House Votes to Make Video Cameras in Movie Theaters a Federal Crime
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Piracy Deterrence and Education Act would aid prosecution of Internet users who illegally distribute copyrighted works.
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InfoWorld - The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday.
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Calling video voyeurism the new frontier of stalking, the House on Tuesday approved legislation to make it a crime to secretly photograph or videotape people, often for lascivious purposes.
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Using video cameras to record cinema films would become a state-wide crime under a proposed US law.
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The U.S. Congress has wrapped up its work for the year by passing a bill that would make it illegal to obtain a person's phone records without permission.
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The House Thursday passed a bill that would criminalize the use of spyware to commit fraud or other crimes, adding an additional two to five years to federal sentences.
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The House voted Wednesday to fix flaws in the national gun background check system that allowed the Virginia Tech shooter to buy guns despite his mental health problems.
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It's acceptable for consumers to use software that edits out nudity or bad language from a DVD movie -- but they had better leave the commercials and promotional announcements in, according to legislation adopted by the House of Representatives this week.
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The U.S. House of Representatives on  Wednesday passed legislation boosting fines on broadcasters and  entertainers who violate on-air decency rules to as much as  $500,000 per incident.
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The U.S. Senate has voted to outlaw  several favorite techniques of people who illegally copy and  distribute movies, but has dropped other measures that could  have led to jail time for Internet song-swappers.
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The US House of Representatives passes tough legislation against immigration.
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Congress will have a narrow opportunity when it returns to pass legislation making it a crime to use video cameras to record films in movie theaters, but the bill could be floored by a fight over a federal boxing commission.
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(InfoWorld) - The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday. The council chose an unfortunate anniversary to publish its decision approving the law, which came exactly 16 years after Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King were filmed by amateur videographer George Holliday in the night of March 3, 1991. The officers' acquittal at the end on April 29, 1992 sparked riots in Los Angeles. If Holliday were to film a similar scene of violence in France today, he could end up in prison as a result of the new law, said Pascal Cohet, a spokesman for French online civil liberties group Odebi. And anyone publishing such images could face up to five years in prison and a fine of â¬75,000 ($98,537), potentially a harsher sentence than that for committing the violent act. Senators and members of the National Assembly had asked the council to rule on the constitutionality of six articles of the Law relating to the prevention of delinquency. The articles dealt with information sharing by social workers, and reduced sentences for minors. The council recommended one minor change, to reconcile conflicting amendments voted in parliament. The law, proposed by Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy, is intended to clamp down on a wide range of public order offenses. During parliamentary debate of the law, government representatives said the offense of filming or distributing films of acts of violence targets the practice of "happy slapping," in which a violent attack is filmed by an accomplice, typically with a camera phone, for the amusement of the attacker's friends. The broad drafting of the law so as to criminalize the activities of citizen journalists unrelated to the perpetrators of violent acts is no accident, but rather a deliberate decision by the authorities, said Cohet. He is concerned that the law, and others still being debated, will lead to the creation of a parallel judicial system controlling the publication of information on the Internet. The government has also proposed a certification system for Web sites, blog hosters, mobile-phone operators and Internet service providers, identifying them as government-approved sources of information if they adhere to certain rules. The journalists' organization Reporters Without Borders, which campaigns for a free press, has warned that such a system could lead to excessive self censorship as organizations worried about losing their certification suppress certain stories.
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The US House of Representatives yesterday passed a bill that will make it illegal to use peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa to share copyrighted works over the internet.
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The C-SPAN cable network wants to use its own cameras in the U.S. House of Representatives instead of receiving the usual official live feed.
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The Motion Picture Association of America is launching civil and criminal actions worldwide against movie pirates in a bid to curb illegal film downloading.
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The Senate passed legislation that would make it a federal crime to obtain a personÂs telephone records without permission.