The stimulus bill includes significant changes to copyright law and enforcement, the Biden administration may have to build a presidential Twitter following from scratch and we round up the startups that shut down this year. This is your Daily Crunch for December 22, 2020.
The big story: Stimulus bill increases penalties for illegal streaming services
While we wrote several stories yesterday about the tech implications of the new stimulus bill (and highlighted it in yesterday’s Daily Crunch), more details are emerging — like the fact that it will make illegal streaming for profit a felony, punishable by fines or up to 10 years of imprisonment.
The language of the bill seems to focus on commercial piracy services, rather than individuals or Twitch streamers — a point that one of its sponsors, Senator Thom Tillis, emphasized in a statement, claiming that “no individual streamer has to worry about the fear of prosecution.”
On the copyright front, the bill also creates a new Copyright Claims Board to handle copyright infringement claims of up to $30,000.
The tech giants
Google, Cisco and VMware join Microsoft to oppose NSO Group in WhatsApp spyware case — A coalition of companies have filed an amicus brief in support of a legal case brought by WhatsApp accusing NSO Group of using an undisclosed vulnerability to hack into at least 1,400 devices.
Twitter’s POTUS account will reportedly be reset to zero followers when Biden takes over — Twitter, meanwhile, says it has “been in ongoing discussions with the Biden transition team on a number of aspects related to White House account transfers.”
Startups, funding and venture capital
Remembering the startups we lost in 2020 — A look back at startups large and small that didn’t make it through hell year.
Horizon Robotics, a Chinese rival to Nvidia, seeks to raise over $700M — Horizon Robotics is a five-year-old unicorn specializing in AI chips for robots and autonomous vehicles.
Austin-based ReturnSafe raises $3.25M for its employee health management tools — Management toolkits that track employee health are piling into the market.
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
To win post-pandemic, edtech needs to start thinking big — After a noisy 2020, can the sector maintain momentum?
One final $100M ARR company and the startups we want to meet in 2021 — Let’s talk about Nexthink.
With a $50B run rate in reach, can anyone stop AWS? — AWS has taken advantage of first-to-market status to become the most successful player in the space.
(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)
Everything else
Gift Guide: TechCrunch’s Favorite Things of 2020 — Many of the podcasts, songs, movies, people and more that got us through this year.
NASA opens new launchpad at Kennedy Space Center meant to serve multiple commercial launch customers — The purpose of LC-48 is very explicitly to fill “a need for new, low-cost launch systems with very fast turnaround cycles.”
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.
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