Music Publishers Sue Cox Communications Over Piracy

wabrandsma (2551008) writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: BMG Rights Management and Round Hill Music have sued Cox Communications for copyright infringement, arguing that the Internet service provider doesn't do enough to punish those who download music illegally. Both BMG and Round Hill are clients of Rightscorp, a copyright enforcement agent whose business is based on threatening ISPs with a high-stakes lawsuit if they don't forward settlement notices to users that Rightscorp believes are "repeat infringers" of copyright. In their complaint (PDF), the music publishers also decided to publicly post IP addresses.

Comments

All of this is extralegal

[Anonymous Coward]

Copyright is supposed to be a first-party concern and rightsholders seem uniformly determined to make other people do their dirty work (without even getting paid).

Re:All of this is extralegal

[arbiter1]

yea rights holders want everyone else to do the work, foot the bill, while rights holders collect 100% of the $.

Re:All of this is extralegal

[Frobnicator]

I hope it goes forward.

Not because I want the recording industry to shut them down, but because common carriers are exempt from the responsibility over their traffic. That is really the best solution for ISPs so they are no longer liable for the content that travels over the wire.

ISPs getting reclassified as common carriers is a major step toward net neutrality, as common carriers are not allowed to discriminate over what they carry.

Re:All of this is extralegal

[Anonymous Coward]

But of course! In the new America, law enforcement is *everyone's* responsibility. You know, if you see something, say something! There's a multibillion dollar prison-industrial complex that isn't going to sustain itself, somebody's gotta feed the monkey. When having an army of jackbooted thugs and ravenous lawyers just isn't keeping you in your fix, you'll shift the responsibility onto someone else and legislate that they do your job for you.

Re:All of this is extralegal

[Fnord666]

I just don't see why our elected officials should assist them at our expense.

Because reelection campaigns cost a lot of money these days.

Re:I wonder....

[easyTree]

I know the lawyers have a legal term for this kind of bad faith

"Business As Usual."

Re:17 USC 512(i)(1)(A)

[penix1]

but 17 USC 512(i)(1)(A) applies the safe harbor only to service providers with "a policy that provides for the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscribers and account holders of the service provider's system or network who are repeat infringers".

I was going to say the same thing but the point remains that Rightscorp would have to overcome the wide open ""in appropriate circumstances" clause in the DMCA as well as be able to prove that a particular IP in a dynamic IP block constitutes a "repeat offender". Good luck with that...