Thanks for this interesting link.
It's proposed, so it's not "law" as yet.
Lobby groups can throw whatever mud they want at the wall, and see what sticks, I guess.
But, I guess that I'm stating the obvious.
There's are many problems with laws such as this.
Although it is certainly advantageous for some corporations to enjoy laws such as this (because it's a great deterrent), it's not good for society as it attempts to raise the alleged theft of content (some worth no more than 99 cents) to a level of a felony. You won't see this happen. Some might say, "thousands of people *probably* downloaded this from you", but now you'd have to prove it.
If the transfer of streaming content is made a felony, this means that the police and the criminal justice system would have to police it directly, collect evidence and make actual arrests. Now we need prosecutors to finish the job. Those arrested would have to be held in a facility at least temporarily. We don't have debtor's prisons; we're not going to see "downloader's prisons". It would all cost many hundreds of billions of dollars.
If such acts are raised to the "felony" level, the level of the "burden of proof" needed (whether copyright, proof of action or even intent) to make a "conviction" would be much, much higher. There'd be actually be less people held accountable for downloading/sharing.
An individual could be charged or convicted of a felony. But that does not necessarily translate into a single cent of direct profit for the copyright holder.
It would be difficult to apply this scheme to images on the Internet. I'm not buying an argument that 1/3 of all americans are actually felons.
For example, if you used a picture from anything, whether a magazine, the web, a tv show, mailed a copyrighted comic strip your buddy then you're a felon by this yardstick.
Sorry, it'll never happen.
S.G.
Topic: Lets fightback (Read 14610 times)