[throwawaykf02]

I haven't even read TFA but I can bet you this: the felons would be those uploading the streams, not those downloading.

How do I know this? Because copyright law targets, and always has targeted, those distributing copyrighted material without license rather than those consuming it. One of the reasons is, as a comment elsewhere makes evident [1], it is not the responsibility of the consumer to know whether goods being purchased have been legally procured.

Where this gets tricky is in Bittorrent swarms, unless you leech, each peer uploads as well as downloads content, making each user a party to the "distribution" of content. This is what enabled those famous P2P lawsuits which resulted in those fines.

People like to think of the RIAA and MPAA as stupid dinosaurs, but as comments here make it clear, they've been undeniably successful in getting people to associate "downloading" with "illegal activity".

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6249355

[snsr]

> the felons would be those uploading the streams, not those downloading

I don't think that's completely accurate. This effort would expose sites and services to secondary liability for the actions of their users.