White House Calls for 'Felony' Penalties for Sizable, Illegal File Sharing
The White House thinks “federal criminal law should be modernized to include felony criminal penalties for those who engage in large-scale streaming of illegal, infringing content,” said Alex Niejelow, White House IP enforcement coordinator chief of staff, in a blog…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
post Wednesday. Such laws are “already on the books" for the "reproduction and distribution of infringing content,” he said. Niejelow was responding to two petitions to the White House, asking that penalties not be increased for online media sharing (see petitions here and here). The petitions invoked the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) (HR-3261), which would have imposed much stiffer penalties for such infringement. SOPA was tabled after public outcry. “We should keep in mind that a felony is meant to reflect significant criminal activity,” Niejelow said. “Congress should consider the question of whether changes in the business model of streaming-based infringement also counsel corresponding changes in the way we set the harm thresholds … required to establish a felony penalty for illegal streaming under the criminal copyright statute.” Those thresholds include the number of infringing acts, their monetary value and the “statutory” time frame in which those acts are committed, Niejelow said.