Slashdot Mirror
Music Labels Sue Charter, Complain That High Internet Speeds Fuel Piracy (arstechnica.com)
The music industry is suing Charter Communications, claiming that the cable Internet provider profits from music piracy by failing to terminate the accounts of subscribers who illegally download copyrighted songs. The lawsuit also complains that Charter helps its subscribers pirate music by selling packages with higher Internet speeds. Ars Technica reports: While the act of providing higher Internet speeds clearly isn't a violation of any law, ISPs can be held liable for their users' copyright infringement if the ISPs repeatedly fail to disconnect repeat infringers. The top music labelsâ"Sony, Universal, Warner, and their various subsidiariesâ"sued Charter Friday in a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Colorado. While Charter has a copyright policy that says repeat copyright infringers may be disconnected, Charter has failed to disconnect those repeat infringers in practice, the complaint said: "Despite these alleged policies, and despite receiving hundreds of thousands of infringement notices from Plaintiffs, as well as thousands of similar notices from other copyright owners, Charter knowingly permitted specifically identified repeat infringers to continue to use its network to infringe. Rather than disconnect the Internet access of blatant repeat infringers to curtail their infringement, Charter knowingly continued to provide these subscribers with the Internet access that enabled them to continue to illegally download or distribute Plaintiffs' copyrighted works unabated. Charter's provision of high-speed Internet service to known infringers materially contributed to these direct infringements."
The complaint accuses Charter of contributory copyright infringement and vicarious copyright infringement. Music labels asked for statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each work infringed or for actual damages including any profit Charter allegedly made from allowing piracy. The complaint focuses on alleged violations between March 24, 2013 and May 17, 2016. During that time, plaintiffs say they sent infringement notices to Charter that "advised Charter of its subscribers' blatant and systematic use of Charter's Internet service to illegally download, copy, and distribute Plaintiffs' copyrighted music through BitTorrent and other online file-sharing services." The music industry's complaint repeatedly focused on BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer networks, saying that "online piracy committed via BitTorrent is stunning in nature, speed, and scope."
The complaint accuses Charter of contributory copyright infringement and vicarious copyright infringement. Music labels asked for statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each work infringed or for actual damages including any profit Charter allegedly made from allowing piracy. The complaint focuses on alleged violations between March 24, 2013 and May 17, 2016. During that time, plaintiffs say they sent infringement notices to Charter that "advised Charter of its subscribers' blatant and systematic use of Charter's Internet service to illegally download, copy, and distribute Plaintiffs' copyrighted music through BitTorrent and other online file-sharing services." The music industry's complaint repeatedly focused on BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer networks, saying that "online piracy committed via BitTorrent is stunning in nature, speed, and scope."
We need to sue music labels for trying to sell annoying thumping noises as "music".
I wonder if the music labels still consider anything over 56k to be "high speed", as any internet connection capable of streaming acceptable video at SDTV resolutions, much less HDTV, makes downloading audio, which is generally about 1% of a video stream, trivial.
Even with just a megabit connection, I could download months worth of audio traffic in a single day.
But then, music labels still haven't figured out:
1. They need to make buying music from them convenient.
2. They can't charge prices higher than video content producers.
It's crazy that buying the soundtrack to a movie often costs more than the movie.
I don't read AC A human right
I don't buy music from major labels anymore. Not that they sell anything worth listening to, anyway. If it can't be found on Bandcamp, or an indie label, it's probably not even worth listening to these days.
Regular folks can't even bring a suit against a company like Experian, which they can't even boycott, and who loses their information. Because there's no damage to show. And, somehow these clowns can get this lawsuit off the ground!?
