There's an interesting article on
TechDirt about a possible legislation amendment to the US Copyright Act that would make is a *criminal* offence to enable "public performance" of Copyrighted material without proper license, potentially turning the 'innocent' embedding of family videos, game walkthroughs, tutorial vids a nightmare of 'property' rights.
You couldn't fob this off onto YouTube et-al either because they generally already have various disclaimers in place - to which you agreed when you uploaded - that provides them with a reasonable degree of 'Safe Harbour'. So although this would seem relatively harmless to some, or impinging on First Amendment Rights to others, it sets the broader precedent turning much of what are (currently) 'civil' infringements into 'criminal' ones that have harder fines and sentencing attributed to them (in some cases greater punishments than are associated with 'harder' crimes like assault, DUI and so on).
Obviously this is notwithstanding the matter of policing all of this, something that's only really practical for deep pockets, so yet again one could argue the case that it's another attempt by the media industry (campaign contributors) to strong-arm or shoehorn the 'new' virtual world into conforming/compliance with an old rather archaic distribution/ownership models that only protects those that can afford it.
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