Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming | Hacker News Reader

Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming

tillis.senate.gov

526 pointstotaldude87467 comments

This 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.

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).

[0] https://www.tillis.senate.gov/services/files/A30B0C08-FB97-4...

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.

> has no commercially significant purpose or use other than to publicly perform works protected under title 17

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.

> 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".

> has no commercially significant purpose or use other than to publicly perform works protected

This seems tailored to kill PopcornTime.

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

Even if individuals are not prosecuted, arguably Plex the company offers a platform this bill is attempting to outlaw.

" this law should really read the text instead of reading whatever nonsense the media is spinning."

It doesn't take you more than a few hours to go over 5000 pages of text, Right?

The linked pdf is 5 pages.

It seems like irresponsible journalism to not just include the text in any article written about it.

If by 5000 pages you mean 5, you might be correct if you are a really slow reader.

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.

So sharing a Plex library with a few pirated videos is now a felony.

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."

[2]https://www.tillis.senate.gov/services/files/A30B0C08-FB97-4...

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?

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.

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.

> This title is misleading

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.

> what business does any of this have in a Coronavirus relief bill?

We didn’t have a coronavirus relief bill until yesterday. Bridging votes is part of policy negotiation.

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.

It is, but should it be?

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.

The admins changed the title. The new title seems to be more accurate.

Yes - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25510091.

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?

This affects sharers, not freeloaders. "Platforms" are easy to create in the minds of judges.

It creates felonies like:

"Hey, if you'll chip in a few bucks, I can run a plex server for the dorm."

"Hey, neighbor, sure you can use my wifi to watch Netflix, if you'll pay half."

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.

(for purposes of commercial advantage) _or_ (private financial gain)

>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.

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.

Criminal copyright infringement didn't cover streaming previously.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-edva/pr/eight-defendants-charge...

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.

>Criminal copyright infringement didn't cover streaming previously.

Why not?

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.

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 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?

> Creating a for-profit platform with intent to do illegal streaming will be.

Hasn't this been the case since... forever?

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> 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.

Does this change anything? Isn't criminal copyright infringement already a thing?

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.

Goodbye IPTV... it was really good while it lasted.

This is an alternate angle, which allows prosecution without trying to count how many copies were streamed.

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).

commercial is a simple as running ads

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?

"someone else's" is a view of property rights that not all hold.

"profiteering" (vs just covering costs) assumes facts not in evidence.

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.

Yeah, but will that kind of nuanced phrasing get you to the top of a news aggregation site? ;-)

Yes because copyright law is never abused far far beyond the plain text reading of the law... never

Note, it seems that the admins changed the title, with the new title being more accurate.

There would be no YouTube if this were on the books back in the day.

Isn't the use of an illegal service already a felony?

> 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.

I'm not talking about the new bill. If it's already illegal they don't need another law to go after the users.

Not even remotely.

It’s also not “to be a felony soon.” The bill hasnt even passed.

Either way, this is bullshit forced through into "must pass" legislation because they know this shit wouldn't pass otherwise.

This is fundamentally evil. Our senators are a pile of shit-enabling shit.

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.

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25498551 is also not ok. Could you please review the guidelines and use HN as intended?

- 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.

The whole problem is enormous "conglomerate" bills in the first place. It's absurd that everyone is forced to evaluate and have a single opinion/vote on all these completely separate issues as a unit. How much political BS is hiding in these massive bills, quid-pro-quo, back scratching, intentionally opaque text that nobody can understand the implications of until long after it's been jammed through... its disgusting

We should outlaw bills like these.

This framing is also sort of a misrepresentation. It's an annual government-funding bill, and it includes some money for COVID relief. All of the broader criticisms about horse trading still apply of course but those apply just as much to separate bills with informal agreements on votes. The only difference is it's really inconvenient to hold hundreds of votes in order to make sure the forestry service janitors get paid, etc. etc.

> This framing is also sort of a misrepresentation

The title of this post is: Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming

Are you sure? Why are we passing completely new laws in our yearly budget bill? What does streaming laws have to do with paying forestry service janitors?

Maybe we wouldn't have a government shutdown emergency every year if our representatives didn't try to shoehorn their pet laws and their <strike>customers'</strike>lobbyists' favorite regulations in at the same time.

Interestingly, the Confederate constitution banned these types of bills.

Washington State has a single-subject rule that affects both bills in legislature and ballot measures[1]. We've regularly had poorly crafted voter initiatives tossed out by the WA State Supreme Court on this basis.

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Laws_governing_the_initiative_proces...

> It's absurd that everyone is forced to evaluate and have a single opinion/vote on all these completely separate issues as a unit.

They aren't forced to, except by their own (collective) consent. They could vote to split the bill, propose smaller bills and vote down the bigger ones in preference, etc.

