Comcast Refusing To Comply With Piracy Subpoenas

New submitter nbacon writes with news that Comcast, apparently tired of the endless BitTorrent-related piracy lawsuits, has stopped complying with subpoena requests, much to the chagrin of rightsholders. From the article: "Initially Comcast complied with these subpoenas, but an ongoing battle in the Illinois District Court shows that the company changed its tune recently. Instead of handing over subscriber info, Comcast asked the court to quash the subpoenas. Among other things, the ISP argued that the court doesn’t have jurisdiction over all defendants, because many don’t live in the district in which they are being sued. The company also argues that the copyright holders have no grounds to join this many defendants in one lawsuit. The real kicker, however, comes with the third argument. Here, Comcast accuses the copyright holders of a copyright shakedown, exploiting the court to coerce defendants into paying settlements."

Comments

Yay Comcast.

[icebike]

I take back every nasty thing I ever said about Comcast.

Well, on second thought, I temporarily suspend my badmouthing of Comcast. ...
Ok, time's up.

Re:Yay Comcast.

[Brewster Jennings]

I am afraid to express an opinion about a cable provider ever since -- when the topic came up for discussion among friends -- I boldly informed them that I like Cox.

They still refuse to let it go, the bastards.

Re:Yay Comcast.

[Defenestrar]

Dude - I know what you mean. Sure, even a perfect /. editor can sometimes miss something during a submission, but this is going too far! Even after a double take it still says that Comcast did something other than going out of their way to screw their customers. That's it, I'm turning in my Slashdot license and actually reading this article. I'm also going to pinch myself, and if I don't wake up, start holding my breath.

Re:Yay Comcast.

[Jeng]

You are looking at it the wrong way.

This is Comcast not complying, that is their standard operating procedure. If they can find a way to not do something, they will not do that thing.

The fact that this actually helps their customers is purely unintentional.

Re:Yay Comcast.

[DanTheStone]

Bear with me for a second:

Pirating customers are heavy users.

Comcast is implementing usage-based tiered billing.

It is now in Comcast's best interest for customers to pirate, because it means they get more money.

Re:Yay Comcast.

[Penguinisto]

It's a step in the right direction, but I'm not sure if it's out of any charity towards their customer base, or if it's because the previous policy of blindly complying with all these subpoenas was an expensive PITA for them.

I'd still rather masturbate with a fistful of broken glass than voluntarily use their services, but this act is a good first step towards reversing that opinion.

Re:Yay Comcast.

[davester666]

It's simple math. The more money Comcast's customers shell out to copyright trolls, the less money they have to shovel into Comcast's coffers.

Re:Yay Comcast.

[Nethemas the Great]

Thank you. I feel better now that I know I can turn back from these feelings of appreciation bubbling up.

Re:Yay Comcast.

[EdIII]

You stole my post. Good thoughts.

Geeezz. He did not steal your post. He only infringed upon it by making an unlicensed copy. :P

The Twilight Zone

[wmbetts]

For a second I thought I was pulled into an episode of the The Twilight Zone. Comcast is the last company I expect this from. Go Comcast?

Re:The Twilight Zone

[C_amiga_fan]

The motive is probably based on $$$$$. Comcast probably wastes a lot of money handling these supeona requests, and they finally decided it was cheaper to say "no" then to comply.

Re:The Twilight Zone

[icebike]

Well it takes lawyers to say NO too. And they don't work for free.

The best they can hope for is to establish a precedent and make the nuisance subpoenas reduce in scope.
Fighting a validly issued subpoena is a costly legal move. A minimum wage clerk can knock out a hundred
replies to these in half an hour with automated tools. That would be the cheap approach.

So there is some financial outlay involved with this approach, and the return on that investment is
probably questionable and short lived, and may blow back in their face if they lose safe harbor
protection by fighting these subpoenas.

Re:The Twilight Zone

[C_amiga_fan]

P.S. I just noticed all four companies that Comcast is saying "no" to are pornography companies. I wonder what the downloaders acquired which made them targets for extortionate letters?

Re:The Twilight Zone

[Anonymous Coward]

fightcopyrighttrolls.com is a good site for finding out what exactly has been going on. Specificyally, yes, this has been a copyright shakedown in which the companies involved have almost never actually taken anyone to court. They've been filing lawsuits with hundreds or thousands of defendants and mailing them threatening letters regarding how embarassing it would be to have their name publicly associated with a lawsuit regarding this type of content. If they drag it out long enough, many people don't know or are to scared to fight it and settle out for 2,500 or so a piece. Anyone who fights back, or in many cases simply ignores them is eventually dropped from the lawsuit.

Some of the site owners have been bragging that they made more from the lawsuit settlements than all their memberships fees for the year.

Re:The Twilight Zone

[icebike]

"lose safe harbor protection"

Lose what?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act

The Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act is United States federal law that creates a conditional safe harbor for internet service providers (ISPs) by shielding them from potential secondary liability for the infringing acts of others.

If Comcast can be found to be aiding and abetting infringers, they may end up being judged directly responsible for the infringement carried on by others who happen to participate in a bit torrent of infringing media. Safe harbor is granted to ISPs to prevent them from having to monitor every packet transiting their network. However the media industry is sure to claim that comcast became a participant in infringement the minute they stepped in and tried to quash these subpoenas. Watch and see.

