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Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- snvzz 6y agoAt this rate, soon, non explicitly authorized copying will be punishable by death. Streaming a felony? Madness.
- quickthrowman 6y ago> 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.
- underseacables 6y agoGood thing there is TOR.
- moocowtruck 6y agopart of my job is to monitor tor and find people from using it, easier than you'd think.. so i wouldn't bankshot on that alone
- chejazi 6y agowhat is your job?
- nixgeek 6y agoIt 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.
- qz2 6y agoCan you please get a different job?
- ben_w 6y agoThis 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.
- moocowtruck 6y agoyep! and i wouldnt get a different job since this one pays very well :D
- redflame8 6y agoGet a new job. If it were as easy as you say it is, why is thepiratebay still around?
- RankingMember 6y agoI wouldn't think it'd be hard to find people using TOR, it's the stuff you're doing while you're on TOR that should be more difficult to track.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- giantg2 6y agoAs long as it's not the NSA doing the tracking (they own a sufficient percentage of the nodes).
- input_sh 6y ago...and judging by your comment history, you work for USPS? The fuck does your job have to do with Tor?
- hiram112 6y agoInteresting. 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Thaxll 6y agoBeside browsing 90' websites you can't do much with tor.
- underseacables 6y agoPiratebay works well, that’s enough for me.
- cspada 6y agoFrom the article: "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."
- crb002 6y agoBullshit. You stream a poem and you will be put in chains if the US Attorney has beef.
- __david__ 6y agoEven 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ForHackernews 6y agoWill this apply to YouTube, the largest service profiting off illegally streaming copyrighted content?
- hexo 6y ago"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.
- Bancakes 6y agoIt's a common misconception that piracy is a loss of business. It's nothing more than an overestimation in profits. 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?
- madamelic 6y agoWhen 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.
- garyfirestorm 6y agotake 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.
- mminer237 6y agoIt 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.
- Bancakes 6y ago
- chadash 6y agoThis title is misleading: >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.
- vmception 6y agocommercial is a simple as running ads
- anonunivgrad 6y agoRunning 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?
- sukilot 6y ago"someone else's" is a view of property rights that not all hold. "profiteering" (vs just covering costs) assumes facts not in evidence.
- vmception 6y agoI 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.
- roblabla 6y agoThis 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). [0] https://www.tillis.senate.gov/services/files/A30B0C08-FB97-4F90-BB60-43283EB7AF35 https://www.tillis.senate.gov/services/files/A30B0C08-FB97-4...
- kasperni 6y agoFor those of us not familiar with the US legal system. What are the implications?
- fumar 6y agoIf 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jonkho 6y agoThe agents in a system tends to work in the way the system incentivizes them. Understand the forces of these incentives to predict behavior.
- breck 6y agoI think a big part is the growth in complexity of the "source code" has allowed special interests to thrive in a discrete way. 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
- fumar 6y agoAnyone 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?
- breck 6y agoYes, anyone can start one. > 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%).
- ffpip 6y agoCan someone explain this? What is illegal streaming? Streaming copyrighted content? Isn't that already illegal?
- nebulous1 6y ago"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."
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- peeters 6y agoIn 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- TheRealDunkirk 6y ago> Last year, one study reported that digital video piracy costs the U.S. economy $29.2 billion a year. "One study," funded by people who also -- just by mere coincidence -- gave a lot of money to Thom Tillis' election campaign.
- boobsbr 6y agoMy opinion is that it costs nowhere near that absurd amount. People who pirate stuff most likely will not buy the content anyways. It doesn't cost them anything if people don't want to buy their product.
- chadlavi 6y agoFinally someone stands up for the little guys, like major league sports, film production companies, and cable networks
- Guest42 6y agoFamily owned businesses like Disney doing their best to provide content for younger viewers and make the world a better place as well as nonprofits like the nfl and ncaa.
