First thing is first.
Jim, I don't know how much your acting for effect but I think you overdid it a bit this time as you seemed a little bit off your rocker and a little incoherant at times. You might want to sit back and try and re-record this message a bit calmer and elaborate a bit more.... also the whole "Streaming God Of War for Charity" thing was kind of "WTF" because honestly giving away someone elses game for a charity (which might not even be genuine despite what was claimed) would be pushing it.
That said, this bill *IS* really bad, and represents a lot of things that game and media companies have wanted to push for a long time, and it is really an Orwellian nightmare of a bill.
The issue with this is that by definition things like game reviews, let's plays, or even people doing FAQS for sites like Gamefaqs could also be considered violations. High traffic sites like Youtube which couldn't be effectively policed if they wanted to are pretty much doomed, and this is to say nothing of P2P services which do have legitimate uses other than piracy.
Strictly speaking a game company SHOULD have to go through the proper channels and specifically identify and chase down specific offenders as opposed to being able to decide "well Youtube has something we don't like, so let's lock it down". The issue of
course being that it's too time consuming and expensive to pursue things that way. Even verifying and pursueing a single case could take a lot of time and money, so it's easier to just shut down anything they find suspicious.
I'll also be blunt in saying that I think the current issues with Metacritic have a lot to do with this as well, albiet indirectly. Simply put, the game industry is realizing that while it can sway professional reviewers and ensure no product with a decent investment of cash gets lower than say an 8/10 rating in most cases, it can't do this reliably with specific users or independant reviewers who have no financial stake, not even so far as them being able to threaten to pull advertising revenues. Given that some popular reviewers on things like Youtube can pull truely massive numbers of hits, and actually do sway opinions, the gaming industry is doubtlessly also considering that they could shut these sources down. Someone like Whiteythereviewer, or Danae from Checkpoint Basement Level could get Youtube shut down as a whole just by showing footage from a game they are playing to illustrate a point.
I also know that there has been some talk fairly recently about the problem with online FAQS and walkthroughs, because game companies and cluebook publishers increasingly want to charge $20 or more for digital strategy guides, and really there is no point to buying a digital strategy guide when a month or two after the game comes out (tops) someone can just hop on Gamefaqs and find a guide there, or even find a dedicated wiki to the game in some cases. This bill could be used to basically shut down their competition here, and close every cheat/strategy site and fan page/database on the internet which I'm sure some bean counter is drooling about as I write this as they count digital cluebook sales figures in their heads.
This is a lot of stuff I'm talking about here, but the bottom line is that as I understand this, this is going to be a very bad thing. This law exists to basically circumvent the existing system because companies find it inconveinent to play by the rules.
Of course a lot of this also gets into intellectual property laws to begin with, and I think a lot of these problems started when they made them so tight knit for the owner of an IP. Technically according to the definition something like a FAQ should be illegal despite the long-term existance of such things... and that's part of the problem. When we're dealing with properties that are pure information (as opposed to say information used to make an actual product like a patent or copyright) I think there needs to be a lot of limitations put in place because there is more at stake than the information itself, but people's very freedom to communicate when you get down to it. In the case of IPs I think it's a problem when say China takes the formula for a drug like Viagra, makes an actual physical product using it, and then sells it. In this case though your pretty much saying that a picture of a game being used for review purposes, or even just text and descriptions talking about content in the game, could be considered theft. This is more akin to me telling someone that Viagra exists, or my experiences with the drug rather than stealing an actual, physical product. Games DO need to be protected from someone copying the entire thing and giving it away for free (or selling it) but this is far too inclusive to my understanding, and Jim is right that this law could shut down pretty much the entire internet gaming community, or at the very least turn it into a paranoid police state with everyone running a website being terrified to let anything be said for fear of being shut down. Just imagine a situation where a spoiler might not just ruin a bit of a game for someone, but actually be a felony because you've revealed protected information.
