In an article on Shoryuken.com by David “UltraDavid” Graham entitled “Trolling the Stream,” David details what exactly it would mean for gamers if bill S.978 passes. According to David, you could be jailed for streaming or uploading a video to Youtube, due to copyright infringement.
Below is an excerpt of the article:
According to the bill as it’s currently written, if you engage in “public performances by electronic means” 10 or more times over a 180 day period, and if either the total economic value of those performances exceeds $2500 or the cost of getting the copyright holder’s permission to perform exceeds $5000, then you can potentially get fined and put in jail for 5 years. Jail. FIVE YEARS.
Just to hit you over the head with this, that means that if you stream a game like Street Fighter 4 or Starcraft 2 (or a movie or a song etc) only 10 or more times in a full half year, and if you make a bit of money doing it, you either need to have a license from Capcom or Blizzard etc or you risk going to jail.
Amusingly slash horrifyingly enough, it gets worse. The wording of this bill is so vague that “performance” could count for a crap-ton of what we who understand the internet would consider very different things. The offense is defined super broadly: “public performance by electronic means.” That includes live streaming of copyrighted audiovisual works, of course, but it almost certainly also includes recorded YouTube videos of copyrighted audiovisual works, whether they be match vids, game footage/live shot hybrids, movies, TV shows, music, and so on. Going off other legal precedent, it might even cover embedding an infringing YouTube vid and videos of kids lip syncing to music.
In essence, a bill intended to limit the unauthorized live streaming of films and TV could result in potential jail time for a lot of people doing very different things. While the bill’s sponsors might not have known how wide-ranging its effect could be at first, they’ve been confronted with that since the text was released and they show no signs of pulling it back.
Read the full article by clicking here.