- sleavey 6y agoExactly. I was happy to pay €10/month to DAZN when they had the streaming rights for a football league I was interested in, but then after two years they lost the rights to Sky via whom the minimum payment to get access to the same content was €30+ month. The content did not suddenly get 3x more valuable between seasons, this is just a big company being greedy. You reap what you sow and all that.
- grogenaut 6y agoYou could, you know, just stop paying attention to sports you don't find it worth paying for. I did that with nfl when they upped rates. Just watch the recaps, so you can chat about it. Baseball, which I like, seems to be a pretty good deal to me, ends up being about .97$ 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.
- cgriswald 6y agoBaseball 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.
- grogenaut 6y agoI 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.
- redflame8 6y agoStill think its all about COVID?
- yalogin 6y agoHow 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?
- whoopdedo 6y agoActual title: "Creating a competitor to YouTube, Hulu, Twitch, Netflix, et.al. to be a felony soon."
- nickthemagicman 6y agoIs this just lip service to entertainment industry lobbying? I mean how will this be enforced? 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.
- KingMachiavelli 6y agoFrom the article: > 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.
- nickthemagicman 6y agoGotcha. Ok thanks. Streaming sites will have to get creative bit prob nothing they can't work around
- phkahler 6y agoWhat 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?
- madamelic 6y ago>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.
- sukilot 6y agoIt'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.
- dawnerd 6y agoSince 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.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoThis is the most realistic and useful comment I've read so far.
- xbar 6y agoPrecisely. 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. Streaming companies seem to be doing just fine.
- mywittyname 6y agoI'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.
- cogman10 6y agoMind you, the law didn't say for profit. It said > 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".
- wojciii 6y agoThis is the perfect time to post this: https://youtu.be/ALZZx1xmAzg https://youtu.be/ALZZx1xmAzg
- SamuelAdams 6y agoThis 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.
- jonwalch 6y agoThis 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.
- dharmab 6y agoCorrection: They shipped the feature at launch but it had a bug where some copyrighted material was missed.
- yakz 6y agoIf you "ship" a feature that only works if it always works and it doesn't always work, does that really count?
- edoceo 6y agoI think you can still tick the "shipped" box even if you have bugs with subjective levels of severity. Otherwise, I'd never ship :/
- 1f60c 6y agoYes? Bugs make it to prod all the time.
- FeepingCreature 6y agoTo be fair, usually bugs don't expose people to criminal liability.
- 6y ago
- redflame8 6y agoHopefully 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.
- BEEdwards 6y agoIf America had half the hard on for Human rights as it does copy rights we'd live in a paradise...
- mistrial9 6y agoI 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.
- sukilot 6y ago> personally instigating legal action on millions of others how so?
- FeistyOtter 6y agoDoes that mean small creators can punish those megacorps who routinely use their work without permission? Oh who am I kidding.
- asah 6y agoflagged for clickbait title - see first comment for limited scope.
- mynameishere 6y agoThe whole bill is nonsense like this, on one hand, and unrelated pork on the other. 700 million to Sudan? Find a non-Sudanese-American who thinks that's a good idea. Just one. Find one. Millions for "gender" programs in Pakistan. Oh, good, that will cheer me up when I am doing my taxes in April. And the usual tribute to Israel. Curiously, the President finally gets some money for his wall, so that's at least plausibly for the good of the people, though I doubt it will ameliorate any damage done by Covid-19. Actually, Covid-19 made it less useful than before, but whatever.
- caymanjim 6y agoI'm disgusted by the comments on HN every time media theft is mentioned. It costs money to make movies, TV shows, and music. There are millions of people whose careers depend on it. Most of the people involved make less than your average HN media pirate. Yes, like everything else, the people at the top make more. Yes, there are shitty UIs, DRM, and absurd rules preventing fair and convenient use of media even if you pay for it. No, copying media isn't the same kind of theft as shoplifting. You're still unilaterally deciding that the rules don't apply to you, that no one involved in the production deserves to get paid. Don't like all the negative aspects of the broken media business? Fine, spend your money on something else, but watch something else too. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.