Re:The Twilight Zone

[Anonymous Coward]

When I worked for an small ISP (roughly 80,000 subscribers), subpoenas were not a matter of a minimum wage clerk handling these. All subpoenas were routed to the legal department where they were reviewed. Once legal was satisfied that everything was in order they would hand it to operations to actually retrieve the requested data. Once the request was complete, operations would hand it back to legal who would then give it to the proper authorities.

It is important to note that subpoenas were not rubber stamped by the legal team. They would often deny subpoenas as unrealistic (IP address, connection start time, connection end time, Name, billing address, for every subscriber in every jurisdiction over a two week period) or not possible to fulfill. So I would not be surprised if the cost of fulfilling the subpoenas at Comcast is significant.

While it's nice that Comcast is standing up....

[Trailer Trash]

While it's nice that Comcast is standing up to them, if you read through you'll find that it's four porn companies. In other words, they're not standing up (in this case, at least) to any of the MAFIAA members.

Re:While it's nice that Comcast is standing up....

[Em Adespoton]

While it's nice that Comcast is standing up to them, if you read through you'll find that it's four porn companies. In other words, they're not standing up (in this case, at least) to any of the MAFIAA members.

True, but precedent doesn't care who the parties in the case were. If Comcast succeeds, this argument can be used in the future just as effectively against Comcast's overlords.

Re:SOPA

[FunPika]

Shutting down an ISP as large as Comcast and leaving 17 million people unable to connect to the Internet. Somehow I doubt our government, while pretty dumb, would be dumb enough to cause a shit-storm that massive.

The real reason is money.

[Anonymous Coward]

A few Subpeona's here and there are fine, sure they cost you, but it's a cost of doing business.

That's that right up until some company wants to subpeona 4,000 of your users, per week.

And the thing is these subpeona's, they aren't for john doe at 127.0.0.1 on 6/15/2010, they're for MAC addresses, traffic usage reports, etc and the requestor gets NASTY if they don't get what they want.

Either you spend an ungodly amount of cash complying, or you go the cheaper route; get the lawyers to tell them to go pound sand.

Re:Who would have thought

[Anonymous Coward]

Rubbish. If Capitalism hits on a morally good outcome, it's by pure fluke.

Capitalism is often exploited by people who are following their human nature to lie, cheat, steal, and other stuff. You know, things like putting melamine into baby formula.

Capitalism doesn't give a fuck about you, and is in fact amoral (note I don't say immoral, but it does yield a lot of immoral things).

If you believe what you wrote, you're an idealist who still believes the system works -- it doesn't, it only works for those who have money and can pay to exploit the rules.

As it exists, Capitalism is mostly about trying to make sure the loopholes are all stacked in your favor instead of anybody else. This great wonderful thing you call Capitalism which always arrives at good outcomes is a myth. Companies would make skin care products out of 3rd world children if they could get away with it and if it was profitable.

This is about keeping customers and making money!

[bobbied]

First, and foremost Comcast is in business to make a profit. Make no mistake, if they thought they could profit from turning folks in, they would. Read some of the supporting documents. Verizon (a Comcast competitor) has taken a stand and started saying "Nope" to the courts/. Apparently they have enough legal ground to quash the "track this IP for us" requests. This is a two fold benefit to any ISP. First, you don't have to waste time and money having your staff searching though logs to find out who had that IP at that time. Second, you keep a small segment of your customers who care about such things from running to your competition.

Surely this problem will go away for all ISP's in fairly short order. Once an ISP starts successfully protesting such requests for information, the guys doing the shakedowns will eventually stop wasting time/money making the requests. ISP's will have to pay their lawyers a bit more up front to stop such requests, but eventually this will get them OUT of the business of turning in their subscribers by keeping them out of court. With the profits fading away, the shakedown artists will have abandon the courts and try to come up with some other way to do their shakedowns.

This is NOT over. Verizon, Comcast and others have signed on to start giving their customers warnings on behalf of various copyright holders for various types of infringing content passing over their networks. It's called something like "six strikes" and the providers are hoping it will allow them to generate more business for their "legal" services, by working in cooperation with MPAA and others. I hold now illusions that this "solution" is a good thing for anybody, except perhaps for the ISP's who see it as a marketing opportunity. I wonder if my bittorrent activity (all legal by the way) will draw a warning from Verizon (my ISP). I know they don't like bittorrent and it sure seems that they throttle my connection when I have active transfers, so I'm half expecting to be "warned" about the Ubuntu, Fedora, and CentOS distributions I try to seed over my 25Mbit connection.

They are in this for the profit. If they got a percentage of the shakedown take, you'd bet they be out there actively turning folks in before they got asked. They are simply making a business decision that it will cost less and maximize profits to take this route, and given that there seems to be legal justification now for saying "Nope!" that the court is accepting you can bet this will continue. If alternate legal tactics alter the economics for the ISP's, you can bet they will be turning folks in once more. If it proves profitable to start the "warning" process with their customers, even before a copyright holder complains, you can be the will do that too.