CAPTCHA: defraud
No, the first one is also batshit crazy. Or will Music Labels be on the hook for people who listen to their music that advocate doing drugs, selling them, or killing people and then one person does all the above over a period of time? The Music Labels can already go after downloaders if they want. Presumably part of their complaint is Charter isn't doing enough to preemptively police its customers, but then see above about people shooting people; we don't hold music labels to the standard of policing its customers either. That's literally the job of police and for civil matters the courts over the actors actually involved. Now, if they could prove Charter was complicit in aiding them through intent, that'd be a whole other matter.
fail to disconnect repeat infringes did a court prove that they are infringes?
...and we're all being played. Has anyone verified the court filing? (No, I didn't RTFA, just skimmed the summary.)
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
The music labels have decided to sue the US postal service for still delivering packages sent by infringers who mailed copied CDs. Music labels say priority mail enablles the CDs to be shared even more rapidly.
You can easily find a direct download that isn't traceable of 99% of musics these days... Not to mention you can simply rip the audio from a youtube video.
ISPs are required by the DMCA to have a repeat infringer termination policy and to follow that policy. The exact subtext that lays out this requirement reads: "[for an ISP to be eligible for limited liability status]...it must adopt and reasonably implement a policy of terminating in appropriate circumstances the accounts of subscribers who are repeat infringers," I propose this as a layman's version of that policy:
"If a court of law issues multiple judgments (or multiple counts in a single judgment) against you that find you guilty of copyright infringement, and finds that those acts of copyright infringement were performed while directly using our services for access, your high-speed internet account with us will be terminated immediately. DMCA takedown notices are considered to be unproven allegations and will not be treated as proof of infringement without the previously mentioned court order being provided."
This appropriately balances the interests of the rightsholders and the alleged infringers while following the requirement set forth in the DMCA. A DMCA takedown notice has never constituted proof of infringement; they exist to have allegedly infringing content taken down quickly and a process exists by which the affected person can challenge the notice and force the rightsholders into court if they still want it taken down. The entire problem here is that DMCA takedown notices are being treated as having equal legal weight to a court judgment of copyright infringement when that's clearly not the case.
I wish someone would email this suggestion to the ISPs so they could implement it and make this stupid crap go away already. If the ISPs did this, rightsholders would be forced to support their allegations in court to disconnect alleged infringers rather than expecting their completely unproven and potentially baseless say-so to automatically result in a permanent disconnection.
Music Labels Sue Charter, Complain That High Internet Speeds Fuel Piracy
Clearly they've never had Charter as a service provider.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
... repeat infringers ...
Why in simple hell didn't they go after those individuals?
ISPs and the Internet infrastructure need to be classified as a utility.
By the music industry's logic, they could also sue electric companies for powering pirate-enabling devices, right?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Actually, in the meaning of copyright infringement, perhaps since 1603 and the 1886 Berne convention mentioned it by name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
What has change is that "piracy" meant for profit copyright infringement until recently when referring to peer to peer sharing.
Me, I was taught that sharing was good and showed a positive character.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Sorry, you can not illegally download. By law, the uploader, is claiming copyright, illegally, you are not responsible for their actions as a downloader, they claim right to do so, you access that content based upon their claim. The greater the bandwidth the cheaper it is to distribute content, 'THE CHEAPER IT IS TO SELF PUBLISH', so the laws of competition demand mass access to mass bandwidth to actively promote the most competitive form of publication, self publication, technically failure to do so would go against constitutional demands, EQUALITY OF ACCESS.
If Charter attempts to control the content in any way beyond the requirements of law, they can be sued for failing to do so properly, however if they do not transmit content, just bits per second, and only act to control those bits as required by law ie they claim ZERO control of content and only transmit bits, they can not be sued. There is no sound economic reason for them to have that content control hardware and labour in place, it places them in extreme legal jeopardy and represents an extremely anti-competitive practice with the clear intent to shut down public access to the internet by the corrupt application of legally jeopardy with regards to the control of bits, rather than the control of content.
There is a right for the public to demand that the digital highway be free of denial, control and manipulation of access, to favour the few at the public's expense, and any attempts to do so will be at the political expense of those corrupt individuals who attempt it and especially those who ineptly succeed for a short time.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen