[meanguy]

That was actually one of the key points of SOPA -- it extended DMCA-style service provider protection to payment providers and ad networks. As for the "streaming" provision, that was (inartfully) meant to penalize the day 0 crowd, especially for unreleased media. It was not intended to penalize people downloading, watching, or what people who read this site consider "streaming."

The language could and should have been cleaned up then; it all got lost amidst the SOPA screaming. Penalties for "streaming" are covered by the DMCA inside the US. It's how YouTube and UStream can exist. And I think we've seen precisely how many felonies and how much jail time resulted from cover songs and Justin Bieber lip dubs since that law passed 15 years ago.

But right now someone outside the USA can take another party's shady (or well-intentioned stream) of a pay per view, wrap ads from an ad network around it, and accept PayPal in order to see the "unrestricted stream" (scam). And there's no legal framework to deal with it.

That's obvious scammy theft regardless of where you stand on copyright. And all the "good guys" (ad networks, payment providers) remain liable whether they respond to takedown requests or not. SOPA let people take down the ads and PayPal links if they couldn't get the site down. It gave PayPal and Google the same kind of process and liability protection for payments and ads that YouTube already enjoys for video.

This needs to get fixed and techdirt, boingboing and others need to hire someone with minimal legal expertise (optimally Congressional litigation support experience) if they're going to keep hammering this for pageviews and anti-copyright cred.