Karaoke Forums

Bastards..

The RIAA has their hands in the pockets of a Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minn, who introduced a bill to amend Copyright law to prosecute anyone lip syncing on YouTube. Penalty - TEN YEARS IN JAIL. REALLY?! The RIAA, MPAA, NAB, NBC, AFM, AFTRA, Disney and others all bribed … er …. supported the bill. SHAME ON YOU ALL!

These people will do anything to make sure their audience are considered thieves while they proceed to rob them blind.

Tennessee too..

The leaden hand of Big Media and the fact that it has got any number of politicians well and truly bought was once again revealed this week when the state of Tennessee, "The Volunteer State," volunteered its legal infrastructure to do the bidding of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

Yep, the dimwits that are Tennessee's excuse for elected officials displayed their intellectual mettle, or lack thereof, when they passed Senate Bill 1659, which actually reads in part: The bill "as enacted, includes entertainment services in services the theft of which constitutes theft of services; specifies that a person commits theft of services by intentionally obtaining services by forgery or false statement, in addition to deception, fraud, coercion, false pretense or any other means, to avoid payment for the services; specifies that victims may report violations and testify."

What this labyrinthine, circumlocutory language means is that if you, a consumer, should share (that's the "any other means" part), say, your Netflix password with someone else, whether that someone else is related to you or not, that person could be prosecuted.

The penalty for infringement? "Stealing $500 or less of entertainment would be a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail and a fine of $2,500. Theft with a higher price tag would be a felony, with heavier penalties."

While it is true that the intent of the bill was to address the blatant illegal sharing of entertainment content by the likes of those legions of scofflaws called "pirates" or "students," the potentially ridiculously wide net it casts is ripe for abuse by Big Media.

For example, just consider the RIAA's ethically dubious program that identified (often erroneously) people using P2P downloading to acquire music and then extorted money from them by threatening prosecution. By having laws that make the sharing of passwords illegal, the RIAA's "net" to capture miscreants effectively becomes much bigger. There's no doubt that the RIAA's now-shelved P2P prosecution program was both ineffective and costly, but the opportunity to start new "enforcement" programs would be hard for it to resist. Not only would it keep the organization's "mission" in the press, it would promote the appearance of the RIAA taking positive action against piracy.

You might have thought the Tennessee legislators involved would have had at least a bit of a clue and picked up on the messiness of the definition of the "crime," but, alas, that was not the case.

The sheer brainless kowtowing to the demands of Big Media is easily detected in the comments of Gov. Bill Haslam who reportedly said "he wasn't familiar with the details of the legislation, but given the recording industry presence, he favors 'anything we can do to cut back' on music piracy."

Yep, Haslam was definitely ignorantly in favor of the legislation and, of course, signed it into law which takes effect July 1 this year.

Haslam's blind support of this bill is pretty much in line with his pro-business position on various issues, such as discrimination policies (though, to give him a little credit, he has been a supporter of other bills that were rational).

What bothers me about this bill is that it is quite obviously part of a bigger plan by the RIAA and its cohorts. Mitch Glazier, executive vice president of public policy for the RIAA, was quoted as saying, "The bill is a necessary protective measure as digital technology evolves." Watch the misbegotten spawn of this bill infect what passes for the thinking processes of other pols in other states.

What I don't get is that services like Netflix limit the number of devices their content can be played on (six is Netflix's limit), and limiting simultaneous logins and capping daily playback quotas are simple and effective ways of limiting abuse.

Perhaps the media companies are just too lazy to employ intelligent management and monitoring systems and would rather complicate the law so they can slope their shoulders. And the law, at least in Tennessee, is apparently equally lazy.

JD,

I don't see it the same way you do on this, I see the media companies trying to close the flood gates (perhaps a little late) against a rising flood of piracy. They are doing whatever they can when and wherever they can to slow it down. That is not always a bad thing, there are way too many people just taking (without paying for the content) in music, movies, karaoke, etc. I know I have been guilty of it as well to some extent, but have tried to eliminate anything from my system that has not been paid for through legit channels.

I'm not for piracy.. but the way the bill is written, lip syncing on YouTube is a felony?

What's next, nude xrays at the airport?

Don't they already have that?

Is it for lip syncing or for actually posting the protected song on Youtube?

I would think mouthing the words to a song wouldn't be a problem it is when you actually post the original song along with it that creates a problem.

wow, lip syncing on youtube a felony?
wonder what kind of damage that caused who?
and i thought this "lets sue everybody for anything" had already gotten to the stupid point in society....guess i was mistaken.

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Paradigm Karaoke, The New Standard.......Shift Happens

Looks like it's been abandoned . . .

From GovTrack:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s112-978

"This bill was considered in committee which has recommended it be considered by the Senate as a whole. Although it has been placed on a calendar of business, the order in which legislation is considered and voted on is determined by the majority party leadership. Keep in mind that sometimes the text of one bill is incorporated into another bill, and in those cases the original bill, as it would appear here, would seem to be abandoned. [Last Updated: Jun 17, 2011 6:38AM]"

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Dave's not here.

I don't know if it happened everywhere, but a couple of years ago these clowns actually went after cover bands ( meaning bar bands that specialize in a particular artist's or group's music).

They evenually lost out, but local cover bands were out of bar work for a few months. Just dumb.

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"No Contests, No Divas, Just A Good Time!"

" Disc based and loving it..."

Why would they go after cover bands, which by the way are covered under ASCAP and BMI licensing for the venues. The only ones they would be "going after" would be those either working in venues who had not paid their licensing, or bands who were doing cover songs and selling them on CD (which many do) without licensing the songs.

Happy day! We agree, and apparently someone else did too.The answer is- there is no reason that they should have- but did anyway. My guess would be to try and set a precedent to get more fees? Either way, it didn't work. I don't think the whole smoke storm lasted but about 3 months.

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"No Contests, No Divas, Just A Good Time!"

" Disc based and loving it..."