
SOPA died in 2012, but Obama administration wants to revive part of it - northwest
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/05/sopa-died-in-2012-but-obama-administration-wants-to-revive-part-of-it/
======
snsr
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.

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.

[1]
[http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20130724/12...](http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20130724/12345123927/state-
attorneys-general-want-to-sue-innovators-children.shtml)

~~~
meanguy
That was actually one of the key points of SOPA -- it extended DMCA-style
service provider protection to payment providers and ad networks. As for the
"streaming" provision, that was (inartfully) meant to penalize the day 0
crowd, especially for unreleased media. It was not intended to penalize people
downloading, watching, or what people who read this site consider "streaming."

The language could and should have been cleaned up then; it all got lost
amidst the SOPA screaming. Penalties for "streaming" are covered by the DMCA
inside the US. It's how YouTube and UStream can exist. And I think we've seen
precisely how many felonies and how much jail time resulted from cover songs
and Justin Bieber lip dubs since that law passed 15 years ago.

But right now someone outside the USA can take another party's shady (or well-
intentioned stream) of a pay per view, wrap ads from an ad network around it,
and accept PayPal in order to see the "unrestricted stream" (scam). And
there's no legal framework to deal with it.

That's obvious scammy theft regardless of where you stand on copyright. And
all the "good guys" (ad networks, payment providers) remain liable whether
they respond to takedown requests or not. SOPA let people take down the ads
and PayPal links if they couldn't get the site down. It gave PayPal and Google
the same kind of process and liability protection for payments and ads that
YouTube already enjoys for video.

This needs to get fixed and techdirt, boingboing and others need to hire
someone with minimal legal expertise (optimally Congressional litigation
support experience) if they're going to keep hammering this for pageviews and
anti-copyright cred.

------
adamnemecek
In the future, there will be a more extreme version of rickrolling. People
will send you links and if you open them, you will be sent to jail.

~~~
northwest
I've never understood how prisons could be allowed to become private
businesses. It's "evil" by definition.

~~~
Prophasi
By definition? That requires some justification.

The justice system still sets the parameters and manages the procedures by
which sentences are handed down. If a court determines you're going to prison
for 10 years, you're going -- the private company manages your environment for
that time.

And given that private parties also manage your medical care, hospital stays,
air travel, car manufacture, work environments, home building, and thousands
of other mechanisms and environments that determine your safety and quality of
living, I struggle with finding a moral difference when it comes to prisons.

You could argue that these other things are voluntary and prison isn't, but
it's involuntary even if run by government; most inmates would opt out either
way.

And I think it's highly naive, this distinction between private companies as
greedy, interested parties and government agencies and functionaries as
objective arbiters of truth and goodwill. Either way you have ridiculous
salaries, internal power struggles, marketing/perception, budget committees,
and cynical people inured to the hard realities of the lives they affect.

~~~
zeidrich
A prison is a place where people are deprived of liberties. A society can
justify depriving people of liberties. A private interest should not have the
right to do so.

Yes, it's not the private interest who condemns the prisoner, but they run
these facilities at a profit, turning what should be a rehabilitating
environment into an environment that is designed to promote full prisons to
enrich an individual.

A good prison should work at a financial loss because there should be a
societal benefit to rehabilitating inmates. If a higher prison population
turns into a financial incentive, there is no incentive to help inmates or
even reduce recidivism.

This is especially true when you consider how many minor offenses can send
people to jail in the US. It is also interesting to consider that when slavery
was abolished, many plantations turned into for-profit prisons; or that the
incarceration rate of the US is the highest in the world.

~~~
Prophasi
The government delivers citizens into the hands of private management all the
time: required insurance policies, training programs, licensure, etc.
Mandating that every obligatory service be not only funded, but _implemented_
, by government would extend its rolls of employees, budgets, laws and legal
complexity, competencies, and requisite voter knowledge beyond any reasonable
possibility.

You seem to be ascribing a negative to the mere profit focus of a private
company, rather than the outcome. We could do the same for insurance, medical
practice, automobiles, plane travel, lodging, and everything else important;
but we don't, because private companies in the open market perform better.

Would you then deliver everything important into the hands of government
monopoly, despite everything we know about the benefits of competition, for
the moral premise rather than results? And if you think the _results_ weigh
against private prison companies, might we restructure the government/private
arrangement before nuking wholesale the notion of the market?

WRT the incarceration rate, I'd have to see something linking that to private
companies running prisons, rather than problems with the justice system
itself.

Consider the abysmal performance of government-run schools, among others, as a
counterpoint.

------
magoon
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...

~~~
tptacek
I think you think this is more clever than it actually is, because the music
industry has been torpedoed over the last dozen or so years.

~~~
pessimizer
music industry != music

------
tptacek
This is a confused and confusing article.

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:

(a) "Streaming" as laypersons define it; literally viewing unauthorized
streaming content from a service like Youtube.

(b) "Streaming" in the SOPA analysis, as Zittrain and (unfortunately) Techdirt
are discussing in the article linked from this WaPo post.

(c) "Streaming" in the Klobuchar bill, which makes a very specific change to
copyright law that isn't nearly as sweeping as SOPA.

(d) "Streaming" as described in the Commerce report.

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?

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.

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.

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.

~~~
meanguy
Thank you for this. Onc clarification: the "Bieber YouTuBe upload" takedown
scenario remained a DMCA issue. The non-commercial = non-felony language was
actually made even more explicit under SOPA.

------
smtddr
[http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/aynrand125008.htm...](http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/aynrand125008.html)

Everyone's a criminal then law-enforcement selective enforces law on who they
want taken care of.

~~~
tptacek
No, every does not run a business feeding unauthorized streaming copies of
movies or songs to customers.

------
pearjuice
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.

------
ktzar
I read SOAP... I'm so relieved it's not.

~~~
Elrac
For what it's worth, I came here to say a similar thing. I was jubilant that
SOAP had finally been put to a well-deserved rest.

Well, of the two, I'd agree that SOPA is the greater evil. By a slim margin,
anyway.

------
brown9-2
What if you don't stream the copywritten work, and instead download it for
later viewing/listening?

~~~
tptacek
Neither of those are criminalized; this is an example of the kind of confusion
the WaPo article has created by being absurdly imprecise about "streaming".

