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."

Comments

Your move, Cox

[clonehappy]

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? Because that'd be my first move.

Re:Your move, Cox

[drunk_punk]

Really? I would think they would use this as the EXACT excuse! "Due to our ongoing lawsuit with BMG we are not forwarding any traffic that may be used against us in a court of law, i.e. any proprietary information that BMG may have rights to."

Re:Your move, Cox

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Would it? I mean, if they're supposed to be the content police and they're being punished for not upholding that, then don't they get a say in what they will or will not let pass through their pipes?

Re: Your move, Cox

[billcopc]

Net neutrality does not come into play if they word it as a "network security" tactic. If I start spamming from my IP address, my upstream provider might null me until the problem is addressed. Why can't Cox null traffic to/from known copyright trolls who are spying on their users and presumably making an unusually large and suspicious number of connections (for evidence) ?

It would be like that old "PeerBlock", but at a network level. Hardly any different than checking mail relays against blacklists

Bad Precedent

[timrod]

The massive problem here is the judicial ruling that a third, non-government party can tell an ISP to disconnect a user simply based on suspicion of copyright violations and the ISP must comply. I have never seen anything like this, where someone who suspects wrongdoing is allowed to set a punishment outside of the judicial system.

Re:Bad Precedent

[CanadianMacFan]

Wait until TPP comes into effect. Someone could get a copyright infringement ruling in one country for content hosted in another country in which it doesn't violate copyright and still have the content provider take down the material.

Accused? Off with their heads!

[fahrbot-bot]

... for failing to disconnect subscribers accused of online piracy.

Yes, because "accused" means "guilty" to the likes of BMG and Rightscorp and, apparently, the courts support this sort of no-due-process process.

Why oh why can't ISIS go after BMG and Rightscorp and do *everyone* a favor? [ Heh, Just kidding NSA - it was a joke ... really, I swear. ]

Re:Rightscorp caused a need for interpretation of

[Matt.Battey]

IMHO, it's really about a dying industry attempting to extract all of the liquidity from a market before it takes its last breath. Or if its anything like the BSA, its about a company that is "hired" as an enforcer that gets to keep anything it kills.

Riddle me this, if Rightscorp is setup like the BSA, then it may keep 100% of any claims it is able to prosecute. In the case of the BSA, they were initially funded by a consortium of software houses. But their business model is now funded 100% by their ability to prosecute incorrect licensing. The BSA is not required to turn over any of it's winnings to the partners. That means that if you installed Adobe Acrobat too many times, the BSA profits but Adobe does not.

Is Rightscorp setup the same way? A tool of the music industry that can hound it's own income with out paying those who stand to loose?