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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."
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
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.
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...
Selective enforcement needs to be a crime in its self. It happen all the time. This is incompatable with rule of law.