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Cox Is Liable For Pirating Subscribers, Ordered To Pay $25 Million (torrentfreak.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the pay-up dept.

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."

3 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. Your move, Cox by clonehappy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Your move, Cox by drunk_punk · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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."

  2. Bad Precedent by timrod · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.