The United States Senate is in the process of considering bill S.978, a bill “To amend the criminal penalty provision for criminal infringement of a copyright,” or as you might know it, the Anti-Streaming Bill. There’s been some discussion about what it really means and how it would affect stuff we care about, so I’d like to clear everything up. To be blunt, if passed it would pretty significantly reconfigure American copyright law in ways that could honestly really hurt internet culture in general and our video game communities specifically.

So what does it do? Its stated purpose is to attack the online streaming of copyrighted works, specifically films and live television. It tries to do this by criminalizing some electronically transmitted (read: internet) public performances of copyrighted works.

Background: the law is split into criminal law and civil law. In (very) short, criminal is for things designated as crimes (like murder and theft), can involve jail time, and is handled by the government, whereas civil law covers everything else, doesn’t involve the risk of jail, and can only be sued over by whatever entity actually got screwed. Copyright law has both criminal and civil law sides, but with a few significant exceptions copyright mostly sticks to civil law in practice. That means that only the copyright owner can sue you for infringement, and the worst thing that can usually happen is that you either get a cease and desist letter and stop what you’re doing or you pay the copyright owner some dough. While that can be really costly (up to $150k per infringement, although that’s very uncommon), you can’t get sent to jail.
so this is a [crazy] bill that is pending right now, I highly doubt this will get passed, but it's still interesting. It would kill the internet.

here is a few links with more info, that quote was just part of the first link:
“Tolling the Stream” (Be Jailed for Streaming?) by UltraDavid « Shoryuken
Jailed for Streaming? Bill S.978 May Make it a Reality.