- kauffj 6y agoNo, other people are unilaterally making up rules and applying them to me. I would happily live in a society without IP, but am not permitted to do so. Those who support IP demand it globally, at the barrel of a gun.
- sukilot 6y agoAll you have to do is not make copies of content the creators don't want to give to you. It costs you nothing to not infringe. Do you also want to live in a society without personal property? Can I come to your home to borrow anything you aren't using at the moment?
- Miner49er 6y agoThis is about intellectual property. Not personal property.
- triceratops 6y ago> Can I come to your home to borrow anything you aren't using at the moment? If I could have it back instantly when I wished, it's not private (like my diary), and it's impossible for you to damage it, sure, why not?
- 6y ago
- emilecantin 6y agoGabe Newell (of Steam fame) has it right: Piracy is not a price problem, it's a service problem. Offer your digital goods packaged in a good service, and people will buy them (see: Netflix). Make it annoying to get your digital goods (through hostile "anti-piracy" software, bad UI, paltry device support, etc), and people will pirate instead. I'd argue the current trend towards exclusives / market fragmentation on video is one such example. Having to buy, then search through 5-6 different streaming services to get what I want is a form of friction, which is non-existent on pirate sites that have everything, for free. The music industry has got it mostly right, IMO. There are a few players (Youtube Music, Spotify, Apple Music) but they all have mostly the same catalog. They compete on service, not catalog. I'd like to see a similar shift for TV & movies, but it doesn't look likely.
- sukilot 6y agoNetflix is draining of quality content and people still pirate memberships. Not a good example. If Netflix was working so well, all those other services wouldn't exist, because they'd have no customers. You undermine your own argument by saying > Piracy is not a price problem, it's a service problem and then say > for free.
- these_are_not_t 6y agoI think that piracy overall isn't a simple issue: trying to put every pirates in the same bag isn't going to work, because not everyone has the same set of motivations: some have issues with packaging, some with price, and perhaps there are other kinds of issues? What can be done on the other hand, is to figure out what are the main reasons for piracy (ie, on average, what are the driving factors), and what can be done to remove them. Packaging in the music industry took a while to adjust: they first fought really hard against Napster and the like, when the customers were quite ready to accept digital content, but the DRM solutions were mostly in the way, or the network technology wasn't quite ready. Nowadays, everyone takes for granted that music is bandwidth cheap, and content owners realized that removing the packaging issue did remove a large part of the piracy, because those who pirated for lack of good delivery didn't have to anymore, and with this market share acquired, the revenues increased, which meant that prices could go down, and thus another chunk of the piracy crowd became customers as well. I guess that my point is that price isn't a completely solvable problem, but it's not entirely orthogonal to the other issues. Clearly, price cannot be reduced down to zero, there will always be people finding this or that to be too expensive for what it is. Note that ads do not reduce cost to zero for the consumer in the case of digital streaming: they still have to pay in ad view time, which leads to ad blockers, yet another form of piracy. > If Netflix was working so well, all those other services wouldn't exist, because they'd have no customers. Even if Netflix is working perfectly well, they can't have the monopoly of creativity. They might produce good content (something you seem to disagree with, I personally don't have an opinion on that), but they cannot prevent other distributors to do the same. The main reasons for this are that: - again people cannot be put all in the same bag: what one will be interested in might bore the next, - "topics" can be exclusive (GP alluded to that): For instance, Disney owns "Star Wars", and if you want to watch some of that stuff, you'll have to go to them.
- fortran77 6y agoHow about a better title, @dang?
- eljimmy 6y agoUnder 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. Says a lot about who these people represent when they're closing the streaming "loophole" while the corporate tax loopholes remain unchanged.
- ckorhonen 6y agoHow will this affect applications like Plex that have functionality which allows sharing libraries? If I watch copyrighted content from someones Plex server, do I go to jail?
