> 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.
It isn’t necessarily nefarious. Account signups, bill payments and any ‘commercial activity’ conducted from Tor exits receives additional scrutiny in the security and fraud teams of many companies. Known exits may also be blocked entirely.
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.
This sounds like shooting the messenger. If it’s practical to break TOR (even just in part rather than in whole), it still will be even if @moocowtruck does change employer — you just won’t have anyone alerting you that you’re insufficiently cautious.
Interesting. I think a lot Darknet activity goes through Tor. The resulting drug purchases to and within the US will end up going through USPS. If I had Congressional funds to go after illegal drug shipments made through Darknet sites, I'd definitely be using Tor to make purchases from the biggest dealers on the most popular sites, and then investigating the source addresses, the types of packaging used to conceal the shipments, etc.
While I think it's immoral and a waste of taxpayer money to go after small time users buying personal quantities of drugs and controlled meds, it would be a satisfying and interesting job to help take down large suppliers of fentanyl laced drugs that are causing ODs all over the country.
"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."
Even so, why is copyright infraction criminal? This is fighting something that just doesn't need to be fought and ratchets up copyright to levels of importance that it just doesn't deserve. We need to be toning down copyright, not cranking it up.
"Last year, one study reported that digital video piracy costs the U.S. economy $29.2 billion a year."
Well, I'd say that it in fact saves $30 billion a year. People can use it to buy more important stuff - such as food.
When I have sought out an 'illegal' stream, it is because I deemed that piece of media not worth paying for.
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.
take f1tv. i enjoy watching f1. but the streaming services really did a poor job in execution. the fps is low, the resolution is low. on race day the service also would break down during start of the race!!! there are illegal streams and many file sharing sites which will give you access to high def high fps races. i am still a paid member of f1tv pro.
It may not be everyone, but there are a number of pirates who would buy a subscription to a legal streaming service if illegal streaming was not as easily available.
I've yet to read a really good large-sample study on this. I believe you're right, I just want to know the percentage of people. So far piracy is being treated as a scapegoat for unreached sales.
It sounds like something that's nearly impossible to study.
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.
There's probably more truth to it when turned around: there are a number of pirates who would buy content, if it would be easily accessible.
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.
Look at Spotify, iTunes, YouTube and Netflix. Laws don’t stop piracy, good legal options stop piracy. The reason people pirated music wasn’t because the piracy sites were great, it’s because music companies wanted to charge ridiculous prices for something they would broadcast on the radio for free.
Music companies don't broadcast music on the radio for free, they charge radio companies certain amounts per play depending on the reach of that radio station.
Obviously if you release something for free like Spotify or YouTube, few people will mess with torrents for it; but that also makes artists a lot less money. You'll never stop piracy. But laws can reduce it. And some probably-impossible-to-know portion of that reduction will pay for the legal option. 99% of people will never download qBitTorrent. It's a small portion that will even get PopcornTime. It's easy to get disconnected as more technically-inclined people, but you have to remember that most people that pirate things just Google "stream avengers endgame free" and click through the links until they find a site that works. If that gets too hard, plenty will just give up and buy the DVD or whatever.
I think the inverse is more accurate. Services like spotify have very significantly reduced music piracy. If a reasonably priced legal alternative exists, people will tend to use it. Piracy only thrives at large scale when content is too difficult or expensive to access legally.
The converse relationship seems well represented by some recent digital music access like iTunes and Spotify. Many would-be customers turn to piracy when piracy is _more_ convenient than legitimate alternatives. I think movies and tv shows have become more accessible through legitimate channels, but the fragmentation of the streaming platforms certainly limits future convenience.
I see people calling for an all-in-one service for movies & TV shows, but that isn't likely to happen since the licensing and pay distribution for those work on a much different scale than music. A big reason is that in most cases at least 100x the amount of people will work on any professional video broadcast media as compared to a music album.
It will continue to hinder consumer convenience, and the only halfway solution is the stream hardware giants giving you a unified interface to pick any piece of content you want and then display where it's available.
