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Senate Passes Scaled-Back Copyright Bill

Posted by michael on from the making-sausage dept.

Finalnight writes "The Senate has voted to outlaw several favorite techniques of people who illegally copy and distribute movies, but has dropped other measures that could have led to jail time for Internet song-swappers..."

1 of 52 comments (clear)

  1. From TFA by lothar97 · · Score: 3, Informative
    Under a measure approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, song swappers could go to jail for up to three years if they shared more than 1,000 copyrighted works.

    Glad to see that this part was left out of the final bill, as I'm a little uncomfortable for busting people for just making files available to download- and people not actually downloading. It's kind of like someone who makes lots of books they've purchased available to friends to borrow.

    I'm a little worried that this might actually pop back in for the final version of the bill. The bills that passed the House and Senate are different, so negociators will smooth out differences. Sometimes nasty provisions like this can make it in, and everyone can say that they didn't vote for that provision.

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