Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming • Hacker News Board

Re: Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming

#301

Post by jariel » Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 5:20 PM UTC

HlessClaudesman wrote: post #188

IdiocyInAction wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are all the people, from the film crew to the VFX artists and engineers that work on the IP that is being stolen "rich people yatch (sic!) money"? You can say what you want about IP law; you wouldn't be able to enjoy many big-budget productions if it wouldn't exist. Many jobs, high-paying and low-paying, wouldn't exist. Of course, the business model for content distribution is somewhat nonsensical and the time until…

The film & recorded music industries were built in an era of information scarcity, maintained by tightly controlled distribution. We now live in an era where information is infinite and everywhere. Criminalising people isn't going to turn back this fundamental sea change.

"Criminalising people isn't going to turn back this fundamental sea change"

- Making private information available as a common activity is not inevitable.

- Staling private information is a crime by any account.

- The underlying economics are against your logic: it takes many workers, doing real work, to make those things. If they don't get paid, it doesn't get made.

- The 'yacht' analogy wrong - the entertainment industry is full of money losing projects, and zillions of people working really hard on stuff because they care and not earning a lot of money. There surely probably more arbitrarily rich people in tech than in entertainment.

Re: Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming

#302

Post by these_are_not_t » Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 5:20 PM UTC

sukilot wrote: post #159

emilecantin wrote: post #99

Gabe Newell (of Steam fame) has it right: Piracy is not a price problem, it's a service problem. Offer your digital goods packaged in a good service, and people will buy them (see: Netflix). Make it annoying to get your digital goods (through hostile "anti-piracy" software, bad UI, paltry device support, etc), and people will pirate instead. I'd argue the current trend towards exclusives / market fragmentation on vid…

Netflix is draining of quality content and people still pirate memberships. Not a good example. If Netflix was working so well, all those other services wouldn't exist, because they'd have no customers. You undermine your own argument by saying > Piracy is not a price problem, it's a service problem and then say > for free.

I think that piracy overall isn't a simple issue: trying to put every pirates in the same bag isn't going to work, because not everyone has the same set of motivations: some have issues with packaging, some with price, and perhaps there are other kinds of issues?

What can be done on the other hand, is to figure out what are the main reasons for piracy (ie, on average, what are the driving factors), and what can be done to remove them.

Packaging in the music industry took a while to adjust: they first fought really hard against Napster and the like, when the customers were quite ready to accept digital content, but the DRM solutions were mostly in the way, or the network technology wasn't quite ready. Nowadays, everyone takes for granted that music is bandwidth cheap, and content owners realized that removing the packaging issue did remove a large part of the piracy, because those who pirated for lack of good delivery didn't have to anymore, and with this market share acquired, the revenues increased, which meant that prices could go down, and thus another chunk of the piracy crowd became customers as well.

I guess that my point is that price isn't a completely solvable problem, but it's not entirely orthogonal to the other issues.

Clearly, price cannot be reduced down to zero, there will always be people finding this or that to be too expensive for what it is. Note that ads do not reduce cost to zero for the consumer in the case of digital streaming: they still have to pay in ad view time, which leads to ad blockers, yet another form of piracy.

> If Netflix was working so well, all those other services wouldn't exist, because they'd have no customers.

Even if Netflix is working perfectly well, they can't have the monopoly of creativity. They might produce good content (something you seem to disagree with, I personally don't have an opinion on that), but they cannot prevent other distributors to do the same. The main reasons for this are that:

- again people cannot be put all in the same bag: what one will be interested in might bore the next,

- "topics" can be exclusive (GP alluded to that): For instance, Disney owns "Star Wars", and if you want to watch some of that stuff, you'll have to go to them.

Re: Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming

#303

Post by dharmab » Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 5:21 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #254

SamuelAdams wrote: post #49

This should be fun for a service like Twitch. What happens when a streamer on their platform starts playing a game with a copywritten song playing on the game's radio or background? Many times the streamers themselves are not aware that this is a crime.

> Many times the streamers themselves are not aware that this is a crime. It's not a crime. What criminal law is being broken?

Games include two types of music:

Original music is created by the game creators and streaming rights are included in the software EULA.

Licensed music is created by third party artists and is usually not included in the software EULA because the music artist/publisher does not grant that type of license to the game creator/publisher. A gamer streaming gameplay that includes the copyrighted song will trigger automatic copyright protection on the streaming service they use and is subject to DMCA takedowns.

Modern games often include a "streamer mode" which replaces or mutes the licensed music.

Re: Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming

#304

Post by knowhy » Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 5:21 PM UTC

panarky wrote: post #230

roblabla wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This appears to be correct from reading the (very short) text[0]. Everyone discussing this law should really read the text instead of reading whatever nonsense the media is spinning. Here's the full text of what is being prohibited: > PROHIBITED ACT. > — It shall be unlawful to willfully, and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, offer or provide to the public a digital transmission service…

> for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, offer or provide to the public a digital transmission service that If it's a peer-to-peer streaming service where media consumers also serve media to other users, then the argument could be made that users themselves are providing the "digital transmission service". There may not even be an identifiable, centralized "platform".