If legal streaming services were not profiling the crap out of me and what I do in their platforms, I would have stayed with them. I had a subscription with pretty much every single service available in my country, but back to Kodi[1], seed boxes, and private trackers I went.
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.
Personally, my issue is more with DRM. I considered buying a few Blu-rays, but I have little use for a bunch of copyrigh-protected plastic, and circumventing the DRM on it might be a hassle, plus drives cost quite a bit.
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.
Providing DRM-free downloads would probably kill the studio's long-tail revenue streams. Once people have a copy of the content in a format that's going to be indefinitely forward-portable, they will never buy another copy again.
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.
Yeah, god, DRM. Sometimes I'll buy an ebook to support the author and then pirate it anyway just so I can have a proper DRM-free version that will run on my ebook reader.
Interesting. Perhaps the studios should quadruple the price of streaming to recoup their losses.
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.
> 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.
Jobs convinced the music tracks studios to let him sell DRM free tracks on iTunes, so it seems to me like he believed it. I don't know if iTunes music is still DRM free, though.
But even it weren't, content creators unwillingness to let Apple sell DRM free media is not evidence that Jobs agrees with them.
Obviously there's some balance in pricing stuff. Selling all your movies for $1 a pop may kill most piracy, but it will kill your movie studio too. Selling streams for $500 per person will price most people out, regardless of whether piracy exists or not. Piracy hurts profits regardless of pricing. iTunes did not make up for the death of CDs at all. Digital sales have never even made up a third of what physical sales used to be: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/
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.
Right. Obviously, you can't value every stream as a loss of of face value price.
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.
The idea is that every pirate copy is a lost sale. Of course, that ignores people who would never buy the product if it cost anything. But it is partly true as some people would pirate over spending if it’s available.
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.
It's relatively unusual to have a job as a teenager where I come from. So I had to make do with birthday/christmas gifts and pocket money. During my university days my budget was pretty much just rent and food. I could afford a PC, maybe a console for playing games, but hardly any games unless I'd buy used ones.
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.
It's like when police say they got $1B of weed off the streets, but it would only equal that if you sold it as dime bags for $20. It totally ignores that getting the theoretical maximum profit out of a product is impossible.
> It's a common misconception that piracy is a loss of business. It's nothing more than an overestimation in profits.
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.
I wonder how hard it would be to get people to start pronouncing the "ch" in yacht. Maybe to rhyme with the German "nacht" rather than a hard "ch" as in "church".
I figure there are more people who enjoy doing silly things to bother other people than who enjoying yachting.
In Danish it's pronounced the same way as the word for hunt - "jagt". I almost forgot what the word sounded like in English just now because my native tongue version of the word, spelled the same, sounds better to my ears.
Are all the people, from the film crew to the VFX artists and engineers that work on the IP that is being stolen "rich people yatch (sic!) money"?
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.
No, but the second-order effects of you not paying may very well affect them in the future. If the studios get less revenue and have to pay more for enforcing IP law, they have less money for new productions and therefore less jobs and salary for the people producing the content. And I don't see why you should have a right to enjoy the fruits of their labor without paying.
Without meaning to offend, that is not a good argument. If you rob a store and the employees have to quit their job, saying "I will spend the money somewhere else and that is where they will be working in the future" would not absolve you of the responsibility that you have indirectly damaged their livelihood.
On your second point I mean that there is zero marginal cost to produce a movie. To me, that makes that it cannot be compared to stealing e.g. a bag of M&M's.
I would bet that the marginal cost of that movie is actually higher than the cents it costs to produce that bag of M&M's. Even if the marginal cost of movies is 0 the cost of a bag of M&M is so low it might as well be 0. Does that now justify stealing the bag of M&M? No.
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.
How fast would you be able to switch the industry you are working in?
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.
The economic re-allocation doesn't have to be overnight or even in a single decade. It isn't as if the revenue suddenly goes to zero and the industry is nuked.
No matter how long it will take they will have to start fresh and whatever experience, knowledge and education they had becomes useless. Much more likely they simply become unemployed and stay that way.
That is an awful lot of time wasted of their lives.
