Bill S.978

[Ashendant]

From notch creator of minecraft

Bill S.978

I’ve received a few emails about Bill S.978, a new bill proposed in the USA, which would make it illegal under certain circumstances to share videos of copyrighted materials over the internet. The problem is that it appears to also make it illegal to upload videos of games, such as let’s plays and speed runs. And I love watching let’s plays and speed runs.

Here’s a great video on the subject I found via Reddit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib7-vSrp6y8

If the bill passes, I suspect many game companies (including us) will add a special clause to the TOS specifically to allow posting videos of their games. A huge part of why Minecraft has grown so fast is the YouTube community.

Better understanding

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.

And it gets worse. Because rather than just (pointlessly) adding "performance" to the list, the bill tries to also define what constitutes a potential felony crime in these circumstances:

the offense consists of 10 or more public performances by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copyrighted works

So yeah. If you embed a YouTube video that turns out to be infringing, and more than 10 people view it because of your link... you could be facing five years in jail. This is, of course, ridiculous, and suggests (yet again) politicians who are regulating a technology they simply do not understand. Should it really be a criminal act to embed a YouTube video, even if you don't know it was infringing...? This could create a massive chilling effect to the very useful service YouTube provides in letting people embed videos.

This is just retarded, i won't be affected by this except a lot of movies from youtube are going to disappear but really

America: where your freedoms are taken one at the time

[Minimalist]

Somewhere deep in the bank accounts of those 3 are big checks from the media companies.

That is how things work in America.

[leo-rcc]

And I thought the DMCA was an ill thought out piece of garbage.

[Judas BentHer]

I'd like to think this doesn't stand a chance of passing into law, given how impossible it would be to police the activity and prosecute the offenders. If we think there's an issue of prison over crowding now, imagine the ramifications!

Though, it does open the door to more invasions of privacy via the net, and enable law enforcement more of a reach into our private lives. So with that in mind, I guess the worst case scenario is possible. Above and beyond that what thought of this bill language in the first place of course.

The Bill

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