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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."
So these subscribers were suspect, and Cox didn't kill their connections after a private organisation told them to, so they're on the hook for the suspected cases?
The whole situation seems suspect in of itself.
FCC just made them common carriers, but now court says they're responsible for what goes over their network? Can't have it both ways...
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?
If the Electric Power company is told by unofficial third parties (BMG et al) that their electricity is being used to power Cox Equipment on both the user and carrier side that is being used to download copyrighted materials, is the Electric Company also just as liable to tens of millions in damages for clearly supplying power to both the alleged perp and to the Cox internet connection utility?? It is the Same insane Logic! This is essentially a case of the gun maker being held responsible versus the person holding it and using the gun... This case will be overturned on appeal.
Does Cox have the Balls to just block all traffic to BMG label sites and any other commercial entities with a presence on the net that are even loosely related to BMG?
Uhhh. If you were a Cox customer legally accessing content from a BMG site, wouldn't you be a bit pissed at that kind of blocking? I'm going to make a wild-ass guess without checking that Amazon is one large source of BMG content, and I don't think you'd have a lot of happy customers if you blocked access to Amazon.com.
More important, it might be possible for Cox to determine what sites are official BMG "label sites", but how the hell would they identify all the "loosely related" sites? Remember, Rightscorp could be accessing the torrents from just about any address on the net. They could be coming out of the Amazon or Google cloud, or from a DSL line in Swampy Bottom, AL.
But most important, the issue wasn't that Cox users were downloading content from BMG sites illegally, but that they were running torrents DISTRIBUTING BMG content without authorization. Cox would have to block all torrent traffic or have some way of identifying a torrent that was distributing BMG content for carpet blocking to have any relevance here.
A much more appropriate response would have been to verify that the customer was running a bittorrent with what looked like BMG content, and then gently remind them that their contract (almost certainly) prohibits operating servers using Cox residential internet service. And then, if the server stayed up, put a block on torrent connections to it. The customer could still access torrent feeds, but nobody would be able to connect to his server to pull content.
So every article I find on this is garbage. I'm reading the ruling on summary judgement from Dec 1st.
Here's my conclusion from reading the ruling:
1) Cox had an official policy to not actually terminate repeat offenders because they didn't want to lose customers.
- This means they weren't in compliance with the DMCA. I gotta agree with the court on that one.
- Side note: If someone is pirating that much, and Cox was still profiting, then why do they need to institute bandwidth caps?
2) The Supreme Court Grokster decision was the scariest blow here.
- The court says Grokster didn't limit liability to companies actually inducing or profiting from copyright violations.
- That completely changes my understanding of Grokster!
- The court says Cox is contributarily liable because they materially contributed to the copyright infringement.
That "materially contributed" thing is frightening. This is what we've all been afraid of because it seems to open-up the possibility that the maker of the modem is liable, and the company who installed the wires is liable, or the maker of the downloading software, etc. Lots of people materially contributed. We need to really limit this definition of "material contribution."
Here's my notes:
Cox limits DMCA complaint emails to 200/day from any given copyright holder.
Cox doesn't do anything with the notices until they receive 8 of them for a single user within 6 months. Termination happens at like 15+ within 6 months.
"Termination" just means the user has to call Cox and apologize, and the counter is reset.
Rightscorp auto-generates DMCA emails.
Rightscorp was sending emails with settlement notices in them.
Cox says those notices aren't within the spirit of the DMCA, so they auto-delete them.
Rightscorp responded by sending 24,000/day
Cox just outright blocked Rightscorp's emails.
The judge cited the Grokster case as the reason that ISPs can be liable for user's copyright actions. They basically rehashed the whole Grokster case, the whole "making available" theory, and all that jazz.
The DMCA says ISPs must implement a "reasonable" repeat infringer policy. The law left this *completely* open. The only way anyone figures out what it means is when they get sued for not doing a "reasonable" job. The courts then clarify the law a bit more each time. Ugh!
The courts say that ISPs are not required to actively monitor for infringement.
Rightscorp made various complaints about Cox's policy.
The court decided that Cox's account termination was too lenient.
The court didn't even really care that Cox blocked Rightscorp's emails.
Cox didn't have a repeat infringer policy before 2012. And Cox derided the intentionally circumvented the process anyway.
Cox higher-ups sent an email that basically told the abuse department not to terminate anyway, because they can't afford to lose customers.
Cox complained that BMG didn't hold copyright to lots of this stuff. Court says: Yes they did, and it doesn't matter anyway.
Cox says: this whole DMCA complaint process is a farce. Judge says: Yeah, but you knew some were real and still ignored those.
The court disregards Cox's arguments that Rightscorp are extortionists as irrelevant since they weren't extorting Cox. Sounds like the end-users might have had an argument there, but Cox doesn't.
They are not supposed to be the content police. Do you not see the obvious problem with this kind of logic? If they are liable for not blocking pirating users, then they are liable for not blocking pedophile users, and liable for not blocking ISIS users. All of a sudden, COX is now financially responsible for what each of its users does. This is a terrible precedent to set.
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.