[KnowItAll]

Great news for all of you with Slingboxes and subscriptions to various sports video sites.

You're soon going to be considered criminals, if the govt has its way.

Unauthorised viewing of copyrighted works on the internet using a process called streaming would become a criminal offence in proposals released in a Legislative Council paper last night.

That would mean watching Premier League soccer matches streamed live on the Web would be against the law because no one is licensed to stream matches to Hong Kong computer users.

Streaming refers to techology that places data - usually multimedia such as sports matches, movies and television series - on the internet, where it is continuously "streamed" and can be viewed at any time.

Unlike downloading, users are generally unable to obtain a complete copy after streaming.

But downloading unauthorised movies, music or even soccer matches using peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing technology will not be criminalised even though copyright owners can sue through civil actions.

There is more on the completely unlinkable SCMP site.

[meiguoren]

So are they just going to get ISP's to hand over IP's that send requests to url's like surfthechannel.com, tudou and the like? It would be very easy to prove someone streamed a certain video on tudou if you get the ISP involved. Even tvuplayer to some extent though tvu is a peertopeer stream...

[Boris]

The article as written is very ambiguous.
You get knicked for watching but not doing !!

[KnowItAll]

Probably proposed by a paper pusher who was lobbied by the likes of PCCW who want to protect sports channel revenues.