US Senators ignore unintended consequences of criminalizing embedding videos

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110616/16480114722/senators-unconcerned-about-massive-unintended-consequences-criminalizing-people-embedding-youtube-videos.shtml

by RyanMcGreal • 15 years ago

114 75 15 years ago

techdirt.com

migrantgeek4• 15 years ago

"potentially putting people in jail for embedding YouTube videos or just putting up YouTube lip synching videos. "

Sounds like FUD

If you read the amendment here http://thomas.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:S.978:

It updates this http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/718/usc_sec_18_00002319---...

Which references this http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sec_17_0...

which then says the following

(A) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain;

(B) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180–day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000; or

(C) by the distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, if such person knew or should have known that the work was intended for commercial distribution.

Basically, if you don't profit from it, you're cool so YouTube is safe.

jbooth5• 15 years ago

B) and C) are basically "It's on the internet and a studio paid for its production". So they're always true.

Now we only need an argument that you were doing it for private financial gain, to satisfy A). If you have adwords on the blog you're embedding the youtube video on? Sounds like a felony to me.

The word "felony" should really be reserved for crimes that hurt people.

migrantgeek4• 15 years ago

"The word "felony" should really be reserved for crimes that hurt people."

Oh, I agree and don't agree with the law. Just stating that it's not as overreaching as stated by the linked article.

I do not know much about the law I believe this comes down to interpretation by a judge which I hope will use their best judgement. I know there are cases where judges have been ignorant but that's why we have an appeals process.

I'm certain that if court rooms are filled with bloggers embedding videos that these will either be thrown out in most cases or the law will be altered.

I'm more worried about letters from lawyers to bloggers and others trying to bully them around with this law. The lawyers may know they can't win but may be able to scare someone enough to cough up cash to not go to court.

Personally, I'd like an anti-bullying law to prevent companies from sending templated emails for profit.

Unseelie2• 15 years ago

No, you missed the point. A, or B, or C,

If you posit that B or C are always true, you don't need A You only ever need one of the three.

rubyrescue• 15 years ago

which means anyone embedding a disputed video on a page with adsense then is profiting from it?

migrantgeek4• 15 years ago

Yes, if someone is taking works from others without permission and posting it on a website where they make a profit, they should be fined and possibly jailed if they are repeat offenders.

The law just gives companies more ammunition in the event of a case where someone is actually stealing content. There are sites that do nothing but stream movies and music for profit without giving anything to the content owner. They are clearly criminals.

It's up to the court system to determine if the company has a case or not. I commented to note that the sky isn't falling and bloggers won't be thrown in jail by the thousands.

Common sense will prevail in the end although some battles will have to be fought out in courts to set precedents.

Nothing new here IMHO.

sehugg• 15 years ago

These are "or"s, not "and"s.

Also from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NET_Act

  The NET Act amended the definition of "commercial
  advantage or private financial gain" to include the
  "receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value,
  including the receipt of other copyrighted works"

Sounds like a pretty broad definition to me, since "anything of value" could potentially mean goodwill, exposure, campaign donations, etc.

The bill's title "Commercial Felony Streaming Act" is a red herring. The intent (as was in the 1997 act linked above) is to prosecute any and all copyright infringement.

migrantgeek4• 15 years ago

I could be wrong but I thought it read A and B or C.

georgieporgie• 15 years ago

I think it's total bullshit that all your comments are getting downvoted. I don't like this law, but I'm not going to take it out on you.

iwwr• 15 years ago

One man's unintended consequence is another man's tool in the power-(ab)using chest. What makes you think the effects are unintended?

jbooth5• 15 years ago

Depends on who's doing the intending.

The companies hiring the lobbyists know exactly what they're doing.

The lobbyists are too blinded by dreams of cocktail party cachet to care what they're doing (on this or anything).

And the legislators have only heard one side of the story. They're too busy dialing for dollars most of the time to actually read up on this stuff.

jcromartie• 15 years ago

US Senators ignore the unintended consequences of criminalizing everything.

kwantam• 15 years ago

John Cornyn is an unmitigated disaster. It's unfortunate that the TX Democratic party has a tenth of a snowball's chance in hell of ousting him.

This is yet another reason we need term limits. Career politicians and bureaucrats are massive facilitators of regulatory capture.

hugh3• 15 years ago

Do term limits help or hinder? After all, if we had term limits then the average congressman would need to go off and find a new job once he's finished in congress. And there's no shortage of folks (whether companies, unions, NGOs, foreign governments, or any ol' well-funded group you like) who'd just love to give cushy well-paid jobs to former congressmen who had been suitably sympathetic to their interests during their time in congress.

daniel-cussen• 15 years ago

As it is almost half of congressmen (43%) register as lobbyists after leaving government.

noelchurchill• 15 years ago

I imagine ex-bureaucrats are useful to hire because of all the connections they made while in office. If there are term limits and the churn rate is high, that doesn't leave much time to build those connections while in office, or to keep them after they've left.

runningdogx2• 15 years ago

More churn in Congress would decrease the value of any one congressperson to private industry, and would also reduce the tendency of members of Congress to amass large numbers of markers that they call in later.

