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Senators Want To Put People In Jail For Embedding YouTube Videos

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Wunderwaffe Posted: Fri, Jun 3 2011 4:57 PM

I'm a bit confused by the reason behind this proposed piece of legisation. A part of me says that this law will do nothing to prevent, stop or have others think twice about capturing, sharing or uploading streamed videos.  The other says that the markets can do a much better job by coding into their website a feature to make it hard to right-click, use screen recording software.

I thought I would ask you guys to see what you had to sav about this issue since I'm a little confused as to why we need another law dealing with private property rights when our legal system is modeled on British Common Law, which is pretty private property rights oriented.

Okay, this is just getting ridiculous. A few weeks back, we noted that Senators Amy Klobuchar, John Cornyn and Christopher Coons had proposed a new bill that was designed to make "streaming" infringing material a felony. At the time, the actual text of the bill wasn't available, but we assumed, naturally, that it would just extend "public performance" rights to section 506a of the Copyright Act.

Supporters of this bill claim that all it's really doing is harmonizing US copyright law's civil and criminal sections. After all, the rights afforded under copyright law in civil cases cover a list of rights: reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works or perform the work. The rules for criminal infringement only cover reproducing and distributing -- but not performing. So, supporters claim, all this does is "harmonize" copyright law and bring the criminal side into line with the civil side by adding "performance rights" to the list of things.

Con't.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110601/01515014500/senators-want-to-put-people-jail-embedding-youtube-videos.shtml

This is the response I get from Senator Cornyn via his FB page when I told him this law would easily be countered by users of the internet using IP masking/blocking programs.

"Chris, I believe in private property rights. Do you?"

 

 

 

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Wunderwaffe:
I'm a bit confused by the reason behind this proposed piece of legisation. A part of me says that this law will do nothing to prevent, stop or have others think twice about capturing, sharing or uploading streamed videos.  The other says that the markets can do a much better job by coding into their website a feature to make it hard to right-click, use screen recording software.

Your confusion comes from the fact that you're operating under the assumption that ideas and patterns are ownable property.

See here.

 

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Thanks for the resources, guys. I'm in the process of reading the Mises Wiki and the many Youtube videos discussing IP. I admit it's a little hard for me to unlearn what I have been led to believe should be protected by the government.

Could I get your views on the article?

 

 

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James replied on Thu, Jun 9 2011 11:35 AM

This legislation would be a very powerful tool to silence dissent.  By creating these crimes, the state authorities can sieze computers suspected of being used to to 'infringe copyright', i.e. any computer they want.

Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro
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Embed? Why does youtube etc provide the code?

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