Conglomerate bills are a tool to reach mutually tolerable compromise.

> mutually tolerable compromise

This is just politispeak for quid-pro-quo. If conglomerate bills are outlawed then maybe we can vote on issues instead of on whether everyone's back is sufficiently scratched.

I don't think that confronts the clustering of unrelated issues. It seems much more to be a tool of hiding things behind the ability to make blanket statements about who voted for certain bills when the complexity to explain why is far beyond how involved most voters will be.

One might argue that conglomerate bills are the result of deal making: You want this? I want this.

Shouldn’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..

If only it were that simple.

There's two major reasons I see why that doesn't happen. First, a 'no' vote is still taking a position. It requires additional explanation to differentiate "no because I couldn't understand it in time" and "no because I think it's a bad idea." That's a fair bit of nuance, which these days is... well often difficult to accurately and easily convey to others.

The second reason is that it's not just a matter of one vote per issue. It's not one massively complex issue that requires 5k+ pages to fully flesh out. It's a bunch of different stuff all jammed together, and votes can only cover the entire thing. Some of those things are often simple enough, and some are very time critical. Do you want to hold up the time critical bits for the rest of it?

If you do, can you get constituents to understand why, and agree with your decision to hold things up? For every voter that you can't convince, your political opponents now have an easy in. Can you afford that?

And, of course, the current session is coming to an end very soon, and leadership could change. Two of the sponsors may soon be out of a job. Would the incoming administration sign off on this? Maybe, maybe not. So best jam it through now while no one is paying much attention.

> First, a 'no' vote is still taking a position. It requires additional explanation to differentiate "no because I couldn't understand it in time" and "no because I think it's a bad idea." That's a fair bit of nuance, which these days is... well often difficult to accurately and easily convey to others.

This is very true, but why, in the year 2020, is it still true?

Why does it seem like we can argue only about object level matters, and almost no one [1] can see that the framework we run politics on top of is fundamentally flawed? Would it maybe help if we were to consciously force ourselves to conceptualize society/humanity as a video game, that has parameters and behaviors, and the state of the system can be acted on, but our actions will only be effective if the game allows it?

[1] A rare exception to this in my opinion is Jimmy Dore's initiative to force a floow vote on Medicare for All

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Medicare+for+All%22+%22ji...

What I like about this approach is that it kind of pulls the "invisibility cloak" off of political claims and rhetoric, exposing the truth that lies inside. It appears that he's going to lose this battle (a vote will not be held), but even so it has forced a new level of propaganda to be deployed into the memeplex on very short notice, making it much easier for the average Joe to see through it. I think this is a good strategy: take away control of the playing field, so politicians can't use pre-written and memorized rhetorical talking points to dismiss obvious desires like affordable healthcare, which has fairly bi-partisan support among voters.

https://www.newsweek.com/69-percent-americans-want-medicare-...

It doesn't really matter if M4A is not achieved (that's where we're at anyways) - the main strategic goal imho should be to bring awareness to the public mind of the notion that politicians are not being truthful (notice I am not saying they are lying) when they say that their goals and actions are to execute "the will of the people", or do what is "best" for the American population. Politics, as it is, is largely all theatre, although even the participants themselves may not actually be consciously aware of it.

"All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players."

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56966/speech-all-the-...

Yes, it should be, but then you possibly end up voting "no" on something that is then weaponized against you in the next election.

"Senator so and so refused to support the end of violence against babies!!" or other such nonsense.

I wish more politicians would realize that this kind of nonsense will happen no matter how they vote or what they say and move on to voting and acting in a way that fits their values and what they represent.

Perhaps because there is entire political dance at play here where you toe the agenda lines of your whip in exchange for future political support?

The 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.

The 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.

This same thing happens in the House.

They should probably abstain instead. Not having time to read what you're voting on seems like a good reason to abstain from voting on something. Voting "no" is making a policy decision with respect to the bill being voted on.

Move next business :-) or more sensibly table it so the non relevant to the budget is removed.

Then no bills would ever get passed again

Don't agree with AOC on much, but she's dead right on this one. I do wish the New Left and New Right could at least unite around getting rid of this kind of entrenched BS instead of (okay, at least in addition to) constantly dunking on each other.

Interesting topic for a research project: create a bill outlining/condensing application which takes the final text as input and enables legislators to quickly get the gist of the high points and skip over narrative text, formatting, even penalties (perhaps color code those or something) — there would be lots of opportunities for the creative presentation of the material to suit various legislator's needs &/or preferences.

I could even see clever presentations like a pie chart illustrating how much of a bill is actually related to the topic at hand. That would make a fantastic tool for an opposition member to use in order to illustrate the absurdities of these omnibus bills.

"We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it" - Nancy Pelosi (referring to the Affordable Care Act)

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pelosi-healthcare-pass-the...

