Senate Committee Votes to make Illegal Streaming a Felony

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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If a Senate Judiciary Committee motion passes a full vote in the Senate, streaming copyrighted material for commercial purposes would become a felony offense. The motion has the support of much of the entertainment industry.

“This isn’t about individuals or families streaming movies at home,” said Sen. Klobuchar in an email to Bloomberg. “It’s about criminals streaming thousands of dollars worth of stolen digital content and profiting from it.”
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That's fine and dandy , but for the love of god! Will they just stop and look at the industry they are helping? Yes we are capitalists, but lies and deception are rife within the this same industry that my senator is helping. She didn't get my vote and she wont get it again. Bah.
 
MajorDomo said:
If a Senate Judiciary Committee motion passes a full vote in the Senate, streaming copyrighted material for commercial purposes would become a felony offense. The motion has the support of much of the entertainment industry.
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Quote:
“This isn’t about individuals or families streaming movies at home,” said Sen. Klobuchar in an email to Bloomberg. “It’s about criminals streaming thousands of dollars worth of stolen digital content and profiting from it.”
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Bull.
This isn't about supposed people profiting from it. I haven't come across ONE pay-for service that makes money from streaming copyright infringed videos. It's all about the individuals streaming a video for another to watch free without having to buy it.
 
A felony? Let's hope this dies quickly.
 
"It’s about criminals streaming thousands of dollars worth of stolen digital content and profiting from it"

Yeah. I'm calling bullshit on this comment. The people who will be targeted almost exclusively will have gotten absolutely no profit from uploading.

The criminal organizations that will account for like 1 percent of their arrests are just the public face they are putting forward. The Patriot Act was specifically stated to be used against terrorism, yet Judiciary Committee testimony showed that for 2008, only 3 out of 763 warrantless wiretaps were for terrorism. Over 70 percent were used for the war on drugs, which is in direct contravention to the law they passed.

Sorry, I don't believe anything they say any more, the government has become the boy who cried wolf.
 
“This isn’t about individuals or families streaming movies at home,” said Sen. Klobuchar in an email to Bloomberg. “It’s about criminals streaming thousands of dollars worth of stolen digital content and profiting from it.”
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If this is true, then write the exceptions into the bill. I want to see it in black and white b4 I believe a word of what you say. Ok, thx, bu-bye...
 
...one nation under RIAA, confrontational, with lawsuits and cease and desist letters for all.

A felony? Really? What about start-up mom and pop restaurant that hooks up their ipod to a pos-boombox. Ignorance is never an excuse but they could get slapped pretty hard with a law like this (if it passes).

Sounds like we should be more focused on the DMA than create random laws to patch up issues/holes.

Break break. I get something like streaming for profit isn't the most moral activity but one-this could be a slippery road towards future legislation that would further restrict users media rights and two-how about that budget issue we all should be working on?
 
I don't get how an industry so relatively insignificant to our overall economy has so much pull in the U.S. They don't even make an attempt to hide the brazen perversion of the justice system.

The music industry commands senators who will rubberstamp every law they write. I guess it's not how much money you have, but who you pay it to.
 
There are a lot of sites that try profit on streaming live sports. But making it a felony will allow the law to be misused. For example, if your filming for your blog and accidentally show/hear something with a copyright in the background. A felony charge is a serious crime and can prevent you from becoming a state employee...for streaming possibly by mistake. I'd rather let courts decide how serious a crime is before we jump the gun here.
 
^Same.... but as with most laws, it's incredibly vague and will end up used in many ways it's supposedly not supposed to be used for.
 
Sounds good, now the MPAA will have yet another form of leverage to use against people. Now instead of sending a letter saying pay us $5000 or we'll come after you in court and ask for $20k per movie, they can say $5000 or we'll come after you court, and make sure you are charged with a felony
 
sfsuphysics said:
Sounds good, now the MPAA will have yet another form of leverage to use against people. Now instead of sending a letter saying pay us $5000 or we'll come after you in court and ask for $20k per movie, they can say $5000 or we'll come after you court, and make sure you are charged with a felony
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You can't say 'pay up' or we're report your criminal acts - that's clearly crossing the line into extortion and in the case of people who do pay you that's clearly aiding in a crime. (by not reporting it happened)

As long as it's civil cases they can say pay up or we're take you to court to pay, but when you're talking criminal cases that's a WHOLE different ballpark with different rules on what the MPAA can and can't do.
 
Live sports is one of the only things cable companies have left when it comes to retaining subscribers. Almost everything else you can get online now.
 
This is all about sports. Live network broadcast sports, and pap-per-view events.

Cable and satellite don't want to lose even more customers to other online services as sports is one of the few things they have left. PPV events are another(but even those can be purchased online), however those PPV events cost $40-$60. I used to watch UFC matches all the time back when my roommates and I would have a party and invite 10+ people over chipping in a couple bucks each to negate the insane PPV cost, but as I've gotten older I'm just not into the whole throwing a party just to watch TV thing anymore. If it were $10 I wouldn't mind, but $40+? Hell no. The PPV and TV sports industries are even further behind the MPAA and RIAA when it comes to modern content distribution and that's why they're trying to criminalize it instead of embracing it and cutting the cable TV networks and doing it right themselves.
 
