Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), currently the Senate‘s longest-serving member and its president pro tempore and a longtime proponent of better piracy protections for over-the-top content, will not run for re-election, he announced Monday (Nov. 15), after six terms in the Senate.

Leahy has been a prominent figure in communications circles as chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, which combines with the Commerce Committee to vet nominees, including to the Supreme Court, and takes the lead in antitrust issues related to proposed mergers.

Leahy said of his two decades as chairman and ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, his goal had always been to “defend our civil liberties, the First Amendment, our right to privacy and the free flow of information from the government to the people it represents.”

He has been prominent on issues particular to the media industry, including protecting and accessing content.

Leahy co-authored a bill making unauthorized streaming a felony to help crack down on criminal piracy in the age of increasingly over-the-top delivered content.

In 2020, after years of effort by the creative community and Leahy, the combination of the explosion of streaming content and over-the-top distribution channels and a COVID-19-sequestered populace for whom online video was entertainment lifeline created the proper conditions for passage of the bipartisan Protecting Lawful Streaming Act, which made stealing video streams a felony, as it already was for illegally copying and distributing copyrighted TV shows and movies.

Before the law passed, a pirated stream was treated as an illegal performance, which is a misdemeanor, rather than illegal reproduction and distribution, which is a felony. Making it a felony meant the greater deterrents of larger penalties or potential prison time.

Leahy has also been a backer of cameras, and later streaming, in the courts.

In the broadband space, like most Democrats, Leahy has backed network neutrality rules and once co-sponsored a bill that would have banned paid prioritization.

He also opposed the bulk collection by the government of communications records undertaken by the government in the wake of 9/11, instead saying such collection should be limited to specific investigations, something he championed in the USA Freedom Act, which he co-sponsored and which passed the Senate in 2015.

The Motion Picture Association hailed Leahy's protection of creative content.

“[MPA] thanks Senator Patrick Leahy for being a tireless champion of the creative community during his eight terms in the U.S. Senate,” MPA chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin said. "Throughout his career, he has been a lion for artists’ rights, from content creation to content protection. His commitment to the film, television and streaming industry goes beyond the halls of the Senate — he‘s been featured in five Batman movies, serving under four different Caped Crusaders. I hope he enjoys a well-deserved, long retirement with his family — his wife, Marcelle; his three children, Alicia, Kevin and Mark; and his five grandchildren. We look forward to seeing him back in Washington, Los Angeles or Gotham very soon.”

“It was my honor to serve with Patrick Leahy in the Senate and my good fortune to call him a friend. I even took the time recently to visit his boyhood home in Montpelier, Vermont," said National Association of Broadcasters President Gordon Smith. "More importantly, during my time in the Senate[he was a Republican senator from Oregon], I had the privilege of traveling the world with Pat and working with him on a range of legislation, all in the interest of the nation. While leading NAB, I have been grateful for the opportunity to continue working with him in support of America’s local broadcasters. I thank Senator Leahy for his decades of service to the American public and the people of Vermont, and I wish my friend the very best in his retirement.”

“As a former staffer to Senator Leahy, I witnessed firsthand his incredible dedication to ensuring a better future for the people of Vermont," said incoming NAB COO and incoming president, Curtis LeGeyt. "Working with him instilled in me a dedication to public service that I carry with me as an advocate for radio and television broadcasting. It was a privilege to learn from one of this generation’s great legislators and public servants, and to see the important accomplishments made possible by working across party lines. I congratulate Senator Leahy on his well-deserved retirement.”■

The Senate Judiciary Committee has held over consideration of legislation updating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) after amendments were offered that could have undone a compromise approach.

Similar legislation, the E-Mail Privacy Act, passed unanimously in the House, and supporters were hoping for clean passage in the Senate as well.

The bill updates ECPA to require the government to get a probable cause criminal warrant to access e-mails, social media posts and other online content stored in the cloud by Internet service providers and other e-mail service providers, like Google. In a nod to the longevity of cloud storage, it eliminates the 180-day sunset on stored communications. Previously a warrant was not required for communications stored beyond 180 days.

During a business meeting to mark up a Senate version Thursday (May 26), committee chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) agreed to hold over the bill rather than press the issue with a vote, pointing out that the bill's sponsors had asked that it be held over.

Ranking member Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), one of those sponsors, thanked Grassley for the move.

But Grassley said there was broad consensus that the 1986 ECPA bill needed revising given the advances in technology. He said that most agree that given the way email is used and stored it hardly makes sense for its protection to hinge on whether it is 180 days old or whether it has been opened at all.

"The privacy of Americans should be protected," he said, and should not depend on [an] email's age at all."

Leahy, who wrote much of the original bill, said he agreed it needed to be updated.

"Digital files ought to be treated the same as the papers in our filing cabinets in our homes," Leahy said. He pointed to the House passage 419 to 0, adding that the Senate should "give some attention to that, given that there are those who thought that neither body could pass a unanimous resolution that the sun rises in the east."

Leahy pointed to the broad support, but also pointed to last-minute concerns, expressed in Republican amendments, and said he supported delaying moving the bill to the floor in the interests of preserving the broad coalition -- "from the right to the left" -- rather than see it "destroyed."

Not to pass the bill, he said, "would be an enormous mistake and turning our back on the tremendous work both parties did in the House..."

Several amendments had been proposed over the past few days by Republicans, including one by Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the International Communications Privacy Act (ICPA), that would have addressed government surveillance outside the U.S. by securing data privacy internationally.

ICPA would reign in what Hatch called the overreach of law enforcement's ability to access data worldwide.

"Currently, the U.S. government takes the position that it can compel a technology company to turn over data located anywhere in the world belonging to a citizen of any company so long as the data can be accessed by a company subject to U.S. jurisdiction.

Hatch did not introduce the amendment, but did introduce it as a standalone bill. Grassley said he was making no promises, but would see how that bill "fit into" the committee's agenda.