Secondary liability for service providers and hosts on the internet remains a serious threat to the open web. Service providers should not be held accountable for the content of their users.<p>This effort to bring back parts of SOPA, combined with a recent push by state attorneys general[1] to compromise Section 230 of the CDA are extremely concerning to me.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20130724/12345123927/state-attorneys-general-want-to-sue-innovators-children.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20130724/12...</a>
Think about the starving artists - decades of downloading have crippled the entertainment industries so much thay there are no new artists, songs, movies, video games, software comlanies, television shows -- oh, wait...
This is a confused and confusing article.<p>The "streaming" to which it refers could mean any of a number of different things depending on the context you choose to read it in. Those contexts include:<p>(a) "Streaming" as laypersons define it; literally viewing unauthorized streaming content from a service like Youtube.<p>(b) "Streaming" in the SOPA analysis, as Zittrain and (unfortunately) Techdirt are discussing in the article linked from this WaPo post.<p>(c) "Streaming" in the Klobuchar bill, which makes a very specific change to copyright law that isn't nearly as sweeping as SOPA.<p>(d) "Streaming" as described in the Commerce report.<p>I assume the WaPo is referring to (c) or (d), since that's the interpretation that squares with the headline. But then why is it talking about Justin Bieber and SOPA?<p>Specifically: the Klobuchar bill closes a loophole in the copyright law that results from streaming being classified as "public performance" and not "distribution". Like other criminal infringement statutes, it requires the infringement to be commercial in nature to be prosecutable --- you have to build a business on your unauthorized streaming to have committed a felony. Unlike (as I understand it) SOPA, the Bieber Youtube upload would not be a crime in the Klobuchar bill.<p>The Commerce report doesn't even advocate for Klobuchar; it merely recognizes the loophole in the law, which obviously does exist: you can build a Pirate iTunes Music Store and be charged with a felony, but build a Pirate Netflix and it's a misdemeanor. That is, in fact, a weird legal result.<p>Finally, Bieber's opinion about his fans uploading unauthorized copies of his work is probably not relevant. Bieber sold his commercial interest in those works to recording companies, for spectacular amounts of money. It's easy for him to advocate for his fans right to traffic in unauthorized copies of his tracks; they're not his property anymore, and infringement is someone else's problem.
<a href="http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/aynrand125008.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/aynrand125008.htm...</a><p>Everyone's a criminal then law-enforcement selective enforces law on who they want taken care of.
Yeah, try killing this one too. And the one after this. After that. Followed by another one. See where this is going? We have to remove the root, not the leafs.