Singing Copyrighted Material on YouTube Could Put You in Jail for 5 Years

No joke.  S.978 is a pending bill in Congress right now that would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted material for the purpose of "commercial advantage or personal financial gain", a felony and carry a fine or up to 5 years in prison. Meaning, about 98% of the material on YouTube would potentially get the owner of the video jail time or a hefty fine. This also means that if this law had been in effect in the past, the very famous Justin Bieber would be serving jail right about now since he started out on YouTube singing songs that were copyrighted. It also mean that if you were to post a video of yourself talking and there was a song in the background, you could get a fine or jail time. Or, to make things sound even more drastic, if you were to post a video of you singing "Happy Birthday" to say, your grandma, the next time you sing it to her would be from prison since "happy Birthday" is copyrighted material.

I agree with to a certain point that people shouldn't post themselves singing someone else's material for a monetary gain, but come on, most of the videos are just for fun! I think its great that the Internet lets people express themselves granted, some of it is pretty bad, but for every bad(hilarious) video there is 5 amazing ones.  Like this video of a kid showing off his moves. BAM! Jail or a fine. Or this one of the littles girls rapping Nicki Minaj. They would be singing the jail house rock if this bill passes. Even the ever popular "Flash Mobs" could be banned since most of them uses copyrighted material in the routines.

I guess what I am getting at is, there should be some monitoring but when has it gone too far? If this passes I feel the Internet is going to become a very boring place to waste time. Facebook games can only hold your attention for so long.

More info HERE

And Here is the petition against it freebieber.org