Waterfall Staff

I woke up to the news that CASE had passed, and SISEA might be next, so let's talk about them and how they'll affect social media, artists, streamers, etc. This is mostly copy pasted from my Twitter thread on it, so sorry if the flow is a little off.

SISEA has been talked about a lot, so I'll start on CASE. It was passed as part of the funding bill in the US, because America is a functional democracy where you can apparently tack unrelated stuff onto important bills.

It introduces some pretty shitty copyright reform. Ironically, this is a neutered version, so at least you won't go to prison. That means that if you're a US citizen, you can have some fun stuff to look forward to now!

This means if you download or share copyrighted stuff, you can get turbofucked to the gentle rhythm of a $30,000 fine. Legally, they're bound to NOT consider intent, and if the claim is for less than $5k in damages, they don't even need to send you a letter first.
It can be applied retroactively. This means if you have streaming aspirations, do fanart (hi Nintendo!) - especially adult fanart that companies might not like - or stream yourself drawing, you're at risk from this new law.

This also affects memes, especially since a lot of them are based on stock images now. The Distracted Boyfriend meme? Hope you have a licence to use that stock image.
But hey, at least you get $600. SISEA is another bill, but I'm not too qualified to go into whether it's good, especially since the chamber is split on it depending who you talk to in the industry it effects.

It mostly means that it becomes almost impossible for any US based site to host NSFW. At least, without spending a ton of money. This affects Patreon, Twitter, Tumblr, Pillowfort, etc etc.

Any US based social media site is likely to just say "it's not worth it" because the extra budget that needs allocating to deal with it.

Something I've seen is "well those sites will just have to move out of the US" - that's not feasible, for many reasons. Traditional business models for social media mean the sites are profitable selling ads and your data on to other companies.

The US is the friendliest country in the world to that business model. Moving to Canada or Europe kneecaps that business model. So much so, that it stays more profitable for them to just formally ban NSFW altogether.

Will it work? Who knows, we saw Tumblr try it. Though that was mostly a token gesture, with it enshrined in law, they'd be obligated to actually try harder at it than leave it as an open secret.

Compliance with CASE is a different matter. It's not on the sites themselves to enforce that (though I'd expect a bunch more posts getting taken down), but a lot of people are going to be fined over it.

Anyway, fact of the matter is any US based site is now inherently hostile to content creators. Not through any fault of their own (for a change), but because they have to follow the law.

Waterfall is immune to these laws and will not be complying with them.