- dannykwells 6y agoCan we please stop posting proposed legislation with highly editorialized titles? Most proposed legislation, even "bipartisan" will not go through are end up so diluted that it won't matter. Not that it's not worth fighting but this is clearly an attempt to garner clicks/votes and we should be fighting back here.
- drenvuk 6y agoI'm not so sure. If you get the word out people act. If you don't then legislation you don't want is more likely to go through. See the icann and .org issues last year.
- Deukhoofd 6y agoIt was proposed when it was posted, two weeks ago. It's now no longer proposed, but actually passed, as part of the covid relief bill. Unless Trump vetos it, it will be legislation quite soon.
- kevinmgranger 6y agoIt's attached to a COVID stimulus. Its odds of passing are much higher.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoI'm so glad Hollywood found another host for it's corrupt parasite - the one that used to live in Orrin Hatch.
- pontifier 6y agoI feel personally attacked. Truly. I purchased Murfie, and am attempting to re-build their business. It's a streaming service that leverages media people own to give them access to that content. This feels like a targeted attack on my business plan by Disney. I can't see another reason it would be so targeted. BUT... I believe the service I'm providing is legal and I'll fight this battle to the end.
- swiley 6y agoYes lets make sharing things on the internet a felony, especially with modern OSes and software that users have little control over. Good job, I'm glad to hear our legislature is still "getting things done" during the lame duck congress.
- dukeofdoom 6y agoOn page 2487 is a repeal of Section 711 of USC Title 18, which provided six months in jail for misuse of the "Smokey Bear" character or name https://twitter.com/FordFischer/status/1341163388559306752 https://twitter.com/FordFischer/status/1341163388559306752
- andjd 6y agoThe headline is misleading because it misstates the status this legislation is in. Any senator or congressperson can release proposed legislation like this. The vast, vast majority of it never gets further -- Especially ones released right before the end of the term. Senator Tillis can introduce this legislation again next year, but nothing is going to happen with this bill before it dies an unceremonial death on Jan 3. It's good to keep abreast of what congress is considering in this regard, but this is nothing more than a wish by the Senator and the handful of lawmakers that are co-sponsoring it. A useful headline would be `Senator introduces bill to make illegal streaming a felony` but to say "it will happen soon" is misleading.
- nobody9999 6y ago>The headline is misleading because it misstates the status this legislation is in. Any senator or congressperson can release proposed legislation like this. The vast, vast majority of it never gets further -- Especially ones released right before the end of the term IIUC, this legislation was included in the $2.3 trillion spending bill (900 billion for COVID "relief" and 1.4 trillion to keep the government running until next September) already passed by Congress. If it hadn't been passed (or Trump vetoes the bill) the government will shut down in a matter of hours.
- tantalor 6y agoWhy the focus exclusively on streaming? That seems arbitrary. There are other distribution platforms for copyright material such as torrenting, p2p, BBS... I could go on. If these are already covered by existing law, then we don't need a new law just for prosecuting streamers.
- 533474 6y agoSimple -- people who cannot afford films will stop watching or streaming sports. Companies will lose free marketing and word of mouth. Companies will have to work harder to persuade the populace to acquire commercial flicks/sports. Youtube and cheap magnate streaming services win. Small studios or independent film makers, lose their free marketing distribution channels (personal opinion)
- bserge 6y agoEh, silver lining, this could be good for society in general. No one actually needs all the trash media companies put out these days. Felony though, wow, that's just evil.
- boobsbr 6y agoAdditionally, the fragmentation of streaming services just creates inconvenience and resentment among the users for having to subscribe to N different services to consume media. I see it happening with digital game stores: my friends refuse to buy anything outside of Steam. It goes as far as not even getting free games from Epic, Ubi or GOG, because they'll have to create another account in another service.
- seanc 6y ago- Everyone discussing this law should really read the text The difficulty in doing so is a big part of the problem. As per AOC's comments on twitter yesterday, at 2PM Members of Congress got 5000 pages of bill dropped on their desk with a vote call at 4PM. The whole thing needs to be much more transparent.
