U.S. Senators Introduce SMART Copyright Act to Combat Piracy

I didn&#x27;t see any mention of fixing the biggest problem with the current system: no penalties for false claims.<p>If I post a video of myself playing moonlight sonata to youtube, and somebody puts a copyright claim (or more than one) against it, then it gets taken down and I suffer the consequences, but there is no mechanism for penalties for what amounts to fraud by the claimant. They should automatically get fined (payed to both me and youtube), and if damages were more severe I should be able to bring them to court to receive larger damages. Claimants should also get strikes the same way posters due, too many false claims and you then have to manually prove the copyright is yours before youtube takes the video down.<p>The above example was for youtube, but broadly this is how it should work. If copyright protection action cause harm, because of false claims (either accidental or intentional) then the claimant gets punished.

<i>Among other things, the senators stress that all government-imposed protection tools and takedown measures will go through a consultation process, where all stakeholders and the public are allowed to have their say.</i><p>If history is any indicator, the public can have their say, but that won&#x27;t be who the government is listening to. That, or it will be the clusterfuck that was the FCC&#x27;s public comment period on net neutrality. Hope always springs eternal for me that Senators and Congressfolk will act in good faith (EDIT: toward their constituents), but I&#x27;m also realistic in that they probably won&#x27;t.<p>If one has the time, click the &quot;facts and myths&quot; link in the article[0]. Or as I like to call it &quot;vague rebuttals, and the straw man arguments that they rebut&quot;.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tillis.senate.gov&#x2F;services&#x2F;files&#x2F;BBDBFA87-17CA-4D15-AA0F-9B54BFEEA31D" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tillis.senate.gov&#x2F;services&#x2F;files&#x2F;BBDBFA87-17CA-4...</a>

I&#x27;m a bit confused as to how this even solves anything to do with piracy even if you take the RIAA&#x27;s side. Youtube et al already have incredibly aggressive copyright filters. I can&#x27;t actually think of a major media platform that is based in the US sphere of influence that lacks those filters. At best this sounds like reinventing what already exists, but with more bureaucracy.<p>I&#x27;m also confused as to how anybody expects to create an upload filter system that respects fair use, given how subjective the fair use criteria are. We have already have seen how this works out with sites like YouTube - it simply does not work.<p>I&#x27;m triply confused as to how this interacts with the DMCA safe harbor provisions. If this doesn&#x27;t override them, as the bill authors say, how does it accomplish anything? Even The Pirate Bay nominally accepts DMCA takedown requests - so if sites can continue with their existing DMCA processes and be safe from being sued, why would anybody bother with implementing the technical measures?

I don&#x27;t pirate music, I don&#x27;t pirate games, I don&#x27;t pirate software, I don&#x27;t pirate anything but TV and movies and the reason is simple: piracy is a service problem for me. I know where to get music&#x2F;games&#x2F;software, I have no idea where to get the movies and TV I want to watch, they&#x27;re spread over 20 different services, 90% of which are not available in my country and the ones that are don&#x27;t have that specific content available in my country, I&#x27;ve even ran into issues where a streaming service say they for sure have some content and I just need to sign up to start watching, great! but after signing up and paying boop nope that content isn&#x27;t available in your country anymore. And even in the cases I find the content available I am treated like a pirate, use a browser without DRM support? nope go away, use a VPN even when connected to the country your payment details come from? nope go away, oh and by the way we removed that content you were watching but we still have season 1 and 2 if you want anything after that it&#x27;s on this other streaming platform and no it&#x27;s not in your country. Even when everything goes right I get a highly compressed stream with all sorts of ugly artifacting. Piracy fixes every single one of those issues for me so I will continue to do it without feeling bad about it. I am very willing to pay for these services by why would I if paying is an inherently worse experience? And I didn&#x27;t even list all the issues I&#x27;ve faced with these services.

It&#x27;s getting to the point that services will simply be hosted outside the United States, the index page will say &quot;this site shall not be used by United States citizens,&quot; and then people can go about using the Web like it <i>already works anyway</i>. It seems Senators don&#x27;t understand well what it is they&#x27;re trying to accomplish because they don&#x27;t understand how the Web works.

I think I&#x27;m more anti-piracy than the average person and despite bitwize being downvoted to oblivion, they are right. You aren&#x27;t entitled to anything anyone creates.<p>However, piracy is also 100% a service problem that has been exacerbated by everyone creating their own streaming services and I&#x27;m actually really curious how Amazon, Netflix, and Disney get away with &quot;exclusive content.&quot; The US vs Paramount Pictures[1] decided that you can&#x27;t have exclusive theaters that are owned by production companies yet it is entirely fine if they have streaming exclusives. If anything, this is an indicator that the laws haven&#x27;t kept up and need to be updated to probably apply to streaming as well.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;United_States_v._Paramount_Pic...</a>.