> As can be seen, it’s true that Pelosi did utter these words: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it”. However, the article left out important context, including the next few words of Pelosi’s statement: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.”

This looks like a case of Snopes trying to make Nancy Pelosi look good without justification. Their "important context" doesn't actually improve anything.

This is an example of why I personally don't trust fact checkers any more. This gets a "mixture" rating, in spite of being:

a) quite literally factual - she said those exact words b) semantically similar in and out of context - Even if you read the whole speech she gave, she still seems to be implying that you need to have the act passed so that you can see what it looks like when implemented. She gives a rough draft of important desired outcomes (many of which ended up being false), but the point of that one one sentence remains the same: to establish that the bill needs to be passed in order for it's real implications to be understood.

To be honest, I half agree with Pelosi here, but snopes is definitely trying to provide her with some unwarranted cover here.

I have no idea if this happens in practice, but if I was put in this situation, I’d employ my staff. Give each person 50 pages and regroup in an hour.

Since most of the bill is presumably the same as earlier drafts, we’d be mostly just looking for red flags. Heck, in theory you could even run it through a diff tool!

You're reading, comprehending, noting changes, all at about a page a minute, and you have a team of 110 people, and expect every senator to do the same? That's insanity

This what happens when your legislative process is basically a game of Katamari Damacy.

(This subthread was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25507339.)

Every third bill in congress is like that. They all have teams of lawyers at their behest to explain and go through all aspects of it.

It was hurried, yes. But hardly unusual.

She needs to be more realistic on the constraints of the system within which she is working. Omnibus spending bills are huge. The COVID relief portion of the bill is huge. So the document, which contains the implementation details is gonna be pretty big. There’s now way around it

More importantly though, you can’t reasonably budget more than a trillion dollars without some horse trading. AOC’s real problem is that she doesn’t trust her party leadership, and they don’t trust her. If she trusted her leadership there’s no need to complain before making her yes vote.

> More importantly though, you can’t reasonably budget more than a trillion dollars without some horse trading.

Why? If the relief is federal, which I understand to be the case, no state or local level relief, then why must there be horse trading? Do the international relief in another bill. Do the illegal streaming is a felony in another bill. Etc.

It's like creating a massive program around a god function with globals instead of setting up sane module boundaries based on data structures and their relationships. You're gonna have a bad time.

> If the relief is federal, which I understand to be the case, no state or local level relief, then why must there be horse trading?

Choosing what industries, etc get relief is very political.

No, representatives should be able to read the bill in full to determine if who they in particular represent would be for or against such a law. They don’t represent their higher ups, they represent their locality. Anything else is a failure in US democracy.

The complaint isn’t against a 5000 page law, it’s a 5000 page law with 2 hours to determine the vote. Regardless of party lines, whenever this happens we should rightfully hear complaints.

No, the reason this is done is so that details of the law can be hidden in plain sight, to force people to vote 'yes' on the bill (for the things in the bill that will cause them political problems if they vote 'no'). Many lawyers excel at burying the world in a sea of words that are legally binding, in hopes that others either won't read them or can't read all of them due to time constraints.

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.

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.

Mind 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".

This is the most realistic and useful comment I've read so far.

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.

Streaming companies seem to be doing just fine.

> 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.

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.

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.

Correction: They shipped the feature at launch but it had a bug where some copyrighted material was missed.

> Many times the streamers themselves are not aware that this is a crime.

It's not a crime. What criminal law is being broken?

Games include two types of music:

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.

Someone spins up a Twitch clone in a more friendly jurisdiction.

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.

twit.ch?

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.

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.

Finally someone stands up for the little guys, like major league sports, film production companies, and cable networks

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.

From 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."

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.

The vast majority of content creators disagree.

[citation needed]

Bullshit. You stream a poem and you will be put in chains if the US Attorney has beef.

Simple -- 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)

Eh, 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.

Additionally, 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.

A 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.

I 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".

I 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

What 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-FB97-4...)

[1] - I Am Not A Lawyer

It's youtube-dl, and it is not a for-profit project/platform, so it should be fine.

I 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.

Why 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.

> dare people to vote against or veto it.

Why vote against it or veto when you can just never bring it to a vote?

This one is actually linked from TFA and is very short and readable as a pdf.

Unfortunately, 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".

Does that mean small creators can punish those megacorps who routinely use their work without permission? Oh who am I kidding.

Can 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.

I'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.

It 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.

It's attached to a COVID stimulus. Its odds of passing are much higher.

At this rate, soon, non explicitly authorized copying will be punishable by death.

Streaming a felony? Madness.

> 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.

So 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.

I 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.

Someone 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?

We 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.

You wait one month for the next UBI and grumble on the DMV when renewing your driver's license.

In 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.

