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Cox Is Liable For Pirating Subscribers, Ordered To Pay $25 Million (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A federal jury reached a verdict that Cox Communications must pay $25 million to BMG Rights Management for failing to disconnect subscribers accused of online piracy. TorrentFreak reports: "During the trial hearings BMG revealed that the tracking company Rightscorp downloaded more than 150,000 copies of their copyrighted works directly from Cox subscribers. It also became apparent that Cox had received numerous copyright infringement warnings from Rightscorp which it willingly decided not to act on.The case was restricted to 1,397 copyrighted works and a six-person jury awarded $25 million in damages. The award is lower than the statutory maximum, which would have been over $200 million."
I know this is meant to be rhetorical/alarmist, but the answer is no.
The DMCA - specifically, the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act - deals with communications, not power. There is nothing on the books about electric companies being responsible for infringement.
The cable companies need to pick a side in this fight. Either fight for the customers (end to end encryption so they don't see anything, no logging anything without a court order) or they support the copyright cartel (active monitoring for IP, log everything, cut off subscribers upon accusation). So the question is, who pays the most?
They have picked a side; their own. They will do whatever they feel is in their own financial interest.
Thomas Hesse, Sony BMG's Global Digital Business President, told reporter Neda Ulaby,
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There is an important point that requires interpretation. The question is, "are complaints which Rightscorp buried in a ton pf BS emails proper complaints under the DMCA?"
The most relevant law is the DMCA, which sets out procedures that should be followed in these instances. Unfortunately, most private individuals and many small businesses don't know how the procedure works. That's unfortunate because when everyone involved knows what they are supposed to do under DMCA, it generally works better than what happened before the DMCA. Here's the procedure :
The copyright owner files a complaint which includes certain specific facts.
The ISP forwards the complaint to the accused.
If the accused doesn't respond immediately the ISP takes temporary action based on the complaint (the accused hasn't denied the complaint) .
The accused may file a counter-claim with the ISP and have the action reversed.
The complainant (copyright holder) may then file suit in federal court.
The process is far from perfect, but one good thing is that the ISP isn't put into the role of judge. The ISP never decides who is right or wrong, if you say you're not infringing, they basically take you at your word. (And if the accused doesn't deny it, they have to aft as if the complaint is true.) The ISP only has to follow the process laid out in the law, and they can't be held liable. If they choose NOT to follow the DMCA process, they can be liable to either the copyright owner or the accused.
So that's the law. Rightscorp did file complaints. Therefore, by a strict reading of the law, the ISP must take appropriate action unless the other party denies the claim.
HOWEVER, Rightscorp sent a shit-ton of very questionable emails to the ISP, many of which did not meet the requirements to be a proper complaint under DMCA. The ISP's argument is as follows:
Rightscorp flooded us with bullshit emails.
Because Rightscorp did so, the ISP couldn't reasonably read them all and determine which ones were actual DMCA complaints containing the required details.
Because Rightscorp made it so difficult to dig through and find the properly formed complaints, the court should not require the ISP to respond to them.
Instead, the court should act as if Rightscorp never sent those complaints.
The ISP's reasoning is to some extent logical and fair. Rightscorp made it nearly impossible to respond to them all, then complained to the court about the results of their own actions.
On the other hand, Rightscorp did send some proper complaints, and Cox ignored those complaints. That makes Cox liable* if you just read the law while ignoring the BS that Rightscorp pulled.
So the legitimate question that does require judgement, interpretation, is this:
Is a complaint which the complainant buried in a ton of BS a proper complaint which must be responded to under DMCA?
That's not clearly specified in the law. Therefore, it is up to the court to decide.
* Apart from the issue above, Cox also asserts that Rightscorp is misreading the law. The law seems to have somewhat different requirements for ISPs which only -carry- the data temporarily through their network vs those which provide web hosting or similar services involving storage of the material. The language of the law isn't entirely crystal clear on which requirements apply to which type of service. Cox asserts that Rightscorp is trying to apply the requirements of ISPs who -host- web sites to them, while they only -carry- the traffic. It's not crystal clear - Cox may very well be right. Because the wording and structure of the law isn't crystal clear, a court must interpret the ambiguous structure to determine what it's supposed to mean.
TLDR;
Cox does cut customers loose but, for a time, Cox allowed disconnected users to sign up for service again. Judge rules before trial that this makes them not a common carrier.
Cox explains during trial that they blocked/dropped all Rightscorp emails for abusing Cox's abuse process by a) soliciting $10-20 settlement payments with their complaints and b) sending extreme volumes of complaints when Cox told them they couldn't do that.
BMG/Rightscorp argue that Cox is still liable for complaints that it never received. Judge agrees, asks Jury for verdict.
Cox owes $25 million because it didn't let Rightscorp milk money from its subscribers with no due process. And possibly because Cox didn't join the Copyright Alert System (time frame fits but conjecture on my part.)
POTUS has said that "the Internet has become an essential part of everyday communication and everyday life" and asked the FCC to reclassify it as a "utility."
And then the FCC basically made ISPs Common Carriers but without some of the drawbacks (they selectively applied Title II.)
Your website(s) and your college are not ISPs nor Common Carries nor even utilities (well, arguably the college could be to students living in dorms.) I don't think university dorms count as landlord-tenant relationships (though IMO they should.)
The DMCA has been around for forever and been broken for forever.
Consider that Rightscorp is blindly downloading torrents in search of its client's copyrighted material.
Ok, so they download every torrent that matches ABC.mp3 because one of their clients has a songs named that and then they download the full file to verify. Obviously they're not just using file hashes or that would be way too easy for pirates to circumvent.
What happens when Rightscorp downloads an ABC.mp3 file that is actually copyrighted by another entity? Rightscorp has just blindly committed a copyright violation!
Of course, Rightscorp's competitors, who are doing the same thing, aren't going to file an infringement notice on Rightscorp because that would be mutually assured destruction.
And so you can see how this scheme is broken by design.
If I send 5,000,000 infringement notifications to Cox but only one is legitimate then is Cox required to go through all 5,000,000 to verify which are bogus and which are not? And how is Cox supposed to manage handling the requests of others if I do that?
What Cox does is it automatically parses emails to abuse@cox.net and puts them into a ticket system. Multiple complaints about the same subscriber (in a day) get put into the same ticket.
They have a hard, but negotiable, limit of 200 complaints per day per source. This is not blind. They send an email back notifying the source that they have hit the limit that Cox can handle.
Cox has a "180 day" (6 month) abuse cycle where they: ignore the first ticket, notify the subscriber on the second to seventh complaints (sic), and soft-suspend the account on the eighth to ninth, requiring user action to unsuspend service.
Tenth to fourteenth complaints (sic) suspend service and require various levels of increasing manual communication with higher and higher levels of Cox management to continue service. At fourteen they do a full review of the account and decide if they permanently disconnect the user or not.
And thus Cox actually was cutting off service to users. It's just that they were also letting users sign up for service again (and when they resigned onto the service then they had a clean copyright infringement slate) for a brief period of time (until sometime 2012.)
Rightscorp's complaints include a link allowing people to pay $10 to $20 for an "automatic settlement" that gives the user a "legal release" (Can anyone say, FEAR SCAM? IRS phone scammers work the same way!)
Cox has a policy of ignoring complaints with settlement offers because it considers them improper and falling outside of the spirit of the DMCA.
Cox replies to such complaints askin