In Germany that is already the case. Streaming is "ok" here for the consumer whereas torrenting is illegal and practically dead by now. The legal argument is that you are distributor when using peer to peer. Under German law it doesn't matter if that is done for profit or not.

Re: Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming

#305

Post by confounded » Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 5:21 PM UTC

univalent wrote: post #290

Why are these bills 5000 page turds with all kinds of legal garbage thrown in? I wish Congress would pass a 1 paragraph bill that does one thing: say $1000 bucks to everyone making under $75k for 3 months and dare people to vote against or veto it.

This one is actually linked from TFA and is very short and readable as a pdf.

Re: Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming

#306

Post by jmull » Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 5:21 PM UTC

roblabla wrote: post #85

chadash wrote: post #9

This title is misleading: > The Protecting Lawful Streaming Act would apply only to commercial, for-profit streaming piracy services. The law will not sweep in normal practices by online service providers, good faith business disputes, noncommercial activities, or in any way impact individuals who access pirated streams or unwittingly stream unauthorized copies of copyrighted works. Individuals who might use pirate s…

This appears to be correct from reading the (very short) text[0]. Everyone discussing this law should really read the text instead of reading whatever nonsense the media is spinning. Here's the full text of what is being prohibited: > PROHIBITED ACT. > — It shall be unlawful to willfully, and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, offer or provide to the public a digital transmission service…

Sounds like if I, e.g. have a podcast where I play and review songs (without permission), I can be charged with a felony if I, say, take paid ads on the podcast.

Perhaps simply a monetized streaming channel where I dance to the current hits is enough to put me in jail... it’s certainly seems enough to at least put me on trial.

I think you have to wonder: what’s insufficient about the civil and criminal laws? What is the current serious problem with streaming that this very strong law is needed to stamp it out?

To me it seems inevitable that it will be applied much more strongly than what you are thinking. “Purpose”, “intentionally”, “significant”, “primarily” can be, and therefore probably will be, argued to have wide meanings.

Re: Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming

#307

Post by zenexer » Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 5:22 PM UTC

chadash wrote: post #9

This title is misleading: > The Protecting Lawful Streaming Act would apply only to commercial, for-profit streaming piracy services. The law will not sweep in normal practices by online service providers, good faith business disputes, noncommercial activities, or in any way impact individuals who access pirated streams or unwittingly stream unauthorized copies of copyrighted works. Individuals who might use pirate s…

Looking at the text of the law, I disagree. It doesn’t require that the service be commercial. The criteria are loose and broad enough that while they may appear to target platforms, they could certainly be abused by creative lawyers to target individuals.

Do you really trust that the RIAA won’t pressure prosecutors into targeting individuals? Heck, if you run a home media server, a good team of lawyers could probably convince a technologically-incompetent jury that you’re subject to this law.

Re: Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming

#308

Post by choward » Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 5:22 PM UTC

So that's what the Congress people are up to instead of trying to help people during a pandemic. Putting in laws to reduce streaming while encouraging people to stay at home. I guess that $600 they paid people whose job they eliminated should cover their streaming bills for the year.

Newsom closing outdoor dining while allowing Hollywood to film is making more sense now. Sorry for going political on HN but this really bugs me.

Re: Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming

#309

Post by rkachowski » Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 5:22 PM UTC

panarky wrote: post #266

lemonspat wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is that "digital transmission service" run "for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain"? I agree with your theory, but not sure why you removed the qualifier from your theory. This seems more targeted to PopcornTime than bittorrent

Getting media for free is "private financial gain".

how so? you don't gain financially by receiving free media in any form, at best you avoid a monetary cost.

Re: Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming

#310

Post by jariel » Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

autosharp wrote: post #109

IdiocyInAction wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are all the people, from the film crew to the VFX artists and engineers that work on the IP that is being stolen "rich people yatch (sic!) money"? You can say what you want about IP law; you wouldn't be able to enjoy many big-budget productions if it wouldn't exist. Many jobs, high-paying and low-paying, wouldn't exist. Of course, the business model for content distribution is somewhat nonsensical and the time until…

Those people are not making less if I don't pay for a movie. The marginal revenue is all yacht money profits.

"Those people are not making less if I don't pay for a movie. The marginal revenue is all yacht money profits"

The byzantine logic here on a supposedly 'smart site' really goes sideways on ideological issues were people have a) some ideology and b) they want it for free.

The failure of your comment is really quite evident: basically 'every purchaser' could make the same statement about 'marginal revenue' in which case, if nobody bought the content, then, there would be no content and no yachts.