Covid19 relief bill has comes with criminalizing illegal streaming. This 5000 page relief bill has a provision to make the monetized illegal streaming a felony and carry 10 years of prison.
Casual users may not have to worry much: The “Protecting Lawful Streaming Act,” which was introduced earlier this month by the Republican Senator Thom Tillis from North Carolina says, it doesn’t target casual internet users. The law specifies that it doesn’t apply to people who use illegal streaming services or “individuals who access pirated streams or unwittingly stream unauthorized copies of copyrighted works.”
It’s rather focused on “commercial, for-profit streaming piracy services” thats get monetized from illegally streaming copyrighted material. According to some reports, that this practice costs $30 billion yearly to the US economy.
Department of Justice charged couple of coders from Las Vegas last years for illegal pirating thousands of hours of television shows from Netflix and Hulu and streaming them on websites called iStreamItAll and Jetflicks. One of them admitted to making $1 million+ out of this.
Although netizens they don’t seem to care about this, but concerned about different forms and shapes this bill may take in the future. Progressive lawmakers AOC criticized the bill in her tweet: