KILLER_CLOWN
06-16-2011, 01:25 PM
Congress Wants To Make Uploading YouTube Videos A Felony With Worse Penalties Than Child Molestation
A new being voted on in the Senate THIS Week will make it a felony crime to post copyrighted videos on YouTube, Facebook and other sites with criminal penalties worse than the crime of child molestation – 10 years in prison!
Clearly the bill is meant to help strengthen the government’s grip on media censorship by preventing the alternative press, bloggers and independent citizen journalists from keeping a record of the lies spread by the government propaganda machine.
The bill will effectively limit the ability of alternative, non-corporate news sources, to reported on issues that are important to the public and and the main stream media buries.
http://cdn.blog.alexanderhiggins.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Congress-Wants-To-Make-Uploading-YouTube-Videos-A-Felony-With-Worse-Penalties-Than-Child-Molestation.png
Take action now! Sign the petition and contact your senator.
http://act.demandprogress.org/letter/ten_strikes
Demand Progress writes:
Congress Wants To Make Streaming A Felony
Tell Congress to oppose S. 978, the new “Ten Strikes” bill
Here they go again: The big business lobbyists who are behind the Internet Blacklist Bill are already making the sequel. THIS WEEK Senators will be voting on a “Ten Strikes” bill to make it a felony to stream copyrighted content — like music in the background of a Youtube video — more than ten times.
As the writers at TechDirt point out, under this bill you could go to jail for posting video of your friends singing karaoke:
The entertainment industry is freaking out about sites that embed and stream infringing content, and want law enforcement to put people in jail over it, rather than filing civil lawsuits…. We already pointed to one possibility: that people embedding YouTube videos could face five years in jail. Now, others are pointing out that it could also put kids who lip sync to popular songs, and post the resulting videos on YouTube, in jail as well.
That’s right: Ten strikes and you could get jail time. Less than two weeks ago, the Hollywood industry magazine, Variety, reported, “Industry lobbyists pressed House members on Wednesday to pass legislation that would make illegal streaming of movies, TV shows and other types of content a felony….”
Only days later, the MPAA is getting its wish. Will you email your lawmakers and tell them to vote against the Ten Strikes Bill? Just add your info at right to automatically send this note to them, under your name and from your address. (You can edit the letter if you’d like to.)
Just sign on at right and we’ll send an email to your lawmakers.
Click here to read TechDirt’s take on the bill. The bill’s text is here
Tech Dirt writes:
Senators Want To Put People In Jail For Embedding YouTube Videos
from the not-understanding-the-technology dept
Okay, this is just getting ridiculous. A few weeks back, we noted that Senators Amy Klobuchar, John Cornyn and Christopher Coons had proposed a new bill that was designed to make “streaming” infringing material a felony. At the time, the actual text of the bill wasn’t available, but we assumed, naturally, that it would just extend “public performance” rights to section 506a of the Copyright Act.
Supporters of this bill claim that all it’s really doing is harmonizing US copyright law’s civil and criminal sections. After all, the rights afforded under copyright law in civil cases cover a list of rights: reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works or perform the work. The rules for criminal infringement only cover reproducing and distributing — but not performing. So, supporters claim, all this does is “harmonize” copyright law and bring the criminal side into line with the civil side by adding “performance rights” to the list of things.
If only it were that simple. But, of course, it’s not. First of all, despite claims to the contrary, there’s a damn good reason why Congress did not include performance rights as a criminal/felony issue: because who would have thought that it would be a criminal act to perform a work without permission? It could be infringing, but that can be covered by a fine. When we suddenly criminalize a performance, that raises all sorts of questionable issues.
Furthermore, as we suspected, in the full text of the bill, “performance” is not clearly defined. This is the really troubling part. Everyone keeps insisting that this is targeted towards “streaming” websites, but is streaming a “performance”? If so, how does embedding play into this? Is the site that hosts the content guilty of performing? What about the site that merely linked to and/or embedded the video (linking and embedding are technically effectively the same thing). Without clear definitions, we run into problems pretty quickly.
