That's a bit over dramatic. Just because the RIAA sponsored or endorsed a bill doesn't mean its necessarily a bad thing.
Can you provide a reason why it's unreasonable for a company to want each person (or even household) who uses their service to have a separate subscription?
That being said, I haven't read the bill, and only know what the article says about it.
Using criminal law to deal with it seems like a fairly over-the-top, dramatic step to take. It's not necessarily unreasonable for a company to want each person to have a separate subscription, and they can even mandate it in their terms of service, and take action to terminate the accounts of people violating it. But criminal prosecutions for sharing accounts?
> Using criminal law to deal with it seems like a fairly over-the-top, dramatic step to take.
Indeed. A company is perfectly entitled to want each member of a family to buy their services, what they are not (morally) entitled to is to use coercion (in the form of laws backed by threats of violence) to get people to do so.
A company is morally entitled only to that revenue that people would willingly give it in the absence of force or fraud.
The article does say that it is mostly to combat people harvesting and selling large number of accounts/passwords which seems reasonable to me. It is scary that they could go after people sharing with a friend with up to a year in jail though.
> The article does say that it is mostly to combat people
> harvesting and selling large number of accounts/passwords
> which seems reasonable to me.
It seems reasonable that there be a law against that?
Reasonable: Netflix TOS allows them to terminate your account if you're found in violation.
Unreasonable: TN law allows criminal charges to be brought against you, potentially incurring fines and jail time and almost definitely incurring legal fees.
We really need help from the Republicans here. They passed laws so that any time someone wants to do something useful with taxpayer money (build infrastructure, provide government services), the first step becomes a 10-year-long "alternatives analysis" stage. We need the same thing for new laws. As an example, before this law can take effect, we need to decide exactly how much it will cost to investigate, prosecute, and imprison violators. And, we need to decide where that money is going to become from? Should we legalize child rape to free up those investigators to go after Netflix ToS violations? If yes, then make it a law. If no, then let Netflix worry about its own profits.
Unfortunately, there is nothing preventing the law from being applied in your 'scary' scenario.
Additionally, if I share my password with my wife, and her sister 'borrows' it from my wife, and she gives it to three friends, and they each give it to three friends, who is responsible under this law? How do you prove it?
Also, it is just really poor business to solve a problem using legislation which could easily be solved using software.
This law may even be in conflict with the licensing agreements between Netflix and the studios. If Netflix and a studio had worked out an arrangement where up to 4 simultaneous users can stream from a single account, who is the Tennessee legislature to declare otherwise.
While this doesn't necessarily make the bill unreasonable, I'd say there are much better market approaches.
For example, Netflix limits the number of devices you can connect, logs what you watched, and uses your watching habits for recommendations. So, if I were to share my account with others, they'd see everything I watched and anything they watch would alter my recommendations. For those reasons alone, I keep my Netflix account to myself.
I'm guessing sometime around when everyone is legally required to have a camera and microphone attached to their head which note everything they see and hear and automatically charge them for any content that they view.
Of course, you would still have to buy movie tickets, DVDs, music, and so forth, despite then being charged every time you view them.