This article is far better written that most mainstream news articles on any topic. It provides detailed and balanced coverage of both sides of this issue. Wasn&#x27;t expecting that from a site called TorrentFreak.

There are a lot of problems in the world and the US right now, and these shmucks are busy worrying about online piracy?

Setting aside the arguments around infringement equaling&#x2F;not equaling actual theft, is the actual incidence of piracy high enough that it&#x27;s on beancounters&#x27; radar? I may be wrong, but my impression is that streaming made it a non-issue. This feels like a smokescreen.

&gt;The bill requires online hosting services to implement standard technical protection measures, designated by the Copyright Office.<p>How does it define an &quot;online hosting service&quot;? Literally any computer connected to the internet could potentially be considered an online host.

Maybe the &quot;rights holders&quot; should invent the technology and let streaming services use it. That way the &quot;rights holders&quot; are on the hook for piracy.

I&#x27;ve stopped watching shows and movies altogether. I simply don&#x27;t want to deal with this mess.<p>I just find something else to do. I have couple channels on YouTube I watch without recommendations and a couple of twitch streamers.<p>Recently, I&#x27;ve started reading.

Would a government-mandated upload filter pass constitutional scrutiny?

Please don&#x27;t cancel your Netflix and Disney+ subscriptions. These laws don&#x27;t come cheap!

This is gross, it&#x27;s clearly stacked by the middle men and otherwise rent seekers that generally own the rights and will cause issues for literally everyone else. No doubt this is not actually about getting value for the artists, more like the RIAA and co.

I can&#x27;t believe this is still a thing, from both sides. There is no stopping piracy or greed, maybe some speed bumps here and there. For the pirates its an access issue, that can range from &quot;can&#x27;t afford&quot; to &quot;can&#x27;t see it&quot; to simply just &quot;I am cheap&quot;. For the companies, it&#x27;s profits, pure and simple. I always wonder though how they quantify taking into consideration most pirates weren&#x27;t going to purchase movie&#x2F;music anyway.

Why won’t government officials and corporations acknowledge there are some issues with digital supply chains and mediums for consuming content? Instead they want to strong-arm consumers into consuming content the way corporations want them to. I wonder if lobbying is at play here.

Fascinating how greed and the demand for ever increasing profits leads to these cycles of purchase and privacy. First we had physical DVDs but studios’ greed in extending the theater playtime as long as profitable resulted in bootleg recordings so people could watch at home. Then torrenting was the final nail to this physical media strategy. Netflix arose, consolidating content into an even easier experience than torrenting with none of the legal&#x2F;ISP risks. Then Disney and Warner Bros and NBC caught on, got greedy, and now we’re back to torrenting seemingly because people don’t want to deal with country licensing, platform lock in, fragmentation, or price increases.<p>Anyone wanting a glimpse at this bill’s future can look at YouTube’s draconian copyright strike engine which ensures artists will live in fear of daring to use a 5 second sample of Major Music Label Intellectual Property.<p>Attempts to legislate this (rather than curbing corporate greed) will only create a new hydra, one providing ML-resistant protections for media against perceptual hashes, greater anonymity, and the fertile grounds for stronger piracy.

I wonder if they&#x27;ll finally come after that one thing we don&#x27;t talk about, that I use constantly for music and TV shows.

As a regular American consumer and producer of copyrighted material, how does this law help me?

Now they want to scan the files on my hosting providers. Imagine another Panama Papers drop or something similar being shared and how quick the government will use a system like this to delete the files and disable your hosting accounts.

How convenient that Patrick Leahy is retiring this year and won’t be on the hook for screwing his voter base.

What sucks is how the US will pressure the rest of the world to also implement this garbage.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.swissinfo.ch&#x2F;eng&#x2F;downloading-and-uploading_what-the-new-swiss-copyright-law-means-for-consumers-of-pirated-online-content&#x2F;45305402" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.swissinfo.ch&#x2F;eng&#x2F;downloading-and-uploading_what-...</a><p>I am going to cancel my Netflix and start pirating because am not going to pay more than Germans for netflix and get an even smaller catalog than they get. Germany already pays more than the US for a much smaller catalog. We just get take to the cleaner just because, no reason whatsoever. The law that would require Netflix to pay a percentage to subsidice Swiss movies hasn&#x27;t even been voted on yet and if it does pass will push the price even higher.