It doesn't. Some people retire, some people leave the industry because they prefer something else, etc. All that needs to happen is that not all of them are being replaced.
Something that affects profitability will change how many projects are worth doing, which will affect demand for their skills. Greater demand means greater ability to negotiate higher pay, and vice versa.
> but the second-order effects of you not paying may very well affect them in the future
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.
"Those people are not making less if I don't pay for a movie. The marginal revenue is all yacht money profits"
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.
And if everyone sold their stocks the economy would crumble and millions of people would be out in the streets and lose their retirement money, should we make selling stocks a crime?
On one single movie, no, but the expected revenue for a movie informs their negotiations (and the demand for their services). The reason high tens of millions of dollars are spend on VX for blockbusters is because they make a lot of revenue.
If what you’re saying so strictly true, yearly movie budgets would have been dropping year over year. With the obvious exception on the pandemic, is this what is happening?
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.
They may not be buying them, but I've done some research on this in the past and IP law is widely supported by content creators, even those who make little money. I personally also think that copyright laws as they exist right now are not optimal, but I think that pretending that "rich people yacht money" is all they are good for is also not a good thing.
I already don't enjoy many big-budget productions. I find niche Youtubers catering to my interests to be a better use of my time -- recently, we've been binging on 3Blue1Brown.
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.
Then don't watch those movies. The fact is, many people enjoy these things - there's market research on that - and you are not the target audience. The sum amount of enjoyment from a big budget production is much higher than what 3B1B produces (who I also like!). And that enjoyment would not exist if not for IP law.
I could live with that if you didn't try to impose their values on me. I want to be free to write whatever code I want in the privacy of my own bedroom. I want to be free to understand my democratic government institutions. I want to be able to reverse-engineer things I own. I want to understand the world around me fully, and completely, to within the limits of my intellect. I want to build school systems where kids learn to understand their world.
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.
Sorry if I'm missing something here, but how does my enjoyment of a big budget movie correlate with I want to build school systems where kids learn to understand their world. What harm am I causing these kids that I am apparently unaware of?
The initial argument was "we need IP law so we can enjoy big budget movies". The counterargument is "I don't care about those, here's a list of things I do care about that are made harder or threatened by IP law".
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.
I don't know how true this is (it could just be rumours) but I've heard multiple times from hardware vendors that the main reason they can't open source GPU drivers and firmware, or the code for a smart TV, is because of concerns about the DRM being cracked. It would be a pretty sad state of affairs if the end result of this copyright enforcement is that the general public just isn't allowed to know how a TV or a GPU works anymore, and that right becomes reserved only for the 5 big movie studios.
The world my child grows up in is increasingly controlled by technology. You can't really understand your toaster, your car, your printer, or your democracy without understanding the software which power them.
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.
And that's fine. The question at hand isn't whether people will pay for GoT, but whether they'll be used as an argument to pass laws like the DMCA, which says I'm not allowed to reverse-engineer technologies in my home, or ones which put bankrupt or put college students in prison.
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.
Then you’re arguing against politicians politicking. It’s not like its real people arguing for any of that.
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.
The film & recorded music industries were built in an era of information scarcity, maintained by tightly controlled distribution. We now live in an era where information is infinite and everywhere.
Criminalising people isn't going to turn back this fundamental sea change.
Information is infinite, but creating it is still not free. Creating the media that people consume via these streaming services costs millions of dollars and manhours. You are right that media companies have to adapt to the changing times, but simply saying that it should all be freely available is not a solution. I can imagine a future where this may be a feasible solution, but we are not there yet.
What is also a problem is that prosecuting copyright infringement presents a nasty threat to privacy protections.
"Criminalising people isn't going to turn back this fundamental sea change"
- 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.
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.
That's never stopped the police and prosecutors before.
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 can't find it right now, but I swear there was a study that showed that people who pirated content also on average spent _more_ on digital entertainment.
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.
That's basically where I am with streaming sites. Exert minimal effort to find version of mediocre quality, let it run for a bit and then decide if I want to actually pay for the content or just stop watching.
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.