Read The Rest…
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110601/01515014500/senators-want-to-put-people-jail-embedding-youtube-videos.shtml
http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2011/06/15/action-alert-congress-uploading-youtube-videos-felony-worse-penalties-child-molestation-27861/
A new being voted on in the Senate THIS Week will make it a felony crime to post copyrighted videos on YouTube, Facebook and other sites with criminal penalties worse than the crime of child molestation – 10 years in prison!
Clearly the bill is meant to help strengthen the government’s grip on media censorship by preventing the alternative press, bloggers and independent citizen journalists from keeping a record of the lies spread by the government propaganda machine.
The bill will effectively limit the ability of alternative, non-corporate news sources, to reported on issues that are important to the public and and the main stream media buries.
http://cdn.blog.alexanderhiggins.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Congress-Wants-To-Make-Uploading-YouTube-Videos-A-Felony-With-Worse-Penalties-Than-Child-Molestation.png
Take action now! Sign the petition and contact your senator.
http://act.demandprogress.org/letter/ten_strikes
Demand Progress writes:
Congress Wants To Make Streaming A Felony
Tell Congress to oppose S. 978, the new “Ten Strikes” bill
Here they go again: The big business lobbyists who are behind the Internet Blacklist Bill are already making the sequel. THIS WEEK Senators will be voting on a “Ten Strikes” bill to make it a felony to stream copyrighted content — like music in the background of a Youtube video — more than ten times.
As the writers at TechDirt point out, under this bill you could go to jail for posting video of your friends singing karaoke:
The entertainment industry is freaking out about sites that embed and stream infringing content, and want law enforcement to put people in jail over it, rather than filing civil lawsuits…. We already pointed to one possibility: that people embedding YouTube videos could face five years in jail. Now, others are pointing out that it could also put kids who lip sync to popular songs, and post the resulting videos on YouTube, in jail as well.
That’s right: Ten strikes and you could get jail time. Less than two weeks ago, the Hollywood industry magazine, Variety, reported, “Industry lobbyists pressed House members on Wednesday to pass legislation that would make illegal streaming of movies, TV shows and other types of content a felony….”
Only days later, the MPAA is getting its wish. Will you email your lawmakers and tell them to vote against the Ten Strikes Bill? Just add your info at right to automatically send this note to them, under your name and from your address. (You can edit the letter if you’d like to.)
Just sign on at right and we’ll send an email to your lawmakers.
Click here to read TechDirt’s take on the bill. The bill’s text is here
Tech Dirt writes:
Senators Want To Put People In Jail For Embedding YouTube Videos
from the not-understanding-the-technology dept
Okay, this is just getting ridiculous. A few weeks back, we noted that Senators Amy Klobuchar, John Cornyn and Christopher Coons had proposed a new bill that was designed to make “streaming” infringing material a felony. At the time, the actual text of the bill wasn’t available, but we assumed, naturally, that it would just extend “public performance” rights to section 506a of the Copyright Act.
Supporters of this bill claim that all it’s really doing is harmonizing US copyright law’s civil and criminal sections. After all, the rights afforded under copyright law in civil cases cover a list of rights: reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works or perform the work. The rules for criminal infringement only cover reproducing and distributing — but not performing. So, supporters claim, all this does is “harmonize” copyright law and bring the criminal side into line with the civil side by adding “performance rights” to the list of things.
If only it were that simple. But, of course, it’s not. First of all, despite claims to the contrary, there’s a damn good reason why Congress did not include performance rights as a criminal/felony issue: because who would have thought that it would be a criminal act to perform a work without permission? It could be infringing, but that can be covered by a fine. When we suddenly criminalize a performance, that raises all sorts of questionable issues.
Furthermore, as we suspected, in the full text of the bill, “performance” is not clearly defined. This is the really troubling part. Everyone keeps insisting that this is targeted towards “streaming” websites, but is streaming a “performance”? If so, how does embedding play into this? Is the site that hosts the content guilty of performing? What about the site that merely linked to and/or embedded the video (linking and embedding are technically effectively the same thing). Without clear definitions, we run into problems pretty quickly.
Read The Rest…
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110601/01515014500/senators-want-to-put-people-jail-embedding-youtube-videos.shtml
http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2011/06/15/action-alert-congress-uploading-youtube-videos-felony-worse-penalties-child-molestation-27861/