- setr 6y agoShouldn’t the collective default be to simply vote “no” if it’s given like this I don’t know why the behavior would exist otherwise..
- RobRivera 6y agoPerhaps because there is entire political dance at play here where you toe the agenda lines of your whip in exchange for future political support?
- tt433 6y agoThe key problem is essentially the Hastert rule and its infection of the Senate. Legislation is only considered by leadership, who only concern themselves with counting beans.
- adamcstephens 6y agoThis same thing happens in the House.
- tt433 6y agoI never said it didn't, Hastert was Speaker of the House when he introduced it, but it's since come to dominate the legislative process in both chambers. I trusted my use of the word infection conveyed that meaning
- Spooky23 6y agoThe Senate is a gross and antidemocratic institution, but this sort of thing is not unique to the Senate. The nature of legislative bodies is such that compromise and voting while holding your nose is a thing everywhere. The supreme power of the leadership more a symptom of the 50/50 political split, which empowers the party machinery. The legislative leadership weren’t household names at most points in time.
- kangaroozach 6y ago$30B was just pissed away 20x over in the misallocation of capital in the $900B covid bill.
- exabrial 6y agoI blame this on reaction-ism... We don't need a law for every little thing that happens. Non-violent offenders should _never_ face jail time.
- trixie_ 6y agoSomeone steals your identity, ruins your credit, drains you bank accounts, sells your crypto/stocks - leaves you with nothing. It wasn't violent so what happens to them?
- Afton 6y agoWe change the laws making it harder for it to happen again. We restrict the actions of the individual to make them less able to do it again. We attempt to understand the circumstances that led to them engaging in this behaviour and attempt to mitigate both directly in the case of the individual, and generally for the class of people that this particular criminal represents. IOW: We try to mitigate and reduce. I am not one tiny bit interested in 'getting back' at the individual. Prison as 'punishment' is fundamentally stupid.
- trixie_ 6y agoYou never answered the question of what happens to someone who zeros out your net worth. Possibly decades of savings gone. Mitigation and reduction is already being done. Punishment is a fundamental deterrent that has been used by societies around the world for thousands of years. And somehow you contrived a solution in your imagination that you think is so correct that you can judge everyone else as dumb.
- Afton 6y agoI don't understand the point of your first sentence. I absolutely answered. What I didn't give you was some bad thing to make up for the bad thing that they did. Because I think that is stupid. Notice that I think punishment is generally stupid. I didn't say that people who use punishment are stupid. Sometimes they are, sometimes they're ignorant, sometimes they just have a blind spot, and sometimes they just disagree with this position. > is a fundamental deterrent that has been used by societies around the world for thousands of years. Lots of things have been done for thousands of years, and we now realize that some of them were bad ideas. I believe that punishment should absolutely go in the bucket of last resorts. IMO it represents an absolute failure of the imagination of our society. Your last sentence doesn't make any sense, doesn't address any point I made, no matter how briefly. It's just you insulting me. I don't think that is likely to convince anyone. Like punishment, we do it because it feels good. I think we can be better than that. This is a point that we might not agree on.
- williesleg 6y agoIt's all illegal. Even this.
- rajvosa07 6y agoInteresting take here as well: https://prospect.org/power/senator-thom-tillis-pushes-prison-time-for-online-streamers/ https://prospect.org/power/senator-thom-tillis-pushes-prison...
- DanBC 6y agoIsn't this already illegal in the US? > bipartisan legislation that would punish large-scale criminal streaming services that willfully and for commercial advantage or private financial gain offer to the public illicit services dedicated to illegally streaming copyrighted material. > The Protecting Lawful Streaming Act would apply only to commercial, for-profit streaming piracy services.
- ipnon 6y agoYes it is, and it's already felonious to distribute copyrighted materially willfully. Recall the FBI warning screen at the beginning of all VHS tapes in the US.