But think of the trickle down effect. If rich people can't buy yachts, a rich yacht manufacturer can't reap profits while paying minimum wage to it's workers.
This is the hat-trick of the "job creator" myth. Narratives have no numbers attached; the quantitative delta between luxuries, and the jobs they allegedly create, belies real economic energy transferred from those living paycheck-to-paycheck, to those who signify status through conspicuous consumption.
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.
The next time you watch something on Netflix go ahead and watch the credits and you'll see the names of the hundreds of mostly regular people who made that thing. In addition, it's worth nothing, that most actors are not remotely rich, they're barely making it if that.
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.
> 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.
Everything is on the razor thing margin while everything is expensive at the same time and salaries are stagnant. Those money should go somewhere after all, like those metaphysical yachts.
I think you implied it with b) but availability of content is important as well. I've still got MP3s obtained via Napster and its ilk back in the day. The quality on many of them is below current standards, so I've been trying to upgrade to higher quality sources over the years. I'd say that I've got about a 20-25% success rate in being able to actually purchase that content legitimately. I could probably up that by 10-20% by going with overseas vendors, but I suspect most of those are bootlegged anyway.
Yes, also it's incredible how it is possible to fully automatically recognize and block music and video's, and go after and punish the perpetrators, but this seems wholly impossible for blatant disinformation and lies on the same websites.
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.
I'm sure that, given the right incentives, that 'objectively very hard problem' would be 95% solved very quickly.
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, given the right incentives, that 'objectively very hard problem' would be 95% solved very quickly.
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.
Yeah, I hate that kind of language because it's so dishonest. Number one, a pirate is not a lost sale. Only a small number of pirates would have otherwise bought the product. Number two, the $29b didn't disappear, it was just spent elsewhere. The economy didn't "lose" anything. Number three, the entertainment industry is doing perfectly fine these days, so why should we be cracking down on entertainment which is accessible to poor people? Culture shouldn't belong exclusively for the financially comfortable.
Politicians love talking about the war on drugs using similar math. For instance, when 10kg of cocaine are seized, they report the street value of the cocaine, when in truth the wholesale value is what has been lost to the trafficker.
Similarly, pirated content does not represent lost retail sales. People who pirate content would not necessarily purchase it legitimately were it available to them.
If everyone had more money to spend on food, then food would be more expensive. People having more money doesn't generate value, it just drives inflation.
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.
Using studies like this irks me. Science doesn't just stop there.
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).
>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.
Running ads on copyrighted content that you didn't pay for is pretty nasty. Is that your position, defending profiteering off of someone else's content?
I didn't state a position. You assume I implied one. The point was that this will cast a wide net over many services, in response to people pointing out who it wouldn't affect as it didn't seem they considered how most "amateur streamers" operate.
This appears to be correct from reading the (very short) text[0]. Everyone discussing this law should really read the text instead of reading whatever nonsense the media is spinning.
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).
This is a problem I have with how a LOT of legal topics are covered, Bills, lawsuits and court cases are discussed, the merits opined, but nary a complaint, brief, motion or court opinion gets linked so I can read for my damn self what the actual law as voted on says.
It’s more of a surprise when it IS linked or embedded to read than not
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.
I agree in principle, but you wouldn't expect court documents in particular to exist for a new piece of legislation though. In this case we would want the proposed revision to the federal code.
Everyone seems to jump to conclusions a bit, though there's still some reason to be wary as I already see 2 ways that this would make it harder for someone to build a new streaming service.
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.
>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.
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 think the main issue I've got with this law is the fact that current laws already seem to cover it. It doesn't make sense to me why we needed additional criminal enforcement around, of all things, media streaming.
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?
>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?
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?
Uh, that was about a very small bit of two songs that were very similar/identical. The notion that you can't just steal a large part a song and it'll be legal because it's not the full work is a pretty obvious one. Beyond that a ship-of-Theseus type ambiguity kicks in regarding to how much is needed to be taken for it to be thefth, as it does for most things that can be taken apart.
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.
> 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
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?
Note that I am not a fan of overarching copyright and crazy patents as is the current US system, and think the DMCA is broken.
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.
It could also kill streaming DJs and the services that support them.
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.
> for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, offer or provide to the public a digital transmission service that
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".
Isn't PopcornTime free software, which means it has no commercially significant anything? Or is it meant to be read has no (commercially significant purpose) or (use)?
PopcornTime definitely has a commercially significant purpose, even if it’s free: it provides unrestricted access to large amounts of copyrighted material that has undisputed commercial value.
But is that "digital transmission service" run "for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain"? I agree with your theory, but not sure why you removed the qualifier from your theory. This seems more targeted to PopcornTime than bittorrent
You're getting something that you'd otherwise have to pay for. That is legally considered a financial gain, even if it doesn't hold up to pedantic linguistic scrutiny. Legal definitions are often different to everyday language.
In Germany that is already the case. Streaming is "ok" here for the consumer whereas torrenting is illegal and practically dead by now. The legal argument is that you are distributor when using peer to peer. Under German law it doesn't matter if that is done for profit or not.
Could this be used to make torrenting a felony then? In the case that you're sharing a commercial work, obviously. You sharing a torrent is essentially you providing a service (being in the swarm, sending chunks), which exists entirely and only to infringe one or several copyrighted works (the files in the torrent).
If I were to share a Plex server with some friends, and that Plex server were to primarily include pirated content (say, whatever we couldn’t get through other streaming services), I’m sure an argument could be made that it’s public and is therefore subject to these laws.
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.
Sounds like if I, e.g. have a podcast where I play and review songs (without permission), I can be charged with a felony if I, say, take paid ads on the podcast.
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.
That's not weird. The bill says "a transmission service that (1); (2); or (3)". That's just how English conjunctions work when you're joining more than two things.
Yeah, fair enough. I'm just used to seeing most legal codes have a conjunction between each element of a list for clarity, or a description before the list whether each element needs to be satisfied or just one of them.
Yes, if you are the one distributing the podcast directly on a platform you control and the platform is primarily to distribute music you don't own the copyright to, it doesn't matter if you happen to be dancing while the music is playing, that is copyright infringement and under this law would be criminal.
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.
Well those videos on Youtube won't be impacted by this. This law doesn't go after individuals who upload infringing content, rather it goes after the platform itself. It's unlikely Youtube will be affected by it.
While that may indeed be the intent, an aggressive prosecutor could make a strong argument that individual streamers dancing or singing unlicensed karaoke are providing a digital service (the word "platform" never appears in the text) that "is intentionally marketed by or at the direction of that person to promote its use in publicly performing works." Which would now be a freaking felony.
Going by the quoted portion of the bill up thread, "platform" doesn't appear in the relevant portions text but neither does "digital service" - it says "digital transmission service".
> This law doesn't go after individuals who upload infringing content, rather it goes after the platform itself.
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!
I would read "digital transmission service" as a service offering digital transmission, but that's not what the bill says. It says "the term ‘digital transmission service’ means a service that has the primary purpose of publicly performing works by digital transmission;" which to my eyes does not clearly restrict it to platforms as opposed to, at, a YouTube channel. Unless, as you say, there is a restriction somewhere unspecified on what can be meant by "service".
> that is copyright infringement and under this law would be criminal.
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.
This makes me realize that torrenting is absolutely under attack here.
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.
Lookup "streaming loophole". This new law would make commercially offering a service of pirated content a felony whereas previously, it would have been a misdemeanor.
That's what the linked press release[1] says but looking at the wording of the bill[2] I'm not so sure it's that cut and dry:
> 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."
Yeah, I think people in this thread are really underestimating the ability for courts to over-apply laws that talk about commercial activity. If growing food on your own property for personal consumption can be "interstate commerce", then really any human activity can be justified as "commercial advantage or private financial gain".
I'd be curious to see if another lawyer could turn all of this on the heads of the 'digital market' as a whole.
> 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?
You quoted the preamble but didn't quote the rest of the text: [...]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.
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.
I envy your gift of statutory clarity. It isn't clear to me. And I can't imagine I'm the only lawyer who can spot the squishy bits of this legislation ripe for manipulation.
