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New Tenn. Law: Spend a Year In Jail If You Share a Netflix/Rhapsody Account With Friends & Family

Phillip Dampier June 2, 2011 Consumer News, Online Video, Public Policy & Gov't No Comments

Sharing your Netflix account with your spouse or your son at college? Under a new Tennessee law, both you and the other party could spend up to a year in jail for “theft of entertainment services” if Netflix, or any other entertainment service says that is not okay.

Eyebrows were raised in Tennessee this week as Republican Gov. Bill Haslam admitted he signed the new copyright protection bill into law while telling reporters “he wasn’t familiar with the details of the legislation.”

Rep. Gerald McCormick (R-Chattanooga), who worked last summer to completely deregulate AT&T’s phone service in Tennessee spent this spring pushing for adoption of a bill sponsored by Nashville record labels to up-end state copyright law in favor of content producers.

The entertainment industry, having failed to win wholesale support of its copyright protection agenda in Congress has now taken to lobbying individual statehouses for new state copyright laws.  Tennessee is the first among 50 states to extend its long-standing cable-TV theft statute to include content over the Internet.

Under the law, anyone other than the account owner who uses their account name and password, even with permission, is a violator and subject to a criminal misdemeanor charge punishable by up to a year in jail and a fine of $2,500. If the username and password opens access to content collectively worth more than $500, the charge becomes a felony with correspondingly harsher penalites and fines.

Some reporters questioned whether the law could mean sharing your Netflix, iTunes or Rhapsody account with an immediate family member meant you were breaking the law.  The answer is, you might, although bill supporters doubt it would be prosecuted.

“What becomes not legal is if you send your user name and password to all your friends so they can get free subscriptions,” McCormick told the Associated Press.

Currently, most online content providers don’t have a problem with immediate family members sharing accounts.  Netflix allows at least two concurrent video streams of its online content.  Music services often recognize three or more “authorized devices” on which content can be shared and accessed.

But if attitudes change, content providers can file complaints when they realize their service is being accessed by multiple parties at the same time or in multiple places.

"Gerald McCormick will support anything if you staple a big check to your cover letter."

The music industry in Nashville openly admits it strongly advocated for passage of the bill, claiming the music business loses millions from account sharing.  But critics of the new law attack it as overly broad.  One defense lawyer suggested it is so broad, it could be used to prosecute people who share magazines.

Proving a case to hard-working law enforcement officials could also present a problem says Jeff Polock, a Knoxville-based law enforcement and consumer advocate.

“We have enough trouble fighting crime on the streets,” Polock tells Stop the Cap! “While law enforcement officials appreciate the dilemma of copyright theft, many officers are not going to be technically skilled in building a case over who shared what password in the dorms at the University of Tennessee.”

Polock suspects the new law will be wielded against larger wholesale copyright offenses, if only to avoid the threat of negative publicity.

“Can you imagine what the local evening news would do if they arrested some father in Chattanooga for sharing his iTunes account with his daughter at school here in Knoxville?,” Polock wonders.  “It’s not like these people are downloading stolen copies of content they are not paying for — they are running a single iTunes account so the parents can monitor what their kids are buying, watching, or listening to while away from home.”

As for McCormick, Polock has choice words.

“Gerald McCormick will support anything if you staple a big check to your cover letter,” Polock says. “The man is never too far away from corporate interests trying to win favorable legislation in the state legislature.”

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