Galaki you are manipulating facts this will not effect youtube users.

The bill, S. 978, would make illegal video streaming for commercial purposes a felony punishable by as much as five years in prison if it involves 10 or more instances of streaming copyrighted works over a 180-day period. The retail value of the video must exceed $2,500, or the licenses to the material must be worth more than $5,000.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-16/illegal-video-streaming-elevated-to-felony-under-senate-measure.html

Also this got less attention when kasz made a proper thread about it.

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=130515&page=1#

Duplicate thread

really, this must be a joke right? lol

What you're quoting doesn't explain much. How do you put a price on the stream? And we all know how the lobbies put out outright false numbers to get what they want.

And by commercial, what does that even mean? Profit in term of money or profit in term of popularity?

My guess is it's one of those things that really won't change anything. They can't possibly prosecute end-users for this sort of thing, this will just put yet more pressure on hosting sites to kill off illegal content, which they've already been trying, but the groups are usually ahead of the game on that.

It's the same kind of cat-and-mouse crap that Sony and Nintendo have tried against the homebrewers, you step up your game, but they step up theirs, and numbers are on their side

Oh well this makes much more sense and is not really bad.

There are sites out there that stream live sports event (NFL Sunday Ticket, UFC) as well as movies. THey make their money through banner ads and video ads just like this webpage. Commercial definatly means for profit of money, not popularity. This should have no effect on youtube. This will effect webpages like channelsurfing.net (already taken down). Basically all of this is allready agaisnt the law as far as I know, they are just raising them to felony criminal charges.

Hooray for not living anywhere close to the US.
What is this retardation? 5 years in Jail? ROFL.

This sounds more like for websites that stream/provide content, not for people viewing streams. Its impossible to track, especially when those sites are out of the country's territory.

the funny thing there, is that if you took like 5 minutes to email the band to ask them if its cool to use their song in a homemade video, most would be cool with it. I know my band would, and we'd be really happy that you actually cared enough to ask us, and might even throw a free tshirt or something back at ya for being a fan =)

I don't mind it, pirates need to be arrested and charged whether they distribute the stolen material over a P2P network or a YouTube style network. Either way stealing is stealing and they should be held accountable. Though I doubt that this law passing will mean police will round up every individual that posts copywritten material.

Chances are it'll lead to warnings and the big offenders will be arrested. I mean right now how many of you have tons of illegally downloaded music? Have you all been charged or arrested? No because the Police don't care about the small time offenders they want to arrest the big boys.

This just gives police another tool to bring filthy rotten pirates to justice!