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.
As the other person commented, I read it as 1 or 2 or 3 though I'll admit this bill has exceptionally poor drafting. Typically to avoid that sort of confusion the "chapeau" would say something like "it shall be unlawful for a person to do one or more of the following" or "it shall be unlawful for a person to do (all of) the following".
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).
This really reminds me of attempts to define a non-commercial open source license.
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.
Not a big shock to see both of Georgia's sub-human Senators, Loeffler, and Perdue, on the list of sponsors of this.
Loeffler is a white supremacist. Perdue very actively traded on secret insider pandemic information to enrich himself during the period in which he, and basically all Republicans, were still lying about the pandemic to the American people.
Calling them subhuman makes the implication that a human would be above such acts - and by implication that the person making those claims would be above such acts and protects the person from self-reflection.
It is dangerous to ever consider another person less than human.
Please don't post like this to HN. Perhaps you don't owe shit-enabling senators better, but you owe this community better if you're posting to it, and the site guidelines specifically ask you not to: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
>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.
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.
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.
> Isn't the use of an illegal service already a felony?
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.
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.
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.
5,500 pages of bridging votes? A bill that's so large that people literally don't have the ability to read it before they vote on it? Policy negotiations are normal. This is not normal.
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.
> 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.
That's just how the press release on the sponsoring senator's web page spins it. It's essentially a combination of "don't worry if you've got nothing to hide" and "we're only going after the big bad criminals not everyday people who watch GoT once or twice".
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?
Looking at the text of the law, I disagree. It doesn’t require that the service be commercial. The criteria are loose and broad enough that while they may appear to target platforms, they could certainly be abused by creative lawyers to target individuals.
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.
I'm not a lawyer, of course, but how do you read this part:
> 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...
“Private financial gain” and “commercial advantage” are so broad that a decent lawyer could probably convince a carefully-selected jury that just about anything falls into one of those two categories.
We found Google’s ad tracking code in your server! (No need to tell the jury how ubiquitous Google Analytics is.) Something like that.
Fun fact, this is how Crunchyroll started. Illegal for-profit streaming site which eventually turned legal. And now Funimation is set to buy the site for $1.175b from AT&T.
> Creating a for-profit platform with intent to do illegal streaming will be
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.
If the law is passed it will be used as a sledgehammer to stop anyone from doing something they don’t like. It opens up the possibility of being interpreted as a for-profit platform.
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?
Yes, the submitted title was "Illegal Streaming to be a felony soon". That broke the site guidelines quite badly. They ask: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." We've changed it now.
They could have done it 10-15 years ago, and Youtube and YouPorn would have not skyrocketed. (it's well known that their initial growth was mostly due to illegal videos being uploaded by users).
I think that is perfectly correct approach, it should not be allowed to steal someone's profit.
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.
If the United States’ populace elects its officials, why do the representatives act against the populace’s wishes?
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.
Anyone can start a news or media organization in the US. Is it the high barrier of entry that limits these businesses? HN likes to talk about industries ripe for disruption. I would argue then that the media or news sectors are primed for a new breed of journalism. Can media ownership be decentralized when the gateway to media consumption is owned by Google and Facebook?
> 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%).
If information and copyright laws create an unfair advantage to the established large players, then removing them should create a more level playing field. Is that right? Wouldn't we still have a winner takes all outcome due to network effects, and users would eventually prefer one search engine or one internet portal? Even if new players could compete, they would still encounter existing large protected companies. Protected by a data and high monthly active user moat.
I suppose without copyright laws, the small players could coexist but remain small...
>If the USA populace elects its officials, why do the representatives act against the populace’s wishes?
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.
We do elect our officials, but the way legislation gets pushed through is typically lobbied by special interests. In some cases the laws themselves are written by those same special interests rather than written by the legislative bodies.
Start with the glorious revolution in UK, and the rise of mercantile corporations (East-India et al.) and licensed /sanctioned cooperatives (such as the original colonies), throw in a pinch of Puritan economic ethics and morality, and finally let it simmer in a pot stamped with “corporations are legal persons”.