- Signez 6y agoI don't understand why the US Constitution doesn't have a way to say that you can't hide something that is not remotely related to the subject of a bill into it. We have that in the French Constitution and it's very useful to take down this kind of thing we call a "cavalier législatif".
- mdaniel 6y agoI keep hoping advances in NLP will allow at least surfacing the hidden topics or summarizing the contents without requiring someone to digest all the legalese to get to the actual payload, since "sunlight" may be the only recourse in the absence of the restrictions you describe That's on the way to my hope that eventually we can create a formal model of the text to allow spotting inconsistencies (or even edge cases), but I don't know if that's even possible
- uncomputation 6y agoMore of this “war on drugs” “tough on crime” mentality from Republicans? When will we learn?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Dirlewanger 6y agoYou do realize this legislation is sponsored by Democrats, right?
- uncomputation 6y agoIt’s literally bi-partisan legislation, so yes by definition some Democrats sponsor it too. But it was introduced by a Republican and the excessive punitive measures on issues that have larger roots in society (punishing people isnt going to make them stop streaming illegally (“you wouldnt steal a car”)) I’m talking about came from the Republican party in the early 80’s, so let’s skip this “gotcha checkmate” mentality please
- tmd83 6y agoNot an American. One thing I don't understand is how a non essential/time-critical bill like this is allowed to be put alongside critical funding related matter? For that matter how multiple completely independent laws are passed by a same vote?
- ceras 6y agoSetting aside whether it's a good idea to encourage this: in practice today, combining laws is a reliable way for different groups to compromise. If group A wants a policy that B doesn't want, and B wants a policy that A doesn't want, then combining those policies into one law is an easy and reliable way to compromise. You know that the whole bill will either pass, or it won't -- Congress votes on entire bills rather than parts of it, and the president doesn't have line-item veto power.
- tmd83 6y agoI know why they do it. But the fact that a kind of mafia tactic is the best compromise is really sad.
- mooreed 6y agoWhat is the fate of `dl-youtube` with respect to this legislation?? I don't see any discussion in the thread - and find that the recent dust up over this type of DRM gray area use is more than correlated with this type of new legislation. After the obligatory IANAL [1]: the fate of `dl-youtube` would be tied to your ability to construe `dl-youtube` as a digital transmission service based on §2319C.a.2. To me seems like the the risky clauses of §2319C.a.2 are : `primary purpose` and `publicly performing`; where primary purpose is tough because their is author intent, and then the proportions of real-world usage, and `publicly performing` is actually a pointer not to common usage of the phrase, but to definitions set forth later in the document. Read the actual law [PDF]: https://www.tillis.senate.gov/services/files/A30B0C08-FB97-4F90-BB60-43283EB7AF35 https://www.tillis.senate.gov/services/files/A30B0C08-FB97-4...) [1] - I Am Not A Lawyer
- Miner49er 6y agoIt's youtube-dl, and it is not a for-profit project/platform, so it should be fine.
- amelius 6y agoIt seems the politicians forgot about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses
- lerpgame 6y agoUS regulations don’t apply to VK and OK so you can keep streaming hollywood flicks in 1080p by just typing their name in yandex search and clicking on the first link.
- jedberg 6y agoTo be honest I always thought it was illegal anyway. That's why none of those websites are based in the USA. I'm curious what companies/websites they are targeting with this?
- sofewquestions 6y agoIs this a law targeting Kim Dotcom?
- univalent 6y agoWhy are these bills 5000 page turds with all kinds of legal garbage thrown in? I wish Congress would pass a 1 paragraph bill that does one thing: say $1000 bucks to everyone making under $75k for 3 months and dare people to vote against or veto it.
- confounded 6y agoThis one is actually linked from TFA and is very short and readable as a pdf.
