Slashdot Mirror
Embed a Video, Go To Jail?
An anonymous reader writes "A few weeks ago, Slashdot had a post about the new bill in Congress to make streaming infringing videos a felony, punishable by up to 5 years in jail if just 10 people watch the video. As more details come out, the bill keeps looking worse and worse, as it appears that the definitions used in the bill would mean that merely embedding or linking to an infringing YouTube video could put you on the hook for jail time. Obviously, supporters of the bill insist that's not who will be targeted with this bill, but just the fact that they could be should be worrisome enough. We've seen other laws 'misused' in the past."
I'd be happy to appear on every radio and TV show discussing the out-of-control government which arrested me because I linked infringing "Sanctuary" episodes from youtube to my facebook page. It's time to Inform the public about what kind of tyranny they are living.
So go ahead and arrest me.
I'll be happy to fight back.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
Whatever happened to our Constitutional protection from cruel and unjust punishments?
Is this the new War on Drugs or something?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
What it boils down to, is they can send you to jail if they want to. This is just another hook to let the man fuck you over if you not play the game like a good little plebe.
The best solution for the interest groups involved would perhaps be to declare all of the US a jail (with some islands for the privileged).
This would be a rather elegant way to get rid of the 'constitution' 'legally'.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
is the name of the video site I'm going to launch!
I think you allowed successive elected representatives to gradually erode any form of constitutionality
How did I allow it? A lot of these bills became law before I became old enough to vote, and most of the time since then, the candidate for whom I voted lost the election.
Let your representatives know what your view is here: https://www.popvox.com/bills/us/112/s978
I've been thinking about these kinds of problems that plague civilization when corporations have a louder voice than humans, and are able to manhandle laws into doing everything they can to keep the plebs in their places. The problem to me appears to be that corporations are completely amoral, and dedicated toward doing absolutely whatever it takes to make as much money as possible. They do this due to their obligations to the shareholders. I'm going to pause along this train of thought to abuse the corollary: Somewhere along the line, "The customer is always right", transformed into, "the shareholder is always right."
Basically what I'm getting at here is that I now believe that in order to effect change, the only way to proceed is to play their same game against them. I propose creating a holdings company, getting it classified as a NPO, and then using donations generated by those interested in the lofty goals of the organization to purchase stock in the companies that are causing the problems. Any and all dividends made from the stock would go toward operational costs of the organization itself, and any surplus would go toward purchasing additional stock. The purpose of this is to be able to try to lobby within the stockholder's meetings with the stockholders themselves, and at worst case and assuming that the organization has enough stock to do so, threaten to tank the company by liquidating the stock for pennies. I'm no market analyst, but I'm pretty sure that it would play havoc with all the automated trading systems were a couple thousand shares of stock to be put out there for 1% of the current asking price.
Anyway, I thought I'd leave this here, figuring that if anyone was cynical enough to be able to shred this to pieces, it'd be Slashdot. Obviously, it has flaws. I'm no genius, and it was just something that came to me the other day, so I've hardly spent much time considering it.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
(CBS/AP) SCRANTON, Pa. - Former juvenile court judge Mark Ciavarella was convicted in an alleged "kids for cash" scheme that accused him and another judge of sending youth offenders to for-profit detention centers in exchange for millions of dollars in illicit payments from the builder and owner of the lockups. ...
I see your Stargate: Atlantis and raise you real life.
Consider This Scenario
I want my friend to see a really funny movie from 20 years ago, but they're not convinced it's worth their time. I search YouTube and I find a video of some highlights, so I send my friend the link to the video. I assume the clips fall under fair use because otherwise YouTube would have pulled them, right?
My friend watches the video, likes it, goes down to the store and buys the DVD and thanks me for introducing him to it.
The MPAA "piracy squad" spends all its time searching YouTube for copyrighted videos. It sues YouTube for its records, the logs show that I used their "share" feature to share the link with one person, and that person watched the video twice. The piracy squad watches the video 8 more times and then sicks its lawyers on me. Since I did indeed link to the video, and it was watched 10 times, I am guilty and convicted of a felony. I lose the ability to vote, the ability to work at many jobs, the right to possess firearms, ammunition and body armor, eligibility for welfare, eligibility for federally-funded housing, and the right to serve on a jury. I no longer have any influence in society and am reduced to flipping burgers by day and scanning retail inventory by night to scrape together enough money to live, which presumably keeps me sufficiently occupied to stay out of trouble.
Meanwhile, the MPAA gets a fee from the sale of the DVD that my friend would never have bought otherwise, they tip the balance of power in government further toward themselves by taking one more voter out of commission, and they strike fear in the hearts of anyone who even thinks about doing anything with video. The only previews you will get to see are the ones they force you to watch every time you pop in a DVD you bought from them.
Perhaps we could counterbalance this bill by adding language that makes it a felony to disable the FFWD or MENU button on a consumer's remote control. It's at least as criminal an act as linking to some YouTube video: millions of people are forced to watch 30 seconds to 5 minutes of previews every time they want to watch the movies they paid to "own" in their own homes. Sure, you could pop the movie in 5 minutes before you're ready to watch it, but the amount of productivity and electricity this needlessly wastes on a global scale is staggering. That's criminal.
The problem with this line of thinking is that any loss of revenue is immediately attributed to piracy, regardless of the facts. Case in point: the music industry. They've mostly been putting out autotuned garbage for the past 15 years, and when sales slumped because nobody wanted to pay twenty bucks for identical vocals that sound like they come out of a kazoo it was blamed on those darned music pirates. The entertainment industry needs piracy to cover for the fact that it's cheaper to produce utter crap no one wants than to produce quality work. A few arrests here and there merely reinforce the illusion that piracy is having a major impact on their sales.
"No matter where you go, there you probably are." -- Buckaroo Heisenberg
By making this a criminal instead of civil issue - its not about locking you up - its about getting the government to prosecute copyright infringements instead of the corporation.
By making linking into a criminal law, now largescale content owners can harness the raw power of the taxpayer dollar - the governement is now the plaintiff, and government laywers are prosecuting on behalf of the corporations. Just like they have done with IP and piracy, by linking their profit protection to criminal matters (the Pirates are stealing our product and selling it on the streets!) they get to defray the costs of protecting their profts, and sic the government on anything they don't want to see happening, like sharing passwords or sharing content, when they could be making profits off of those interactions.
Winter is Coming.