It would also change the entire dynamic of Congress, to be less of a club and more of a transitional job, people coming from some other job -- some of them perhaps even hoping to do the right thing regardless of political fallout -- and then disappearing from the public stage and moving on to another stage their lives, rather than turning elected service into their lives.

A seminal paper on this subject from 1968, The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives, by Nelson Polsby: http://crespin.myweb.uga.edu/polsby.pdf

kwis• 15 years ago

I think term limits are probably ineffective, if only because so many staff stick around even as the names on the offices change, and they hold so much of the power.

Unseelie2• 15 years ago

Rather than instituting term limits, we could try what the founders set up, and arrange for senators to be representatives of state legislatures, not state populations. Same problem exists, but I'd imagine its harder to buy the backing of a few hundred politicians than one.

ahamlett2• 15 years ago

I just called John Cornyn's Washington office at 202-224-2934 and talked to an aide about S. 978 because I live in Texas.

He explained a few details of the bill to me like how it only applies when the economic value of the public video streaming is above $2500. I asked if this would include a blogger who makes more than $2500 from ads on his blog and he said yes. Then I gave an example of a blogger embedding a YouTube video which is copyrighted in a blog post, even if the blogger removes the video after finding out it is copyrighted, to which he just said "OK, I will notify John Cornyn".

I tried my best to express my concern that millions of people including myself could be charged with a felony if this bill gets passed, but I don't think my effort will work. I don't think the people passing this bill, like my Texas senator John Cornyn, can see the dangers in making it illegal to embed videos. Maybe they just don't care because they don't use the internet the same way younger / technology efficient people use it?

jim_h• 15 years ago

It's great that you called. Unfortunately it seems like most, if not all, politicians are shielded and you can't reach (talk to) them directly unless you're connected in some way.

learc83• 15 years ago

That's why we should get rid of the cap of 435 reps in the House. It was never supposed to work that way.

jbooth5• 15 years ago

They don't care because they haven't heard the other side of the story, nobody's employing lobbyists to defend medium-time bloggers.

Moreover, many senators and congressmen, especially Cornyn, have determined that "capitalism" means "support entrenched business interests through favorable legislation" rather than all that hooplah about competition we learned in school.

lutorm2• 15 years ago

I liked how the Economist put it (that was about GW Bush): "Being business-friendly is not the same as being market-friendly."

runningdogx2• 15 years ago

I believe you got snookered by the aide. The crime is conditioned on $2500 of income to the infringer, _or_ $2500 loss to the copyright holder, _or_ a $5000 or more licensing fee for said content.

It is not clear, if those damage requirements are met, that there is any requirement -- other than non-zero economic advantage from the infringement, as required by 506 (a)(1)(A) -- that the infringer actually made lots of money as a result of the instance of copyright infringement.

It is also unclear what "total retail value", "total economic value", and "fair market value" (all of which are used in the bill) mean in the context of a form of property that is given artificial monopoly status. If someone uploads an unreleased Justin Bieber video to youtube and it gets 1 hit, then Bieber releases that video in a limited collector's edition at $2600 USD, is that youtube uploader a felon?

The text of the bill is very short: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:S.978: (include the last ':') And 18 USC 2319 which it affects is also very short: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/2319.html

narrator• 15 years ago

The unintended consequences are often the point of the law. By being "unintended", the crafters of the law creates a small intellectual barrier to understanding the ramifications of the law that perhaps half the population fail to overcome. This is enough to get just about anything through without considerable widespread public opposition.

r00fus2• 15 years ago

Bingo. The MAFIAA wants to criminalize any sharing of content unless they stamp it with their blessing.

This law basically kills youtube and ad-supported blogging.

I'm surprised Google isn't all up in arms over this, two potential sources of revenue are greatly impacted by this legislation.

calibraxis• 15 years ago

Yes. Every policymaker knows that the US jails more people than any other country, both in percentage and total. "Unintended" is a sad attempt at a fig leaf.

Any action we do can have unintended consequences (not to mention known tradeoffs), and we deal with them by using experience and fixing problems as they come up. But this case is far beyond that.

DanielBMarkham• 15 years ago

Is it just me, or are we reaching the point where every other day there's a major news story about the security state and the continued criminalizing of civil matters? You could almost devote a website to it. Lots of new material.

