Commercial Felony Streaming Act Passes Senate Judiciary Committee: Website Owners May Face Harsher Punishments

Lawmakers are taking a stand against websites in the business of streaming movies illegally.

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved a measure that aims to punish site owners for streaming ill-gotten movies, TV shows and other intellectual property. According to the Hollywood Reporter the bill would make streaming felonious "in most cases."

Introduced in May by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas), the Commercial Felony Streaming Act (S. 978) targets site owners who flout copyright law and does not include the sites' visitors, who might stream movies on their personal computers.

"This isn't about individuals or families streaming movies at home," Klobuchar said in an email to Bloomberg after Thursday's vote. "It's about criminals streaming thousands of dollars worth of stolen digital content and profiting from it."

The bill would reconcile a disparity that exists in current law between illegal streaming and peer-to-peer downloading, the latter of which is already considered a felony.

The Hollywood Reporter outlines the consequences violators could face if this new bill becomes law: "The penalty [for streaming] is increased to up to five years in prison when it involves 10 or more instances of streaming over a 180-day period. The retail value of the streamed video must exceed $2,500, or the licenses to the material must be worth more than $5,000."

This legistaltion is backed by the Obama Administration, as well as by many organizations within the entertainment industry. The AFM, AFTRA, DGA, IATSE, IBT and SAG released a joint statement on Thursday commending the measure:

We congratulate Senator Klobuchar, Senator Cornyn and Senator Coons, who introduced the Commercial Felony Streaming Act, for recognizing that digital content theft via streaming is just as illegal as digital content theft via downloading, and for leading the charge to apply the same criminal penalties to illegal streaming that already apply to illegal downloading. [...] Make no mistake: the illegal streaming of content for commercial or financial gain is a crime, and the Commercial Felony Streaming Act places the appropriate criminal label on the activity. This legislation is an important step forward in our efforts to stem the rising tide of Internet theft that threatens our members' very livelihoods.

Now that the bill has passed committee, it will appear for a vote before the full Senate. If it passes, it will move on to the House.

Comments

[Isenki]

05:48 PM on 07/04/2011

This is completely preposterous. This bill only exists because these Senators are all in the pockets of business interests.

[Tony Blass]

10:22 PM on 07/01/2011

This would include posting videos of your friends singing Karaoke. Now the Senate is taking up this so -called "Ten Strikes" bill to make it a felony to stream copyrighted content -- like music in the background of Youtube videos -- more than ten times. The United States already has the highest incarceration rate in the world with 743 per 100,000 of national population. By comparison, Russia has 577 per 100,000 and China just 120 per 100,000. While Americans only represent about 5 percent of the world's population, one-quarter of the entire world's inmates are incarcerated in the United States. Welcome to the land of the free!

[Crystal Stephens]

11:06 AM on 06/20/2011

Sure..let's fill prisons with those violent people who stream movies. This is a waste of time and completely pointless. Cable companies have ripped all of us off for years with no consequences but let the average person stream a movie and you want to make it a felony. How about you concentrate on going after real criminals?

[KittyisaDog]

05:01 AM on 08/11/2011

Yea... I agree with you completely!!! The REAL criminals are people LIKE YOU! People who scam other poor people with your pitiful stories about your autistic son( whose NOT autistic) or how the cops are going to shoot your dog, when really the police in Henry county Tenn should REMOVE every animal you have because of the way you ABUSE them. And you are no stranger to Jail...are you Crystal? You who have been arrested 3 times in as many months for STEALING power from the power company there, FELONIES!!...all the while begging on the internet for money for Lawyers and food and gas. The best scam was the one about your Van that a tree fell on. Why she's even tried to scam Kieth Oberman... Google it!.
Do a Google seach on this "Crystal Stephens" or Kittydog90...... you will be AMAZED at what a cruel scam artist this woman is! She is a pathetic excuse for a human. She has even stolen money from the elderly on the pretence of a "LOAN" to help her feed her poor family. She has Pay Pal accounts set up all across the web!
This Pathetic heartless woman needs to be in JAIL! She rips off the Cable companies.... SHE rips off the power companies!!! The town of Paris Tn had to go as far as to REMOVE her Electric Meter at her house, cause they couldnt stop her THIEVING.
PATHETIC piece of Doo Doo.

[spytheweb]

02:18 AM on 06/20/2011

Piratebay is still up and wasn't the trial a few years ago? If the US causes enough trouble the hackers will take down big studio web sites and any other legal movie streaming sites. From the way things look even the US government can't protect themselves from being hacked.

[PhillyKing]

11:46 AM on 06/20/2011

Thepiratebay is not based in the US, that's why they're still up.

[edenooch]

03:43 PM on 06/19/2011

useless. most of those types of sites are now private or hosted in another country. they will just pop back up undera new name.......... Solve some real problems senator...

[William Brock]

01:07 PM on 06/19/2011

A Felony? Please....give me a break.....If it is on the Internet, it is open to ALL. Keep your hands off any regulation, taxation, censorship or laws concerning the World Wide Web.......................it is not yours to control.

[Atari]

06:29 PM on 06/19/2011

So according to your beliefs, its acceptable to have child pornography sites on the internet, right?

[Th3 5p3ctr3]

05:37 AM on 06/20/2011

False equivalency.

Movie = no one was harmed against their will in the production. = Movie is not the product of someone's pain.

Child pornography = at least one child was harmed against their will in the production = CP is the product of someone's pain.

In this case it is not a matter of ownership. It is a matter of the nature of the material. Same for snuff films, animal torture and IMHO those self-cutter films becoming popular on certain popular video sites (but that's a grey area since they are usually doing it to themselves.)

[General Public]

10:14 AM on 06/19/2011

Well this is a stupid bill. It already is illegal to share copyrighted stuff like movies online, but making it into a felony? That is ridiculous. The punishment should fit the crime. Such a stiff punishment for such a minor offense amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. What we really should do is just acknowledge that information is by its very nature free, and stop trying to enforce copyrights so strictly in the first place. No amount of laws can change the fact that bits and bytes of data can be copied an unlimited number of times. That is simply a fact of how computers and networks operate, a fact that laws have to catch up with in common sense ways, by legalizing the types of violations of copyright law that are virtually impossible to stop. There is no point in having unenforceable laws that give strict penalties towards actions that are commonplace and done by many people. I am against the outdated, pre-digital-age notion of "intellectual property" entirely. All information should be free, and copyrights should not exist. Freedom of information is freedom of speech.

[Trave M Harmon]

08:42 AM on 06/19/2011

There are some MAJOR MAJOR things wrong with this.
1. What if they don't profit from the movies? (most sites do not even make money)
2. What if they are OUTSIDE of the jurisdiction of the US, (which most pirate sites are)
3. What if they just link to other sites like a search engine. (the pirate bay)
4. What if they are authorized by their local governnents but contradict US law? (spain for one)

This is will do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to even road bump online piracy of movies. NOTHING.

[Seekeroffalsehood]

11:51 AM on 06/19/2011

ICE will kill the ip address. Google and other search engine will not be allowed to list websites outside the USA that are deemed illegal. In other words, Our government will censor the internet and there will be no recourse for anyone to take.

[Chilly8]

08:47 AM on 06/21/2011

Then people will use offshore VPN and proxy services to circumvent that.

[Seekeroffalsehood]

07:14 AM on 06/19/2011

All music, movies etc... should fall into public domain after a year or two.

[Mike Vids]

05:50 AM on 06/19/2011

If they want to save American intellectual property, they should forget about the felony and start issuing 25 to 50 dollar infraction tickets for heavy illegal downloading. The political fallout from such a move could be minimized by earmarking the money for reducing student tuition and for preserving the jobs of teachers, police officers, firemen, and other emergency workers. Right now they are trying to make up the shortfall by overtaxing the physical world...parking meters, traffic tickets, cell phone tickets, gasoline taxes... which drives everyone indoors and to their computers, instead of outside where they might spend a little money. Tax HEAVY (not light) downloaders and streamers and you will see an immediate bump to the economy.

[conservicide]

04:39 AM on 06/19/2011

For better or worse, hands off the internet you cowards.

[Alex Gartzia]

03:57 AM on 06/19/2011

"It's about criminals streaming thousands of dollars worth of stolen digital content and profiting from it."
_____________________

If there is not profit there is no harm? This article is not clear if free sharing is penalized and/or they are shared in the absence of adverts. If it is, it could be a constitutional issue.

[SapphireBlaze9]

02:14 AM on 06/19/2011

Hopefully Senators Klobuchar, Cornyn and Coons don't get re-elected. This law would still be just a deterrent, though. Hopefully it'll leave enough loopholes for most site owners who get caught to try to slip through. Now site owners will have to be as smart as the people who host torrents.

[AlanBannacheck]

01:23 AM on 06/19/2011

The internet is a global entity. Therefore prosecuting servers outside the United States would be quite the Drogheda. I only watch media online because of the lack of commercials (brainwashing) that has been part of the downfall of the U.S.

[conservicide]

04:41 AM on 06/19/2011

Don't you know, they want to move to a one world corporate controlled government? This means that they will one day propose to eliminate borders.

[AlanBannacheck]

04:14 PM on 06/19/2011

impossible, there are too many divisions between nations, Just look at the European Union.

[Chilly8]

08:54 AM on 06/21/2011

I understand the no commercials part. I am a figure skating fan, and I watch skating on one Russian government owned channel, that someone in Europe streams, for an annual fee of about 150 USD, and am not pelted with commercials every 5 minutes or so. I also watch the Olympics on it, the the viewing experience is much more enjoyable when not interrupted by commercials every 5 minutes or so.

[firelord5000]

01:15 AM on 06/19/2011

Issue is simply that cable companies need to get on the streaming bandwagon, as well as give consumers opportunities to pick and choose channels. I probably don't watch half the channels in my package, example being say Lifetime which plenty of people do watch.

[Trave M Harmon]

08:43 AM on 06/19/2011

Sir, I absolutely, totally agree.

You are a scholar, a genius and a man ahead of his time.

[cenourinha]

08:56 PM on 06/19/2011

what?! customer choice you say? heresy.
/sarcasm

I think it was...let me think...last march that I turned on my TV because I watch the 2 shows I follow on the internet.