Senate Passes Scaled-Back Copyright Bill

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..."

Comments

Not Happy

[DrJonesAC2]

Im not happy about this passing but at least most of the really stupid things were removed. Maybe my letters to good ol' Orrin helped.

Re:Not Happy

[Content-Free]

At least "A section that would have made it illegal to edit out commercials was removed." I was wondering if I'd have to leave the room when commercials came on in order not to watch them.

Re:Not Happy

[Relic of the Future]

The concern is that the punishments do not fit the crime. No one thinks that shoplifting is a good and moral thing to do, but would a law demanding 3 years in federal prison for petty theft be fair?

Secondly is the issue that an ailing industry is trying to legislate itself back to super-profitablilty with special government favoritism. As the joke goes, the horse-and-buggy industry tried the same thing when the model-T came out, but cooler heads prevailed.

Thankfully, the provision that would have made it the Justice Department's job to hunt down and prosecute file traders was dropped; the **AA will have to continue to pay for its own lawyers, just like everyone else.

Small victory... TiVo shows sighs of relief

[Beatbyte]

A section that would have made it illegal to edit out commercials was removed.

I feel like for once, contacting my congressman worked!

...Either that or they have TiVo's themselves ;-)

Re:Why jailtime?

[Danse]

Why do we send people to jail that are at most causing loss of revenues for a certain industry? ...
Why not just fine him for every copy he sent out? $1000/upload sounds like it would be more fit for the crime.

Can't get blood from a stone. And why $1000 per upload? Why not $1 per upload? Isn't that more in line with the actual damage? Ok, let's do triple damages then. $3 per upload. Of course they still need a way to track how many uploads you've done. And I suppose there's no reason they couldn't just sit around and track you for a good long while before they turn you in, just to scale up the damages.

I disagree.

[hummassa]

You can't act like it doesn't hurt the companies making/distributing/advertising the movies.

But it doesn't!!! At least not in my case: I usually watch movies first at home, and then at the theather if I think the experience would be good. The films I can't download, I will not watch at all. I will buy a good DVD with a lot of extras instead of downloading the KVCD version of the movie. The cost (to me) would be the same (a good DVD with 1 disc here costs approx US$ 15 -- the same price of one hour of work + one day of processing I have in downloading/transcoding the same movie). I watch Enterprise, which is not broadcast to my country, and that I would watch for free OTA if I lived in the USofA anyway.
And I am certain that this is the majority of P2P user's cases here and in the US.

Now, the message to the *AA:

You are losing revenue because your products are getting crappier and crappier, not because of P2P.

You do know what they're doing right?

[sudog]

They introduce the bill, put draconian measures into it, and fight to pass draconian measures that would seriously impact the way Americans live their daily lives.

Then an outcry develops, they strip out the draconian measures and leave behind innocuous, small-step leftovers that they were hoping to pass in the first place, to make it look like they were being magnanimous by compromising.

The more they do this, the more they can get bills passed that erode the rights of US citizens and turn the US into a nation of good little worker bees making the elite upper class richer and richer.

I wonder what it'll look like in 15 years, when another five or six of these bills gets passed in succession?

You guys are so fucked.

Smaller penalty for insider releases?

[morcheeba]

People who secretly videotape movies when they are shown in theaters could go to prison for up to three years

Hackers and industry insiders who distribute music, movies or other copyrighted works before their official release date also face stiffened penalties under the bill.

Well, I hope the industry insiders face a stiffer penalty than three years in prison -- they make much better, more watch-able copies, so the damage is much worse.

But, somehow, I don't think the industry will want such stiff penalties for their own people. And, if so, why the long sentence for taping in a theater? Hopefully someone will eventually realize that jail time is not appropriate & copyright should be kept a civil matter.