Free Justin Bieber! (Campaign against Bill S.987)

An American organization called Fight for the Future launched a 'Free Justin Bieber’ campaign yesterday. With the campaign, Fight for the Future wants to raise attention to Bill S.987. The Bill focuses on the criminalization of illegal music streams. This is apparently not sufficiently covered in the current law. The Bill proposes a maximum prison sentence of five years for illegal streaming.

The Bill qualifies illegal streaming as a crime under certain conditions. One of the conditions is that at least ten people must have seen the streamed song or movie. In addition, the hypothetical value of the song or movie needs to be more than five thousand dollars. How this value is calculated, is unknown.

The campaign is called 'Free Justin Bieber’ because the young teen idol actually became famous by streaming copyrighted works (songs) without the rights holders consent. Bieber made YouTube videos of himself singing various popular R&B songs without the consent of the copyright holders. When Bill S.987 would come into effect, that would be a felony. Dutch singer Esmée Denters also had her brake through in the U.S. after singing on YouTube.

Fight for the Future is a non-profit organization dedicated to counter the influential lobby of the entertainment industry. According to Tiffiniy Cheng, Director of Fight for the Future, the biggest problem is that the Bill has an undefined scope. Therefore, individuals who sing someone else’s song, dance to background music or place a video of their childrens’ musical online, are also felonies according to the Bill.

Supporters of the Bill indicate that it will however not go that far. They claim that the Bill instead focuses on website owners who stream millions of copyrighted songs, movies and TV shows without permission of the copyright owners and hereby generate revenue.

The Free Justin Bieber campaign receives a lot of online media attention. It is striking that many people who react to the news say that they wouldn’t mind if Justin Bieber would go to jail. Apparently not everybody is a fan of Bieber’s music…

Bill S.987 is introduced in March this year. Time will tell whether the Bill is adopted or not.

References: TorrentFreak, BoingBoing

By: Karen Groen