What it looks like is that we've reached the point with the legal system that the trick is to make huge swaths of behavior illegal, then selectively enforce the law. This is basically like having no law at all, only instead of a central ruler we distribute it out to thousands of various prosecutors (and their associated political parties.)

I don't want to be all "the sky is falling" but heck if I can see where we can continue like this for a lot longer.

d0ne2• 15 years ago

No it's not just you. It just seems the majority of the people have lost sight of the fact that Freedom is not free.

techdmn• 15 years ago

Arg, I hate that phrase. It may cost you something to protect your freedom from those who would take it, but the freedom itself does not have any inherent cost. Secondly, I hear that phrase being used to justify all sorts of things that I consider to be impinging on my freedom rather than increasing it, such as using my tax dollars to wage wars against countries that are not actually threatening my freedom at all.

fleitz2• 15 years ago

You're right, it's commonly known that freedom costs a buck o five.

anigbrowl• 15 years ago

every other day there's a major news story about the security state

It's a great topic from the media point of view, because most people don't understand computer security or legislative process, and the people who understand one of those things often don't understand the other, so everyone is unhappy with everyone else. Conflict is an essential element of a dramatic story, and dramatic stories attract readers and sell advertising.

sixtofour3• 15 years ago

I agree, although this particular thing has nothing to do with the security state, and everything to do with the gradual co-opting of Congress and the legislatures by the content industry.

r00fus2• 15 years ago

> This is basically like having no law at all, only instead of a central ruler we distribute it out to thousands of various prosecutors (and their associated political parties.)

Isn't that the central basis for the Prison-Industrial-Judicial Complex?

ie, law enforcement, judges, lawmakers, and all the companies and servicers who profit from increased incarceration rates?

fleitz2• 15 years ago

Like when the prisons pay the judges? http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=...

tedunangst4• 15 years ago

fwiw I have been reading sky is falling stories like this for ten years now, but the sky has in fact remained in its original position.

cheez7• 15 years ago

You might want to check your data: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/68/Incarceration_...

rms• 15 years ago

Correct, the US Government does not exist anymore in the sense that most people think it does.

loup-vaillant• 15 years ago

> You could almost devote a website to it.

Like these ones? https://www.eff.org/ http://lqdn.fr

lr• 15 years ago

Just one more way the feds can go after a group of people they don't like. It is like all of the mobsters getting charged with tax evasion instead of their actual (if any...) crimes. The same will hold true in the future: XYZ leader of ABC "radical" environmental group was put in jail because...he/she had a parody video mocking Exxon on their website.

OwlHuntr• 15 years ago

This is getting ridiculous. So it looks like eventually the internet will be colonized and taken over by the government soon enough. Where is our next frontier for freedom of speech, open data, and endless cat videos? The internet is supposed to be free and unhinged.

gallerytungsten• 15 years ago

Authoritarianism + Campaign Contributions make for a lousy cocktail.

sixtofour3• 15 years ago

The thing about unintended consequences is that law enforcement will often use them to get what they otherwise cannot get. If you're investigating a group of people on Offense A but can't gather enough evidence to make an arrest and charge, you can arrest them on anything else you can stick them with, and suddenly they're in your control and potentially more pliable.

floppydisk• 15 years ago

Part of the solution to the problem is we need more tech savy people working on capitol hill--party preferences regardless. The federal government usually lags several years behind the industry standards for information technology and the people writing or reviewing proposed policies for technology regulation are much more likely to have a BA in Government or Poli Sci than a BS in engineering or CS.

If I go to a friends' house and watch a movie and that movie happened to be pirated (and I was not aware) could the law logically be extended so the government could arrest me for viewing pirated content even if I didn't know it was pirated? Or what about the "viral" video defense where companies will release promos or "restricted" content under false names to drum up interest in a product. I could see a defense attorney arguing the uploading account could be used by someone in AA industries to create interest in a product and there was no way their client could have known.

tzs• 15 years ago

I see only one commenter who has clearly read the bill, looked up the sections of the USC that it modifies, and has tried based on that to start discussing what the bill actually does and its actual contents, instead of the largely made-up stuff based on third hand sources that most people want to discuss.

He's getting voted way down.

Stop doing that, please. The end result of that kind of down voting is to discourage people from putting research into the comments, and the overall quality of discussion goes down.

resdirector• 15 years ago

This may be a silly (& uninformed) question, but are there any strong lobbyists that are representing the interest of us hackers?

I guess we have the EFF, but what's the power structure look like? Are the odds stacked against us?

(NB: I use the term "us" loosely to refer to the common ideals found often on HN)

US Senators ignore unintended consequences of criminalizing embedding videos

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