Do The Authors Of The Felony Streaming Bills Even Know What The Details Of Their Own Bills Mean?

from the doesn't-sound-like-it dept

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After Justin Bieber himself pointed out how silly the various bills in both the Senate and the House (S.978 and SOPA, respectively) concerning making streaming a felony were, the office of the key sponsor behind S.978, Senator Amy Klobuchar's, insisted that Justin Bieber didn't understand the bill. We've been hearing the same thing from a few others, who insist that, at best, the streaming felony bill might make a service provider liable for felony charges, but would not impact an uploader such as Justin Bieber After looking over the details, I'm not convinced that's true -- and neither are the folks at Fight for the Future, and some of their legal experts. They've now put up a site called BieberIsRight.org , highlighting the legal problems, and how it appears that Klobuchar and the supporters of SOPA don't even understand their own bills. Part of the claim is that it's only the service provider who would be responsible for the "performance," but that's not supported by the case law. Hell, it's not even supported by Klobuchar's own co-sponsor, Senator Chris Coons, who admitted that it wouldn't just criminalize service providers, but "individuals and sites providing the streamed content."But the bigger issue highlighted by the site is that there is caselaw showing that "a transmission that ultimately results in a performance to the public is, itself, a public performance." That would suggest that merely uploading to a site that then allows a performance to the public could certainly be interpreted as a public performance. Furthermore, in the case of Bieber, the problemthat he merely uploaded the videos. I agree that for people who merely upload videos of other people's work, this might not apply. But Bieber clearly wasthe works of others in his videos. The uploading isn't the issue. The performancethe video thenwith the public performancethe infringing video seems like it could easily fall under the law.Yes, this is a question of interpretations of the law, and a large part of the problem is that the text as Klobuchar and (on the House side) Lamar Smith have put forward, doesn't carefully distinguish, meaning that no matter how many times they insist the law won't apply to people like Justin Bieber, we really won't know that for sure until the courts weigh in -- and the ambiguity, especially given the existing case law, means it's no sure thing. One hopes that the court would give weight to the statements of Klobuchar's staff, but there's no guarantee that they will. Besides, any law that is going to require hunting down the press quotes from staffers to prove that it doesn't mean what it seems to say on its face is, without a doubt, a bad and dangerous law.So why is Klobuchar so focused on getting it passed?

Filed Under: amy klobuchar, felony, justin bieber, s.978, sopa, streaming