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Cox Denies Liability for Pirating Subscribers, Appeals $25 Million Verdict (torrentfreak.com)
Cox Communications insists that it is not responsible for copyright infringements carried out by its subscribers, challenging the ruling by a Virginia federal jury late last year. The court had found Cox Communications guilty and had asked it to pay music publisher BMG Rights Management a sum of $25 in damages. TorrentFreak reports: The verdict was a massive victory for the music company and a disaster for Cox, but the case is not closed yet. After a failed motion for judgment as a matter of law earlier this month, the ISP has now informed the court that it will take the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Cox denies any wrongdoing and hopes to get a judgment in its favor at the appeals court. Considering the gravity of the case, Cox's move is not surprising. The liability verdict has come as a shock to the Internet provider industry, as it suggests that providers have to actively disconnect repeat infringers. At the moment, many ISPs don't have a solid policy in place where repeat copyright infringers lose their subscription. In fact, the law doesn't prescribe when and based on what evidence an ISP has to terminate an account.
Cox is generally the least shitty of the US cable ISPs. Admittedly, this is a terribly low bar, but most surveys have rated them somewhere around "adequate" which puts them light years ahead of Comcast/etc.
Also, as Churchill once said, "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons."
This just isn’t true.
Cox charges more money for lower speeds than Time Warner, Verizon (Frontier), Comcast, AT&T, etc.
And they have the weakest channel/cable subscription offerings of of any of the monopolies. If there’s a new feature or technology being offered by the cable industry, you can bet that Cox customers will get it years after everyone else in the country has it.
In short, Cocks Communications is aptly named.
I thought the FCC classified them as "common carriers" now.
Also I thought wording under the CDA was that "Service Providers" were not liable for content posted by their users.
It sure seems like they would be covered either way.
(stolen from DaBum) I am dyslexia of borg - your ass will be laminated.
Here is the point. The music and movie industries is trying to force the internet providers into monitoring for infringing downloads. If they do not then the record/movie companies think that internet providers are responsible for the illegal downloads. They are also trying to force the internet providers into sending notices on their behalf to supposed/suspected infringing users and to disconnect them at the whim of the record/movie companies. In essence they are trying to force the internet providers into the role of being the enforcers for them. Of course the internet providers are not to keen on any of this bullshit as it puts all the cost on them. If they comply they lose a cash cow since most of the customers that "MIGHT" be actually infringing do it at most on a very casual basis at worst. These are at most 10% of the public and far less are actually hardcore down loaders and seeders. Also most are likely not cable cutters so they provide a fair bit of monthly recurring income from subscriber packages. So lets see, you can fight the music and movie industries and continue to make a boat load of money a month off of each and every customer or you can kick them at the whim of a group of greedy no talent scum bags and lose a significant chunk of your revenue stream. Wow really hard choice there for the internet providers.
If it is established that in order to avoid liability, providers must disconnect their customers after a certain number of allegations of infringement (because let's face it, it's rarely going to be practical to determine the factual or legal basis of these alleged infringements), then a new business model is opened up for copyright trolls. If they can obtain lists of email addresses of consumers, then they could send letters to those consumers directly, threatening to send a notice of infringement to their ISP unless a certain amount of money is paid. It would often be in consumers' interest to pay up, to avoid the hassle of disconnection from the internet.
Or they could send the letter to the ISP directly, and come up with some mechanism to pressure consumers into giving them money to avoid future notices or to somehow get the original notice rescinded. People won't know whether the activity really came from their IP address or not (e.g. their router might have been hacked), and it won't matter since it will hardly ever be worthwhile to bring it to court.
The threat of taking people to court isn't usually credible, but if a disconnection policy is in place, the threat of disconnection will be very credible. So the trolling business becomes much more lucrative due to higher rates of response. And what are the rules, if any, on sending multiple separate notices for infringements that occurred on the same date? Suppose someone's computer is hacked or they start using a file-sharing application, and they download multiple files on the same day. Could a legal firm send multiple separate notices to the same individual, triggering the disconnection policies of their ISP right away unless the individual were to pay up? It seems very possible.
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The whole idea of the service provider being responsible is bullshit. The provide the service, they do not control what it connects to or what connects to it. Want legal recourse then sue the customer, prove you case and than the service provider can act. No one can make empty claim and demand the service provider than pay the legal case of proving it occurred in order to justify breaking contract. Until it is proven in a court of law there is no action that can be taken with regard to breaking of the contract. That is quite clear cut and just shows the corruption of the court and judge in question, clearly shows signs of a pay to get elected, pay for the results you want, corrupt legal system.
The claim is question is one of, "We don't need to prove shit, we say so and you are guilty and owe us tens of thousands of dollars", this the shifted to the service provider because, yeah, making claims of tens of thousands of dollars with shitty circumstantial evidence, doesn't work. So corrupt courts, allowing really shitty verdicts and forcing appeals, and more court costs.
They are bound to lose because any ISP must consider how this percent for copyright infringement could spread to real criminal cases and they could become liable for them as well, with bad precedent set (think terrorist communications and holding ISPs liable for aiding terrorism, which means staff and management would become criminally liable).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen