“Big Brother” says streaming more than 10 times is illegal

The so-coined “10 strikes bill” – is this the copyright lobbies last ditch defense ?  US Congress is in the process of approving a bill that will make viewing copyrighted material (like a Youtube video that someone uploaded – or just the background music of a clip!) more than ten times a felony.  A ridiculous proposition, of course. Implying that someone will keep such detailed track of your activities on the web in order to enforce such a rule, sends the shivers down my back.

A key question is if this also goes  for embedding say Youtube videos on your pages. Will this make you or your website host guilty of performing (a copyrighted piece of art)? What about the site that merely linked to and/or embedded the video (linking and embedding are technically effectively the same thing) ?

We been down this alley before. I think US legislators are in deep and muddy water here, infringing our privacy which is barely acceptable to protect national security, but hardly to protect commercial interests.  Unfortunately whatever they tend to come up with tends to affect the whole world – so there is reason to worry elsewhere as well.

Read more:  Tech dirts articleDemand progress

About Jens Zander

Professor Jens Zander is professor in Radio Communication Systems at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. He has been among the few in Swedens Ny Teknik magazine's annual list of influential people in ICT that have been given the epithet “Mobile Guru”. He is one of the leading researchers in mobile communication and is the Scientific director of the industry/academia collaboration center Wireless@KTH. His research group focuses on three main areas – the efficient and scalable use of the radio frequency spectrum, economic aspects of mobile systems and application and energy efficiency in future wireless infrastructures.
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2 Responses to “Big Brother” says streaming more than 10 times is illegal

  1. Bree T says:

    I don’t understand why streaming is so important for this one show. So many other shows are constantly be streamed all the time. Does the Big Brother Corporation not make enough money already from their many shows and live feed costs? Do they really need to greatly impact some innocent person’s life for this? I’m streaming it right now. I guess that’s one strike for me.nAnd are they only going to be monitoring YouTube? Because that is far from the only website offering streamed videos of Big Brother. There is no way this could even be regulated.

  2. Jens Zander says:

    I was not referring to the “Big Brother” show, but rather the (Orwellian) notion of Big Brother = the governmentu00a0 ;-)

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