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Is it possible that our copyright laws could be made even more draconian? So much so that a person could go to prison for five years for the unspeakable crime of embedding a YouTube video on their blog or website?
Apparently, the answer is yes.
Three Senators want to amend the Copyright Act to make “public performances” of copy-written material a crime, not just a civil tort as it is now. Why is this a problem? Because, as usual, our government is incompetent in matters of technology they don’t understand and have written a piece of legislation which would have broad consequences in turning millions of Americans into criminals.
Furthermore, as we suspected, in the full text of the bill, “performance” is not clearly defined. This is the really troubling part. Everyone keeps insisting that this is targeted towards “streaming” websites, but is streaming a “performance”? If so, how does embedding play into this? Is the site that hosts the content guilty of performing? What about the site that merely linked to and/or embedded the video (linking and embedding are technically effectively the same thing). Without clear definitions, we run into problems pretty quickly.
…
If you embed a YouTube video that turns out to be infringing, and more than 10 people view it because of your link… you could be facing five years in jail.
It seems unlikely that we’d see massive prosecutions against every person who shares an “infringing” video on their Facebook account, but that brings up another, perhaps more important point: Laws like this turn all our laws into a joke. There’s no longer a stigma against breaking the law but rather simply getting caught. Any time you pass a law which is unenforceable it degrades the integrity of our entire legal system, and when we pass laws this broad which are enforced it’s one more step into the pit of tyranny.
fred
June 22, 2011
I forgot my password and my old email account has been closed.
I have know way of closing the video I posted on you-tube with copyright music on it that I didn’t realize.
Can people be charged before or after the law date comes in??.
fred
June 22, 2011
I forgot my password and my old email account has been closed.
It the law came in do I get charged for videos before that date or after??.
Open
November 29, 2013
I’m not one of his students, but I did foollw his strategy ground up. My traffic actually increased even more after the latest update from Google. I have 90 posts now all indexed. Averaging about 70-100 views a day and making sales almost every day now. I’m in a very tough niche. But the key is that I build quality content and I really work on the design to make it look appealing.
syther
June 23, 2011
@fred. No, YouTube is in bed with most recording industry entities. They do one of two things. Delete/Restrict the content or tag it with a link and ad that allows users to buy that song online. You do lose pretty much all rights to your video and youtube can even put an ad on your video that makes money for the record company in question. So if your video became the next “big thing” and pulled in multi-million views you would gain nothing.
Cladir
November 29, 2013
Many of my clients are still rnanikg very well. Dealing with Google is pretty straightforward. Create good content and separate yourself from the masses. The whole idea of targeting low competition products is usually enough to do that.
Terry Pearson
September 30, 2011
A more sinister reason for such laws is that everyone becomes a criminal. Then the elites can pick and choose when they enforce the law for political harassment purposes.