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Judge Wipes Out Safe Harbor Provision In DMCA, Makes Cox Accomplice of Piracy (arstechnica.com)
SysKoll writes: The DMCA is well-known for giving exorbitant powers to copyright holders, such as taking down a page or a whole web site without a court order. Media companies buy services from vendors like Rightscorp, a shake-down outfit that issues thousands of robot-generated take-down notices and issues threats against ISPs and sites ignoring them. Cox, like a lot of ISPs, is inundated with abusive take-down notices, in particular from Rightscorp. Now, BMG Rights Management and Round Hill Music are suing Cox for refusing to shut off the Internet access of subscribers that Rightscorp accused of downloading music via BitTorrent. Cox argues that as an ISP, they benefit from the Safe Harbor provision that shields access providers from subscribers' misbehavior. Not so, says U.S. District Judge Liam O'Grady. The judge sided with the media companies ahead of trial, saying Cox should have terminated the repeat offenders accused by Rightscorp. Cox's response is quite entertaining for a legal document (PDF): its description of Rightscorp includes the terms "shady," "shake-down," and "pay no attention to the facts." O'Grady also derided the Electronic Frontier Foundation's attempt to file an amicus brief supporting Cox, calling them hysterical crybabies.
Everyone with some kind of registered copyright should file a DMCA complaint against anything the judge has online.
Sorry, judge Liam O'Grady, but you're a moron.
Rightscorp has been found to be making fraudulent claims, misrepresenting themselves, and doing little more than running a shakedown racket.
If accusations by an incompetent shady organization are enough to cut off access, that's a terrible precedent.
How does someone clearly too stupid to be a judge get appointed as one? Or is he merely on the payroll of the media companies?
What a fucking useless asshat.
"suing Cox for refusing to shut off the Internet access of subscribers that Rightscorp accused of downloading music via BitTorrent."
And I 'accuse' the CEO and entire board of RightsCorp of doing exactly the same. I have given no actual evidence, but the simple accusation should be enough, right?
In light of this interesting news, I have started my own rights-protection company.
Here at RighterKorp, we employ state-of-the-art technologies to track down copyright violations and identify the violators with 100% precision. Either that, or we just make shit up. In either case, under the DMCA ISPs are required by law to immediately comply with our outrageous and hugely disproportionate demands, immediately depriving their customers the benefit of essential services they have bought and paid for, despite the fact that we provide no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing.
Otherwise, we sue. Our industry-leading "judicial partnership" program helps us to achieve a high percentage of favorable rulings, in many cases before the actual trial.
We are now accepting new clients, especially those who made a series of pornos on VHS tape in the nineties, and then put them on YouTube under an alias and want to sue Google over it.
No, because regular phone companies fall under the "common carrier" laws. This basically means that they can't be held liable for what goes over their lines but they have to abide by the FCC regulations.
ISPs - the big ones, anyway - are trying to have it both ways. They want the protection of being a common carrier - no lawsuits for content - but without the annoying FCC regulations like net neutrality.
They're basically trying to say, "We don't know what's in the packets but we want to throttle the data based on what's in the packets."
Do you fucking assholes absolutely have to bring the fucking assholes in the middle-east into every gods-be-damned conversation!? Fucking give it a rest!
Well, the hypothetical penalty was written by the same people who paid for the law ... it basically allows them to say "ooops, we really believed that but we were wrong".
With a wink and a nudge they can simply claim incompetence, and magically everything is OK.
ALL of these laws bought and paid for by the copyright lobby basically give them huge amounts of leeway to do anything, and ultimately they have no penalties. They can misuse those laws all day long, and nothing will happen to them -- because that was designed into it to allow them to do shit like this.
They have no actual burden of proof, and want to reduce that even further to the point of "we've accused this guy of downloading, you need to cut him off from the internet to stop him"; they want to be able to have innuendo count as proof to save them the trouble. And they want no repercussions when they misuse it.
Welcome to the oligarchy, they've stacked the laws so heavily in their favor we can't win, and they've passed on the cost of policing their "rights" to everyone else.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Pretty sure ATT, Verizon, Sprint, and to a lesser extent t-mobile all do exactly the same stuff when it comes to mobile data. They have the NSA in their datacenters monitoring everything though so they are probably automatically in compliance. They sure as crap don't behave like common carriers. The rule of law doesn't apply in this country though if you have enough money.
I can't believe affluenza is really a thing now.