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Rightscorp Threatens Every ISP in the United States (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Following a court win by its client BMG over Cox Communications this week, Rightscorp has issued an unprecedented warning to every ISP in the United States today. Boasting a five-year trove of infringement data against Internet users, Rightscorp warned ISPs that they can either cooperate or face the consequences. "For nearly five years, Rightscorp has warned US internet service providers (ISPs) that they risk incurring huge liabilities if they fail to implement and enforce policies under which they terminate the accounts of their subscribers who repeatedly infringe copyrights," the company said in a statement. "Over that time, many ISPs have taken the position that it was simply impossible for an ISP to be held liable for its subscribers' actions -- even when the ISP had been put on notice of massive infringements and supplied with detailed evidence. There had never been a judicial decision holding an ISP liable."
So, I now assume that:
If you are caught driving around with copyrighted material, your drivers license is revoked?
If someone hears copyrighted music playing over a phone call, your phone line is terminated?
If a broadcaster accidentally broadcasts some copyrighted material without license, all their views/subscribers the service terminated?
That land of the free must be a wonderful place to live, what with all those 'protections' and all..
Oh, I forgot didnt I, civil violations over the internet are the new terrorism, and must be crushed by the state. Silly me.
At least the general public still get their fair half of copyright, by the timely entry into the public domain of the works that WE, through the tax
funded state, have protected for the holders. Oh wait, damn! how did that happen?
I mean, we prosecute mailmen for drug trafficking. We prosecute telecoms because terrorists use their phonelines every day to conspire against the United States. We prosecute sulfur miners murder, since they provide society with the element required to make gunpowder, which enables mass murderers via guns. When a company goes bankrupt due to mismanagement, the CEO always ends up penniless for the damage he caused.
In our country, if you can't catch the people who break laws, we ALWAYS make sure some unaffiliated distant party takes the fall for it.
Just because something has a copyright doesn't mean it is illegal to share it. If the owner of the copyright allows their content to be shared on site x, then it is ok. Therefore, how is an ISP supposed to know a content's owner has given site "x" the right to store/share/distribute their content. Also, that right could be granted for an hour, a day, a month, or longer. Most mainstream artists license their work to be used via multiple venues. There is no real way for an ISP to know who has a legitimate right to store/share/distribute content for any particular time period. It would be like holding UPS responsible for me shipping antibiotics to someone. They don't know the contents of the package and if they did, they don't know whether the recipient has a legal prescription for that medication.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
RIAA. While we might hate our ISPs, at least there's something useful about them - the Internet Service they provide. It might be subpar quality (speed, customer service, etc) and they might overcharge for it, but there's a bit of value there. With the RIAA - or more specifically in this instance, RightsCorp - there's nothing of value there for us. They exist solely to serve themselves and at no point does their existence give us anything of value.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Demand that secondary liability lawsuits be banned.
It's bitztream, the moronic autism-hating Slashdot troll!
That's probably what they want. IBM could have done the same with SCO, but that's basically paying the ransom which encourages more people to take hostages. Better to cure it with fire so they don't start a new company, take the small amount of IP they had to base the case on and start all this over again...