Record Labels File 'Billion Dollar' Piracy Lawsuit Against ISP Cox (torrentfreak.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: This week Cox's problems doubled after a group of high profile record labels filed a new piracy liability lawsuit against the Internet provider. Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Music, Universal Music, Warner Bros Records, and several others accuse the company of turning a blind eye to pirating subscribers. The labels argue that Cox has knowingly contributed to the piracy activities of its subscribers and that it substantially profited from this activity. All at the expense of the record labels and other rightsholders. "Indeed, for years, Cox deliberately refused to take reasonable measures to curb its customers from using its Internet services to infringe on others' copyrights -- even once Cox became aware of particular customers engaging in specific, repeated acts of infringement," the complaint reads. To stop the infringing activities, the music companies sent hundreds of thousands of notices to the Internet provider. This didn't help much, they claim, noting that Cox actively limited the number of notices it processed.

"Rather than working with Plaintiffs to curb this massive infringement, Cox unilaterally imposed an arbitrary cap on the number of infringement notices it would accept from copyright holders, thereby willfully blinding itself to any of its subscribers' infringements that exceeded its 'cap.'" Cox has previously stressed that it implemented a "thirteen-strike policy" to deal with the issue. According to the record labels, it is clear that Cox intentionally ignored these repeated copyright infringements. As such, they believe that the ISP is liable for both contributory and vicarious copyright infringement. As compensation for the claimed losses, the companies demand statutory or actual damages, as well as coverage for their attorney fees and other costs. Since the complaint lists over 10,000 musical works, and there's a statutory maximum of $150,000 per work, the case could in theory cost Cox more than $1.5 billion.

Comments

Countersuit

[orlanz]

I hope Cox counter sues for all the money they take from their customers and shareholders to protect the music industry's decrepit business model.

The cost of processing those requests, the monies wasted with erroneous requests, and the cost of defending their policies.

Re:Countersuit

[Greyfox]

Yeah. The engineering effort of supporting DRM that has already been broken by some wiseass kid in Sweden is astronomical. Among other things, it makes automated testing of all the different ways video can be delivered incredibly difficult. This has an impact on customer satisfaction when bugs slip through the build process, on development costs of those delivery methods themselves and in the requirement to hire more manual testers in order to verify that mobile devices and set top boxes work at all before they're shipped out the door.

And that doesn't even begin to cover consumer frustration when none of their AV equipment works with any of their other AV equipment. Or when a customer has to maintain a relationship with 5 different media delivery companies in order to access all the content they've purchased.

I could make a pretty good argument that the AA's have cost the legitimate content delivery industry billions of dollars. Their rabid defense of profits has the opposite effect that the various IP laws have been set up to encourage -- stifling innovation and creativity of content producers and delivery companies. Not that anything can really be done about it until the the public is willing to have what is really a pretty boring discussion about the sad state of IP law and how it should be fixed.

Besides, don't they already have a law that says they don't need to police their own user base as long as they take down content when notified about it?

DMCA provides safe harbor...

[KJ Hrim]

So, they love the DMCA (I believe that's part of this filing...). but, they hate the DMCA because "pass through" or "facilitators" are enabling theft. What most people don't realize is that for the past couple years all ISP's have been pushing IPv6 to the home. The addresses are static, and unless you are taking fairly drastic measures broadband users are not anonymous. With static IP addressing, I'm not sure what this complaint is about.

Re:Cox literally said "F the dmca!!!"

[BlueStrat]

According to the complaint, Cox chose not to follow the DMCA requirements for safe harbor, and literally wrote "f the dmca!!!"

I'm sure Cox has their side of the story, but they already told the side of the story in court and after hearing thier side the judge already ruled that they did not in fact implement a reasonable policy.

One action Cox could take would be to just say "OK, fine, we'll pay" and just switch it all off and close the doors. Tomorrow. Everything shut off. Wipe all customer account and company data. All the servers, switches, routers, peering points, everything wiped clean (oblig. "like with a cloth?"), and sell all that essential major-capital-investment-level hardware at fire-sale prices. Place the money in an escrow to pay against the "billions" the labels and studios claim they owe. Millions of customers suddenly without internet, not consuming the content cartel's products (or anyone else's like FB, Amazon, etc that sell products and services over the 'net as well), and without even the hardware or personnel left in place for a court to conceivably be able to effectively order service turned back on all because of Congress, the courts, and the RIAA/MPAA.

Let everyone involved experience the consequences of *full* ISP DMCA and "forever minus a day" copyright law compliance.

Sometimes, the most effective strategy is to give your enemy *exactly* what they want in spades.

Strat