'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.”'
that's because many people don't vote or take part in political advocacy. it doesn't make society in "oligarchy". our democracy actually works really well, even with gerrymandering and some voter disenfranchisement. if all those people actually voted frequently, the policy outcomes would be a lot different.
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.
It's not because people aren't voting - it's because our votes are not equal. We don't have "one person, one vote" here - we have "one dollar, one vote", and those with more dollars get more votes. Citizen's United infamously set that in stone. Meanwhile, rampant gerrymandering, court packing, and other anti-democratic tactics have been heavily abused over the past few decades of Republican control to further erode and cement that. Though Republicans are not the only ones accountable - Democrats are just as responsible for accepting PAC money, for instance - and the two party system is mathematically guaranteed to be intractible as a consequence of our voting system. Even if every eligible voter voted in every election, the two party system is an inevitable conseqeunce of any election outcome, and both parties are dogs of the rich.
That the average American has approximately zero influence in politics is a mathematical, deliberately orchestrated truth.
It’s not really debatable that money has an influence in US politics and elections. It’s also pretty clear that for presidential elections, votes are not equal for people living in different states. But to say “We don’t have ‘one person, one vote’” in this context is pretty blatantly false.
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.
Ranked choice was rejected in MA because it was poorly explained to voters and they voted against it because they didn't understand it. A vote against ranked choice is a vote against your best interests, and that's an objective fact.
> that's because many people don't vote or take part in political advocacy
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.
> Secondly, I believe it confuses cause and effect.
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.
What data do you want? Look at the way people change their answers to whether or not they support Medicare For All based on how the question is phrased, or support for the Affordable Care Act [1]. What you are asking for is asinine. The data is the results of elections. You are the one who has provided no evidence for your claim.
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.
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
Most people tend to vote along party lines. Some of those that don't will be influenced by successful campaigns. The US is a two party, first pass the post system. Getting on the party ticket is generally dictated again by campaign funding and other forms of political influence.
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?
Lyndon B. Johnson - “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
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.
I used the racism quote above because that is the foundation of how completely broken the political system in the US is. Where every progressive policy can be short circuited -- reviled by the very people it would benefit the most -- through some simple racist gyrations.
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.
It's not even possible to have our good representatives help. They had a 5500+ page bill thrown together then said, if you don't vote on this tomorrow, people won't get a measly $600.
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.
We kind of don't. Only a very small percentage vote in primary elections, which is the election that determines who will be on the ballot in the general election.
Identity politics, for the most part. Talk about how you're going to "own the libs" or "every trump support is a racist" and you can loot the country. The political divisions are advantageous for getting citizens to vote against their own interests. The "us vs them" mentality is by design, something that is fomented to achieve political goals.
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.
What systems can be put in place so that unpopular legislation like this isn't snuck into unrelated bills? You'd need something like a rolling referendum on all suggested law changes that were up for a direct democratic vote, but direct democracy would probably just lead to a lot more politics fatigue.
Defer to the other replies pointing out this is against services and not individuals, but I think "the populace wishes for free content, government please make it so" is fairly naive. It requires money to produce good content, and the government protecting property rights (yes for corporations, but who pay salaries and yes stockholders) is actually doing what the majority of the populace effectively wants.
It would be an interesting experiment for a polling company to pick a sampling of legislation and see how much of a disconnect there is.
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.
"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."
In the US, there is a distinction between illegal and felonious conduct. The latter is a subset of the former. Being charged with a felony offence is much more serious than being charged with a misdemeanor offence.
My opinion is that it costs nowhere near that absurd amount. People who pirate stuff most likely will not buy the content anyways. It doesn't cost them anything if people don't want to buy their product.
Family owned businesses like Disney doing their best to provide content for younger viewers and make the world a better place as well as nonprofits like the nfl and ncaa.
Exactly. I was happy to pay €10/month to DAZN when they had the streaming rights for a football league I was interested in, but then after two years they lost the rights to Sky via whom the minimum payment to get access to the same content was €30+ month. The content did not suddenly get 3x more valuable between seasons, this is just a big company being greedy. You reap what you sow and all that.
