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Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming

tillis.senate.gov

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

#391

Post by mminer237 »

Traster wrote: post #70
mminer237 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may not be everyone, but there are a number of pirates who would buy a subscription to a legal streaming service if illegal streaming was not as easily available.

Look at Spotify, iTunes, YouTube and Netflix. Laws don’t stop piracy, good legal options stop piracy. The reason people pirated music wasn’t because the piracy sites were great, it’s because music companies wanted to charge ridiculous prices for something they would broadcast on the radio for free.

Obviously if you release something for free like Spotify or YouTube, few people will mess with torrents for it; but that also makes artists a lot less money. You'll never stop piracy. But laws can reduce it. And some probably-impossible-to-know portion of that reduction will pay for the legal option. 99% of people will never download qBitTorrent. It's a small portion that will even get PopcornTime. It's easy to get disconnected as more technically-inclined people, but you have to remember that most people that pirate things just Google "stream avengers endgame free" and click through the links until they find a site that works. If that gets too hard, plenty will just give up and buy the DVD or whatever.

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

#392

Post by t-writescode »

zenexer wrote: post #307
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 probabl…

I'm not a lawyer, of course, but how do you read this part:

> 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 that...

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

#393

Post by celdon25 »

Part of the goal here seems to be about putting the responsibility on video chat applications to censor users who stream movies to a friend or two (perhaps because they need to practice social distancing). That way, we can continue blaming "muh private company" and make it not the government's problem. It seems to have been a great strategy when it comes to policing political speech so expect to see more of this paradigm.

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

#394

Post by saidajigumi »

rhino369 wrote: post #336
infogulch wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole problem is enormous "conglomerate" bills in the first place. It's absurd that everyone is forced to evaluate and have a single opinion/vote on all these completely separate issues as a unit. How much political BS is hiding in these massive bills, quid-pro-quo, back scratching, intentionally opaque text that nobody can understand the implications of until long after it's been jammed through... its disgusting…

Interestingly, the Confederate constitution banned these types of bills.

Washington State has a single-subject rule that affects both bills in legislature and ballot measures[1]. We've regularly had poorly crafted voter initiatives tossed out by the WA State Supreme Court on this basis.

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Laws_governing_the_initiative_proces...

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

#395

Post by mminer237 »

dessant wrote: post #64
mminer237 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may not be everyone, but there are a number of pirates who would buy a subscription to a legal streaming service if illegal streaming was not as easily available.

There's probably more truth to it when turned around: there are a number of pirates who would buy content, if it would be easily accessible. This is a self-inflicted wound by media companies, and they are attempting to solve the issue by sending people to prison, instead of taking the money people are ready to spend on their content.

I'm not saying media companies are perfect, moral angels. But I don't think people should pretend that piracy is some act of justice either.

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

#396

Post by jmull »

Kranar wrote: post #334
mod wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Vocal coach reacts!" I, for one, will be glad if these go away. (Plus, get them out of my feed, youtube. I don't watch them.) Apparently they're so successful that other people are doing it now. I saw someone totally unrelated to music reacting to amateur music songs.

Well those videos on Youtube won't be impacted by this. This law doesn't go after individuals who upload infringing content, rather it goes after the platform itself. It's unlikely Youtube will be affected by it.

> This law doesn't go after individuals who upload infringing content, rather it goes after the platform itself.

Be careful. That's not what the law actually says. It doesn't mention "platform".

The term used is "digital transmission service", which is defined in terms of the undefined term "service". Perhaps there is some established narrow legal definition of the term "service" that will keep this law from being abused? Let's all hope so!

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

#397

Post by elliekelly »

t-writescode wrote: post #392
zenexer wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 probabl…

I'm not a lawyer, of course, but how do you read this part: > 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 that...

(for purposes of commercial advantage) _or_ (private financial gain)

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

#398

Post by kevinmgranger »

dannykwells wrote: post #128

Can we please stop posting proposed legislation with highly editorialized titles? Most proposed legislation, even "bipartisan" will not go through are end up so diluted that it won't matter. Not that it's not worth fighting but this is clearly an attempt to garner clicks/votes and we should be fighting back here.

It's attached to a COVID stimulus. Its odds of passing are much higher.

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

#399

Post by dragonwriter »

infogulch wrote: post #295
dragonwriter wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's absurd that everyone is forced to evaluate and have a single opinion/vote on all these completely separate issues as a unit. They aren't forced to, except by their own (collective) consent. They could vote to split the bill, propose smaller bills and vote down the bigger ones in preference, etc. Conglomerate bills are a tool to reach mutually tolerable compromise.

> mutually tolerable compromise This is just politispeak for quid-pro-quo. If conglomerate bills are outlawed then maybe we can vote on issues instead of on whether everyone's back is sufficiently scratched.

> This is just politispeak for quid-pro-quo.

Yes, compromise and quid-pro-quo are the same thing. So what?

> If conglomerate bills are outlawed then maybe we can vote on issues instead of on whether everyone's back is sufficiently scratched.

You are voting on issues either way, and, cynically, voting on whether everyone's back is sufficiently scratched, either way. A single subject rule, such as is in place in the California legislature and several other state legislatures, simply reduces scope within which compromise can occur (or, alternatively, just makes the legislative compromises more complex and opaque as mechanisms are found to obey the technical requirements of the rule while evading its substantive intent, such as building in contingencies in one bill that are triggered by the passage or not of another bill.)

Quid-pro-quo isn't the problem, being able to trade-off across issues is a good thing.

The problem is legislators serving powerful narrow interests rather than the broad public interest, but narrowing the permitted scope of individual enactments doesn't do anything to help that.

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

#400

Post by mminer237 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #146
mminer237 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may not be everyone, but there are a number of pirates who would buy a subscription to a legal streaming service if illegal streaming was not as easily available.

Interesting. Perhaps the studios should quadruple the price of streaming to recoup their losses. But of course that would send even more to piracy.... It makes you wonder if Steve Jobs was correct that people that pirate (songs, Napster back in the day) would be willing to pay for music if it was easy (iTunes) and cheap ($0.99). I'm not sure if I agree but it is an interesting foil.

Obviously there's some balance in pricing stuff. Selling all your movies for $1 a pop may kill most piracy, but it will kill your movie studio too. Selling streams for $500 per person will price most people out, regardless of whether piracy exists or not. Piracy hurts profits regardless of pricing. iTunes did not make up for the death of CDs at all. Digital sales have never even made up a third of what physical sales used to be: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

Personally, I don't think consumers have a right to tell creators, "You have to sell that to me for $x or I will take it without paying." Companies certainly aren't good, but they're not typically stupid either. They're not going to price things to a point where people can't afford them. I think pirates just lie to themselves a lot to justify their actions.

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