Some techniques favored by peer-to-peer online traders have survived while others that might have made criminals of millions of Netizens using P2P networks have been dropped from a measure the U.S. Senate passed over the weekend.
The House already passed most of this bill but they'll get a fresh crack at it next month to take care of what are considered minor differences, according to several reports.
Left in the measure was jail for those secretly taping movies in theaters to get them online before they see their full releases. Offenders would face up to three years in prison under the Senate-passed measure. Hackers and industry insiders who put movies, music, or other copyright works online before their official releases face stiff consequences as well.
"This bill strengthens the intellectual-property laws that are vital to the ongoing growth of our economy," outgoing Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said after the Senate vote.
One provision that was dropped from the Senate bill would have ordered the Justice Department to chase file swappers through civil lawsuits and also sent song swappers to prison for up to three years if they swapped over a thousand copyrighted files online. That measure bonded an unusual hybrid of consumer groups, electronics makers, and the American Conservative Union against it.
Another measure taken out of the Senate bill was almost as controversial: a potential ban on editing out commercials from television broadcast recordings. But the bill retained an equally controversial measure protecting services like ClearPlay, which remove violent or sexual content from films. The movie industry protested that those services alter copyrighted work without permission.
The Senate action came as the Recording Industry Association of America filed 761 new lawsuits for peer-to-peer related copyright violations, suits involving students at twelve universities and bringing the total number of RIAA litigation defendants to almost seven thousand since September 2003. And, it followed the Motion Picture Association of America launching its own round of P2P-related suits last week.
