circumstances aside) for me to beat the shit out of someone in the middle of a movie theater. But streaming a clip from that movie could net me a felony rap? And this sounds reasonable to you? Do you have ANY idea how thoroughly a felony conviction fucks up someone's life?

Question: why is this modded down into near-invisibility? It seems to be sensible and well-argued.

I'm not commenting on the subject matter of legality, so you're barking up the wrong tree with all that.

I'm questioning the classification of crimes. Felonies are serious and primarily intended for removing violent criminals from the grid. Felons can't vote, can't buy guns/ammo, can't obtain most vocational licenses, can't obtain visas abroad with most US partners, and can't easily find jobs anymore.

Felony status should be reserved for people who are a danger to society, not just a danger to a record labels and publisher contracts. Socially acceptable (accepted by society) crimes shouldn't be felonies -- that's a direct collision with the purpose of a felony! And a special interest group shouldn't be able to lobby for elevated crime classifications like this.

Considering there is no standard "valuation" except what the content owner says it is, that entire clause is useless. Any stream can likely be valued over $2500 by some shady accounting.

  The MPAA claims that it will only target website owners who
  "willfully and knowingly violated a copyright and profited
  from it." The organization says it will not look to
  prosecute those who "stream videos without intending to
  profit".

I'd like this sort of promise to come from my government, not an industry organization.

Those promises never hold weight though if the letter of the law allows that prosecution. I remember a certain presidential candidate saying he wouldn't go after nonviolent pot offenders.

So someone records a video of their cat, music happens to be in the background, and the video happens to go viral and become a huge hit.

If they are a Youtube partner, and make money off the videos, they would be subject to this law, even if the music in the video was largely irrelevant.

Doesn't fall under the purview of the law as written.

I haven't read the law, but how does it now? You're streaming Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" while your cat is attacking a box, it gets 100 views within six months. Clearly the song is worth more than $5000.

I have read the proposed law (it's literally like 200 words long, it modifies an already-existing law), and it's because you didn't set up the stream with the explicit intent to make it a commercial enterprise. http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112s978is/pdf/BILLS-112s9...

There doesn't appear to be anything in that about intent. Hell, you don't even need to make money off of the stream - it applies if the cost to license whatever works are being used exceeds $5000.

OK, how would you choose to rewrite the law, in order to only target the things that the law is actually trying to target?

Many arguments about intellectual property get confusing, because the folks making arguments like "this law is aimed at targeting X but theoretically could be used to target Y and hence will result in the entire population being locked up" are folks who don't actually think X should be illegal either.

In this case the real targets are the folks who are quite deliberately making websites that serve copyrighted material for profit. We all know that these exist -- just type "watch [your favourite tv show] online" and about a dozen of 'em will pop up. If we assume that we want to make this illegal (I know I sure as hell wouldn't want somebody else making money off my intellectual property without my permission) then how can we rewrite this law to do that, while protecting the theoretical case where the camera accidentally pans past a television while recording a cat?

How so?

I really don't like the idea of the government playing cop for the media companies

This seems like a silly argument. It's the Government's job to "play cop". I mean, that's why, as you may have noticed, actual cops are government employees.

Protecting property rights, whether physical or intellectual, is part of the Government's job. You can argue about the execution of it if you like, and you can even argue about whether existing intellectual property laws are just. But complaining that the government is "playing cop" seems misguided.

Obviously the role of executive branch of the government is to "play cop", but in context I'm simply stating that I don't like the idea of our government being the security guard for the media companies, and while it is their job to carry out the law, I wish they would enact laws that made a little more sense.

>unauthorized streaming for commercial purposes (for profit) will become a felony, not "personal" streaming.

I don't think that's the intent at all. This bill is an extension of the 1997 NET Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NET_Act) which was specifically designed to make it possible for non-commercial copyright infringement to be prosecuted as a criminal offense.

Also read this testimony, in particular the mention of "private financial gain" which is a very broad definition: http://www.copyright.gov/docs/regstat060111.html

Anyone claiming this can only be applied to commercial infringement is blowing smoke. The title of the bill "Commercial Felony Streaming Act" should be changed to "Felony Streaming Act".

Sentate _Commmitee_ Votes to Make Illegal Streaming a Felony

Please update the title. While the story is worrying, this is misleading and needlessly sensationalist.

when the government represents the interest of a small group agains the people that voted for them is time for change:

meta-government + minarquism.

So if i make a $2500 profit from accidentally embedding a copyrighted youtube video on my blog, the government (taxpayers) will need to pay $150,000 to jail me for 5 years. Seems logical.

Maybe I'm not fully comprehending the validity of this bill--so is profiting via illegal streaming a big thing in the United States? Judging from their reasoning, and not to get ethical, but is this really the answer to this issue?

Not to commit thought-crime, but why is this anyone's priority in Washington?

Not to commit thought-crime

This kind of rhetoric doesn't really advance the discussion.

We're all using rhetoric here. Calling a digital pattern "property" doesn't really advance the discussion either. So long as patterns are a criminal offense I will continue to be wary of engaging in thought-crime.

The example always given is a youtube video. Why is Youtube not liable??

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