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>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

>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.

cogman10 6y ago
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? Cases like this https://variety.com/2020/music/news/katy-perry-dark-horse-reversal-1203537482/ 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".
- rndgermandude 6y ago
  >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?
- Trombone12 6y ago
  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.
- tzs 6y ago
  > Kim Dotcom is a great example for how much protection is already enjoyed by copyright holders. That was downloads. Commercial download piracy did indeed already have a lot of serious legal penalties. Commercial streaming piracy did not.
r0m4n0 6y ago
> 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?
ev1 6y ago
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.

cogman10 6y ago

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? Cases like this https://variety.com/2020/music/news/katy-perry-dark-horse-reversal-1203537482/ 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".

rndgermandude 6y ago
>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?
Trombone12 6y ago
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.
tzs 6y ago
> Kim Dotcom is a great example for how much protection is already enjoyed by copyright holders. That was downloads. Commercial download piracy did indeed already have a lot of serious legal penalties. Commercial streaming piracy did not.

r0m4n0 6y ago

> 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?

ev1 6y ago

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.