Pallante: Large-Scale Illegal Internet Streaming Should Be Felony
Pallante: Large-Scale Illegal Internet Streaming Should Be Felony
At a Hill hearing Wednesday, register of copyrights Maria Pallante stood up for content creators and pushed for Congress to close a loophole in the law and makes illegal streaming of content over the Internet a felony rather than a misdemeanor.
Pallante was the sole witness at a hearing in the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet on her recommendations for revisiting copyright law to square it with the digital age and new ways to distribute content.
She made it clear that she was talking about tools to go after large piracy groups and enterprises, not the student downloading music in their dorm room, and in the criminal context, "egregious, criminal conduct," she said, at the "worst, purposeful levels."
But she suggested those tools should include criminal penalties for illegal streams, just as there are for distribution of copies of physical works.
"Law enforcement can go over reproduction and distribution, and they can go after that in a meaningful way because those are felonies. But the public performance right, which is implicated by streaming -- performing the work but not necessarily downloading it or streaming a copy, whether it's a football game or music -- is a misdemeanor."
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/492454-Pallante_Large_Scale_Illegal_Internet_Streaming_Should_Be_Felony.php
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