I guess I am the only one then who thinks that if you don't hold the copyright (or have a contract with the copyright holder) then you shouldn't be allowed to stream it commercially. I don't see what's wrong with that at all.
 
Thuleman, I agree with it being wrong, but making it a felony is crossing the line.
 
How will they enforce this is what I'd like to know, this has to be a joke.

All someone needs to do is post the "I'm behind 7 proxies" pic to make my point, LOL.
 
Even though the bill says commercial streaming, or business who steal content, there's a worry of how this can spill over to individuals.
It should be a misdemeanor first time, and a felony for habitual offenders. But it seems like they will have a way to monitor that persons usage. GL to the people who stream.
 
It's too bad we don't have jurisdiction in China because I can count on two hands the number of illegal streaming videos coming out of China.

Bootleg, camera shot movies in the theatres? For free? Yeah, those are in abundance in China.

How about my Slingplayer/Slingbox? Hopefully those won't get illegalized. It's such a convenience being able to watch on the road so long as I have an internet connection, and would fight tooth and nail to make sure it doesn't disappear.
 
Thuleman said:
I guess I am the only one then who thinks that if you don't hold the copyright (or have a contract with the copyright holder) then you shouldn't be allowed to stream it commercially. I don't see what's wrong with that at all.
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This is like chopping off a hand for stealing a candy bar. In fact, a person is likely to make a better living in the U.S. with one hand than a felony conviction, so it's actually worse.
 
WorldExclusive said:
Even though the bill says commercial streaming, or business who steal content, there's a worry of how this can spill over to individuals.
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The initial piracy laws were geared toward similar offenders.

It used to be that a "pirate" was someone who hawked bootleg copies of VHS tapes on the street, or distributed them en masse to such people. Now a "pirate" is someone who saw a clip of a movie without the express written and notarized consent of the rights holder.
 
The only streaming I'm interested in doing if this passes is the streaming of urine on some lawmaker's shoe.
 
Monkey34 said:
Bull.
This isn't about supposed people profiting from it. I haven't come across ONE pay-for service that makes money from streaming copyright infringed videos. It's all about the individuals streaming a video for another to watch free without having to buy it.
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Never seen a streaming site with ads on it, huh?
 
BGK said:
Never seen a streaming site with ads on it, huh?
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Actually no, I haven't......but then I have a locked down browser so I don't see any anywhere unless it's IN the stream itself ([H] ads excluded). I guess I take being ad-free for granted.
I sent a link to some info to a guy not that long ago, and he emailed me back a complaint about not telling him it was NSFW. I was like "huh?", because I hadn't thought about what content never makes it onto my screen.
I saw a vid on justin.tv not that long ago (never knew the site existed until a month ago), and until Kaldskryke mentioned it a few posts ago, I didn't even know the site had ad's. I thought he was being sarcastic.
 
MajorDomo said:
If a Senate Judiciary Committee motion passes a full vote in the Senate, streaming copyrighted material for commercial purposes would become a felony offense. The motion has the support of much of the entertainment industry.
Click to expand...

So they've got all of our other problems like wars and budgetary woes taken care of, right? :D

Our "representatives" are straight up crazy. Bought and paid for, and crazy.
 
While I'm not sure about making it a felony, I hope we can agree that making money off the work of others is wrong.

Beyond that, I would read the bill before getting upset. It's not really appropriate to oppose a law because you don't think the government is going to follow the letter of the law. If the government doesn't need to follow the law then why would they even bother to pass this one?
 
HOCP4ME said:
While I'm not sure about making it a felony, I hope we can agree that making money off the work of others is wrong.

Beyond that, I would read the bill before getting upset. It's not really appropriate to oppose a law because you don't think the government is going to follow the letter of the law. If the government doesn't need to follow the law then why would they even bother to pass this one?
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I agree it is wrong to profit off another persons work without permission or rendering proper compensation. However, current law already covers this. So I am curious what they intend to add to it, to make it worthwhile legislation. I thought the current trend of suing a person for many hundreds or thousands of times the value of the infringed product was already enough.
 
fattypants said:
The initial piracy laws were geared toward similar offenders.

It used to be that a "pirate" was someone who hawked bootleg copies of VHS tapes on the street, or distributed them en masse to such people. Now a "pirate" is someone who saw a clip of a movie without the express written and notarized consent of the rights holder.
Click to expand...

Wow. Haven't seen that for myself, but if that's indeed true, how will they enforce it?
Looks like they will have to issue those dreaded ID cards to track everyone's usage. :mad:

I'm not for it. Doesn't matter who's the majority in the Senate, they all make crap laws.
 
Thuleman said:
I guess I am the only one then who thinks that if you don't hold the copyright (or have a contract with the copyright holder) then you shouldn't be allowed to stream it commercially. I don't see what's wrong with that at all.
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I also don't think that people should steal a cob of corn from a cornfield they stroll by or jay-walk in the middle of the street.

That doesn't mean I support making it a felony crime.

Those are "slap on the wrist" type of crimes that while not great, are hardly massively detrimental to any individual and are really only even noticed if everyone is doing it left and right. The punishment should fit the crime, pretty simple.
 
Well i kinda agree that making money outta stolen content should be considered a serious crime. unfortunately despite reassurances this will translate to someone burning a movie for a friend/colleague and asking for a few bucks to pay for the physical media he used. well just glad america hasn't passed a law that says they can pass any law they like in other countries.
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