I'm so glad Hollywood found another host for it's corrupt parasite - the one that used to live in Orrin Hatch.

The 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.,_In...

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.

> personally instigating legal action on millions of others

how so?

For those of us not familiar with the US legal system. What are the implications?

Felons often cannot vote, cannot get jobs working with children, have difficulty finding housing, etc.

Most "good" jobs will turn people down (in most states) if they have a felony or even misdemeanors.

Isn'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.

Yes 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.

Gabe 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.

Netflix 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.

Look at how hard it is to make people pay 0.99 on the app store for an app. It's not the price, it's the fact that you have to pay.

Deciding to buy Netflix is a one-time decision, and then you have access to the full catalog, without any friction. I added "for free", meaning that I don't have to decide whether or not I want it enough to pay, and then enter my payment details, manage an account & password, etc.

When Netflix was the only game in town, it actually made a measurable dent in pirate traffic; a fact which was widely reported at the time. Now that content owners want to have their own Netflix (thus draining its catalogue), piracy rises again [1].

It's true that there's a certain limit the "it's not a price problem" statement. I'm perfectly willing to pay up to a certain amount per month on entertainment services (and I do), but at some point, enough is enough. That certain amount will vary from person to person, the industry just needs to find that sweet spot and stop trying to turn potential clients into criminals.

[1] (https://www.sandvine.com/inthenews/netflix-falls-to-second-p...)

I 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.

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?

>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.

On 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

"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.

I read on a post somewhere that if you replace "the economy" with "rich people yatch money" a lot of headlines make more sense.

"Last year, one study reported that digital video piracy costs the U.S. rich people yatch money $29.2 billion a year."

It's still funny money.

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.

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.

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.

Yacht?

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.

It'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?

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.

I value my comments on HN at $5/view. I lose an estimated 50k/year to people not paying for the value they get from reading my comments.

> 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.

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.

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.

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 suspect those figures are assuming three things...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

This made me realize for the first time that I'm not sure as to what these “cost “the œconomy” x currencies” statements actually mean.

Certainly it's not about generating money ex nihilō, so what is the standard?

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.

Not really?

Recognition of an exact pattern is computationally very easy. Examination of often subjective truths is objectively very hard?

Next post you'll be complaining that the food the people are buying is unhealthy.

As if those $29B would have been purchased if not watched illegally...

Is 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.

From 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.

Gotcha. Ok thanks. Streaming sites will have to get creative bit prob nothing they can't work around

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. 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.

>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.

Yes 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.

The 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.

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.

Says a lot about who these people represent when they're closing the streaming "loophole" while the corporate tax loopholes remain unchanged.

It 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.

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?

Part 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.

How 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?

This is the perfect time to post this: https://youtu.be/ALZZx1xmAzg

I 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.

The 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.

Will this apply to YouTube, the largest service profiting off illegally streaming copyrighted content?

I'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.

Why 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.

Interesting take here as well: https://prospect.org/power/senator-thom-tillis-pushes-prison...

Not 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?

Setting 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.

I know why they do it. But the fact that a kind of mafia tactic is the best compromise is really sad.

$30B was just pissed away 20x over in the misallocation of capital in the $900B covid bill.

It seems the politicians forgot about this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

To 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?

US 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.

I 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?

Can someone explain this? What is illegal streaming? Streaming copyrighted content?

Isn't that already illegal?

"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.

More of this “war on drugs” “tough on crime” mentality from Republicans? When will we learn?

You do realize this legislation is sponsored by Democrats, right?

It’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

How about a better title, @dang?

Is this a law targeting Kim Dotcom?

flagged for clickbait title - see first comment for limited scope.

Flagged

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.

We're an oligarchy, that's why:

'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.

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.

It's sad how true that quote is.

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.

>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.

https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-pas...

So why elect our officials?

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.

A day? Closer to 90 minutes. The bill was delivered at 2pm, and the vote, on the floor, was at 4pm.

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.

The agents in a system tends to work in the way the system incentivizes them. Understand the forces of these incentives to predict behavior.

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?

Politicians follow the wishes of donors, not voters. Pretty simple.

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.

You'll need a huge citation that this against the populace's wishes. I'd wager 99% of Americans still want theft to be illegal.

I did not make that claim. The post simply inspired the question based on some of the early commenters.

"theft"

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”.

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.

Populace gives them votes. Corporates give money. Loads of money. And influence. And power.

See Brexit

Corruption and low information voters.

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.

I 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.

Control the media and it becomes a lot easier to get away with lying.

We need to #AbolishCopyright

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?

This is a live shot of companies buying legislation via lobbyists. Just another day at work for the Oligarchs.

Good thing there is TOR.

Beside browsing 90' websites you can't do much with tor.

Piratebay works well, that’s enough for me.

part 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

I 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.

Can you please get a different job?

what is your job?

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