You could, you know, just stop paying attention to sports you don't find it worth paying for. I did that with nfl when they upped rates. Just watch the recaps, so you can chat about it.
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.
Baseball is an exceptional deal if you're an out-of-market fan since you can see nearly all of your team's games. It was even better a few years ago when, during commercial breaks, they just threw up a logo and offered silence.
I find that they're all over the place on what actually has the commercials and what doesn't. The network broadcasts are the worst.
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.
How is this changing anything? We already have DMCA.
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?
> 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.
What is their definition of criminal organizations? I can understand the distinction between users and service providers. I understand users, posters, and creators. It seems to targeting only the service provider, but only if they meet some definition of "criminal organization". Is that just a way to selectively enforce?
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.
It's just circular logic to fallaciously justify itself. "criminal organization" == "Any group of >1 person who breaks this law".
The term isn't in the text of the law itself.
Since most if not all of these platforms are based in countries more friendly towards infringement it’s really not going to do much of anything other than be another law that gets selectively applied and abused.
Precisely. Some dozens of citizens performing relatively harmless individual acts of illegal stream will go to prison and have their lives ruined over twitch activities.
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.
I'm absolutely positive the DoJ can find a way to bend the definition of "for-profit" to go after a person who shares their Plex service with other people.
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.
This should be fun for a service like Twitch. What happens when a streamer on their platform starts playing a game with a copywritten song playing on the game's radio or background? Many times the streamers themselves are not aware that this is a crime.
This is already a problem on Twitch. Cyberpunk 2077 claimed to have a "streamer mode" where no copywritten music was played, but they didn't actually ship the feature.
In this case, I don't see it as a 'bug' though... I would see something like not playing music at all or playing the same unencumbered song on repeat as a bug.
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.
Just like GDPR, doing business in a country subjects you to the laws of said country regardless of where you are incorporated. If this wasn’t the case, a lot of companies would only have to follow the laws of Panama or the Cayman Islands.
This law requires that the service as a whole be primarily designed for or marketed to the piracy market. So there’s no real grey area, we can be confident it won’t apply to Twitch.
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.
It will eventually be sorted out in the contracts whereby the games get licences for whatever content: music performed in-game is 'part of the experience' etc. and/or because they are playing a game with the music artists will claim that it's an original work in it's totality.
Twitch already has mostly DRM aware content creators - I hear them talking about 'rights' quite a lot in their streams.
My issue with these copyright strikes on streams is: who will actually watch a stream just to listen to a song played in the background of a videogame with all the game sound effects and dialog and streamers talking?
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.
Hopefully Trump vetos this PoS legislation. Lets do the math: 900B / 300m = $3000 a person. Where is the other $2400 of OUR OWN MONEY going. People who trust big government are such fools.
I find it humorous to recall an early days of the Internet story in California. A certain large, loud, famous guy on the Internet had made money in the 1990s business environment of California. He bought an expensive house in the hills in the San Francisco Bay Area. He used his home address and local Internet connection to stream digital content immediately, and was quite vocal about that in groups, including in front of me personally. The content was sort of "Pirate Party" content, which he maximized with his engineering skills, and every challenge or legal situation that came up, written or at a party, he would literally yell and become physically agitated about his "rights" .. Of course this included full-length first run movies from the US (as far as I could tell).
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.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 303 ms ] threadStreaming a felony? Madness.
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.
While I think it's immoral and a waste of taxpayer money to go after small time users buying personal quantities of drugs and controlled meds, it would be a satisfying and interesting job to help take down large suppliers of fentanyl laced drugs that are causing ODs all over the country.
"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."
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.
ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
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).
>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.
Loeffler is a white supremacist. Perdue very actively traded on secret insider pandemic information to enrich himself during the period in which he, and basically all Republicans, were still lying about the pandemic to the American people.
It is dangerous to ever consider another person less than human.
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?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
/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.
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.
Isn't that already illegal?
"One study," funded by people who also -- just by mere coincidence -- gave a lot of money to Thom Tillis' election campaign.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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".
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.
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?