Administration Can't Let Go: Wants To Bring Back Felony Streaming Provisions Of SOPAby Mike Masnick
We've been working our way through a paper released last week by the Commerce Department, concerning copyright reform, and will have a much more detailed post about it soon (there's a lot in there), but over at the Washington Post, they're highlighting the silly recommendation to bring back the plan to make unauthorized streaming a felony. This was a part of SOPA and was widely discussed. It wasn't technically in PIPA, but there was something of a "companion" bill from Senator Amy Klobuchar that effectively had the same thing. This got a fair amount of attention when Justin Bieber was asked about the law, and said that Klobuchar should be locked up.
It's no surprise that this is coming back. It's one of the points that's been raised a few times since the death of SOPA. As we explained back during the original debate, there are different "rights" associated with copyright law, including distribution, reproduction, etc. For very good reasons, when the government put in sections on what could be considered criminal infringement, they left the "public performance" right off of the list of possible felonies. And that's because it's fairly absurd to consider a felonious public performance of a work. But, because of the rise of streaming sites, and the continued myopia of the entertainment industry, they're afraid that sites that embed works from elsewhere might not be seen as technically violating the distribution or reproduction rights (for good reason), and thus they want to elevate public performance as a felony to try to let the feds go after such sites.
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