- et-al 6y agoUnfortunately, it's packaged as part of an omnibus bill. Basically some congresspeople wanted to pass the $600 stimulus check, and others bundled on the CASE Act with it. And this will pass because anyone opposing it "doesn't love America".
- ianleeclark 6y ago> dare people to vote against or veto it. Why vote against it or veto when you can just never bring it to a vote?
- Sunspark 6y agoThe amazing thing is, once we had a working technology where bittorrent was hooked up to a video player. It was called Acestreams. It went away for reasons, one of which was the fact that people want to monetize ads and they can't do that if they can't control the stream. As a technology however, it worked perfectly.
- Threeve303 6y agoIn practice what will this do to streams provided by commercial services like Twitch, where someone has copyrighted music playing in the background. Or the more political streams that play other videos and even share news articles. Will that kind of stuff be shut down? Also, It will be interesting to see how “THEY” go about picking away at Section 230.
- rogerdickey 6y agoFlagged
- choward 6y agoSo that's what the Congress people are up to instead of trying to help people during a pandemic. Putting in laws to reduce streaming while encouraging people to stay at home. I guess that $600 they paid people whose job they eliminated should cover their streaming bills for the year. Newsom closing outdoor dining while allowing Hollywood to film is making more sense now. Sorry for going political on HN but this really bugs me.
- mattficke 6y agoThe primary holding of the Supreme Court case that shut down Aereo[1] in 2014 was that their streams were "public performances", the category of violation that is being strengthened in this act. That decision is more consequential in light of this. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_Inc._v._Aereo,_Inc.# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_In...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jb775 6y agoThis is a live shot of companies buying legislation via lobbyists. Just another day at work for the Oligarchs.
- BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y agoI remember long ago there was a service called Napster, that could distribute pirated songs "peer-to-peer". I wonder if it could be used again instead of the "platforms", because Napster network wasn't owned by anyone and nobody profited from it, so there is nobody to sue here.
- bww 6y agoIt certainly makes sense for the U.S. government to act against large-scale, commercial, copyright-infrigning streaming services. These estimations of the impact to the U.S. economy that online piracy represents have always struck me as highly dubious, however. $30 billion per year? For context, that’s roughly equivalent to the combined revenues of Netflix and YouTube for 2019. Is there really another Netflix + YouTube sized subscriber base out there that would be willing to pay for these services if only some of the same content weren't available for free? Seems unlikely.
- fortran77 6y agoI think I'll sit down and try to read as much of these 5,000 pages as I can over this "shutdown" week. Who knows what else is in it?
- Nuzzerino 6y agoPart of the goal here seems to be about putting the responsibility on video chat applications to censor users who stream movies to a friend or two (perhaps because they need to practice social distancing). That way, we can continue blaming "muh private company" and make it not the government's problem. It seems to have been a great strategy when it comes to policing political speech so expect to see more of this paradigm.
- morpheuskafka 6y agoA lot of the confusion about this has resulted from the ability of the word "streaming" to refer to both directions. The issue is not people watching a stream. Nor does the bill likely cover individual torrent/p2p users who upload works or even potentially seedboxes or services like Mega. So as far as people who are intentionally trying to pirate copyrighted works for the purpose of not buying them, the applicability is very limited. It would only apply to one of those streaming/DDL movie sites, or possible a torrent site themselves depending on the definition of "transmission service." You would have to be a fool to try and set that up from anywhere where the US could get to you anyway. The problem, and the concern from groups like EFF, is that on the other hand people who are not really pirates (ie. their purpose is not to serve a substitute for buying the work) but who may violate copyrights in the process (ex. streamers who don't have distribution rights to music playing in the background) could be covered as long as they are in some way monetized, and it would not be hard to play this as a "major infringer" with a number of songs.
- smaddock 6y agoI'd love to see legislature go through a process like public GitHub pull requests. If we could create a culture similar to the best practices of code reviews, that'd be great. - Keep changes limited in scope for easier review. - Open the process to the wider public for inspection. - Transparent revision history.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]