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EFF: The Music Industry Shouldn't Be Able To Cut Off Your Internet Access (eff.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electronic Frontier Foundation: No one should have to fear losing their internet connection because of unfounded accusations. But some rights holders want to use copyright law to force your Internet service provider (ISP) to cut off your access whenever they say so, and in a case the Washington Post called "the copyright case that should worry all Internet providers," they're hoping the courts will help them. We first wrote about this case -- BMG v. Cox Communications -- when it was filed back in 2014, and last month, EFF, Public Knowledge (PK), and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) urged the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to overturn a ruling that ISP Cox Communications was liable for copyright infringement. EFF, PK and CDT advised the court to consider the importance of Internet access in daily life in determining when copyright law requires an ISP to cut off someone's Internet subscription. The case turns in part on a provision in copyright law that gives internet intermediaries a safe harbor -- legal protection against some copyright infringement lawsuits -- provided they follow certain procedures. Online platforms like Facebook and YouTube, along with other internet intermediaries, have to "reasonably implement" a policy for terminating "subscribers and account holders" that are "repeat infringers" in "appropriate circumstances." But given the importance of Internet access, the circumstances where it's appropriate to cut off a home Internet subscription entirely are few and far between. The law as written is flexible enough that providers can design and implement policies that make sense for the nature of their service and their subscribers' circumstances. A repeat infringer policy for the company that provides your link to the Internet as a whole should take into account the essential nature of internet access and the severe harm caused by disconnection. But music publisher BMG wants to use this provision to force ISPs to become tougher enforcers of copyright law. According to BMG, ISPs should be required both to forward rights holders' threatening demand letters to their subscribers and terminate a subscriber's Internet access whenever rights holders allege that person has repeatedly violated copyright law. A subscriber is a "repeat infringer" and subject to termination, they argue, whenever they say so. Cox's appeal of the ruling raises two very important issues: (1) Who should be considered a "repeat infringer" who should be cut off from the Internet, and (2) whether ISPs must either cede to rights holders' demands or monitor their subscribers' internet habits to avoid liability. Slashdot reader waspleg adds: Two landmark Supreme Court cases, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., and Sony Corp. of America v. Universal Studios made clear that if a service is capable of significant lawful uses, and the provider doesn't actively encourage users to commit copyright infringement, the provider shouldn't be held responsible when someone nonetheless uses the service unlawfully.
Repeat offenders should be cut off but "accused"??? What about convicted!
I worry that the music/film industry can have the power to just accuse someone and have their internet cut off with out independent proof to identify the particular offender.
This could be considered a method of voter suppression because many voters use the internet for news and to investigate candidate positions.
Hmm, I wonder how many copyright infringement lawsuits the big labels have faced? Could they be considered a "repeat infringer" based on those?
If not, why does it apply to normal people who know little to nothing about copyright law, but not to sophisticated parties with many lawyers who reasonably should know their own business?
The copyright holders want to use restriction to internet access as a club, instead of a surgical knife. Given the importance of the internet in daily life, especially given its increased importance and utility to the disabled and elderly (I'm a housebound disabled woman who uses the internet to do things like pay my bills, order grocery deliveries, and not go insane from a complete lack of social interaction), a sane response would be "if someone uses torrents to infringe copyright, block their access to torrents", "if someone uses Usenet to ...", etc etc. But these wankers of course could never accept any sanely measured response like this because these are the people who sue for ONE MILLION DOLLARS! for downloading/uploading a single mp3, and so of course they want the situation to be as disproportionately punitive as possible. Also, while I pay for media when I can (that being somewhat limited due to the low income which comes with being unable to work), even that which I can afford to pay for I generally also download an unDRMed (i.e. "pirated") version of because the various ways I need to use my media player of choice, VLC for the record, just to ensure things like access to subtitles i.e. "captions" in Americanese (even filthy "pirate" subtitles, a nice side effect of VLC also being choosing font style/size so subtitles are about half-by-height and a quarter-by-width the ABSURDLY HUGE FONT SIZE you find on DVDs and Blu-rays... yes, I use memetastic Impact-like fonts for that, except less ugly, so perhaps Trektastic LCARS-like is a better term), to ensure those subtitles have an offset of about 650ms after the relevant line begins (don't even ask me to get into the complex reasons why that breaks my brain less and increases accessibility, just trust it does), proper keyboard shortcuts for skipping back and forth a few seconds (cognitive issues sometimes make me need to repeat a line two or five times to get my brain to absorb it and I am not about to screw around with an imprecise and cumbersome cursor-based time bar) and various other ways in which I need to ensure my media player is accessible. Plus I do apologise that about 60% of this post went on a wee tangent, but that's what happens when something gets me started about the various ways people forget or dismiss accessibility for the disabled!