Remember SOPA? The Obama administration sure does. Last week the White House began an attempt to revive one of the key aspects of that failed legislation. The Internet Policy Task Force of the Department of Commerce has recommended that the administration support legislation that would make it a felony to stream unauthorized copyrighted content over the internet. Such conduct is defined as a violation of the public performance right and is currently punishable as a misdemeanor. In its report, the task force makes clear that this is an “anomaly” that poses a significant impediment to deterring the piracy of copyrighted content on the internet.

Many may recall the widespread outcry over the SOPA legislation writ large, including the massive internet blackout that encompassed websites such as Wikipedia, Reddit, and Google, amongst many other large internet sites. Beyond the general opposition to the bill as a whole, the anti-streaming provisions specifically generated a significant amount of controversy. The focal point of this opposition came from an unlikely source – ‘tween pop sensation Justin Bieber, who stated that the primary sponsor of the bill, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) should be “locked up”. While this may seem like an odd arena for a normally apolitical entertainer to be involved, consider that Bieber’s career began by him singing cover versions of his favorite songs and uploading them to YouTube. Bieber’s innocuous childhood pastime could be criminally punished under such legislation.

Violations of the public performance right on the internet are usually thought of as the live streaming of pay-per-view events such as boxing matches or MMA fights. Other forms of internet streaming are already criminally punishable as a violation of the reproduction right such as the illegal hosting of television shows and movies on streaming sites. The sites streaming such content are criminally liable because they are hosting the copies on their own servers. Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain has stated that because of SOPA’s ambiguous language, any person who uploads infringing content to a service and causes it to be viewed in a public performance could be held criminally liable. Zittrain also believes that such legislation could create significant problems for embed features which websites use to display videos from services (like YouTube) without hosting them on their own servers. This could potentially implicate a party that neither created the infringing work nor hosted it on its own server.

While it remains unclear what form the anti-streaming legislation will take if it is reintroduced to Congress, it is certainly clear that both sides of the issue will not be backing down anytime soon.