Comcast Refusing To Comply With Piracy Subpoenas 224
New submitter nbacon writes with news that Comcast, apparently tired of the endless BitTorrent-related piracy lawsuits, has stopped complying with subpoena requests, much to the chagrin of rightsholders. From the article:
"Initially Comcast complied with these subpoenas, but an ongoing battle in the Illinois District Court shows that the company changed its tune recently. Instead of handing over subscriber info, Comcast asked the court to quash the subpoenas. Among other things, the ISP argued that the court doesn’t have jurisdiction over all defendants, because many don’t live in the district in which they are being sued. The company also argues that the copyright holders have no grounds to join this many defendants in one lawsuit. The real kicker, however, comes with the third argument. Here, Comcast accuses the copyright holders of a copyright shakedown, exploiting the court to coerce defendants into paying settlements."
Re:The Twilight Zone (Score:5, Informative)
P.S. I just noticed all four companies that Comcast is saying "no" to are pornography companies. I wonder what the downloaders acquired which made them targets for extortionate letters?
While it's nice that Comcast is standing up.... (Score:5, Informative)
While it's nice that Comcast is standing up to them, if you read through you'll find that it's four porn companies. In other words, they're not standing up (in this case, at least) to any of the MAFIAA members.
Re:The Twilight Zone (Score:5, Informative)
fightcopyrighttrolls.com is a good site for finding out what exactly has been going on. Specificyally, yes, this has been a copyright shakedown in which the companies involved have almost never actually taken anyone to court. They've been filing lawsuits with hundreds or thousands of defendants and mailing them threatening letters regarding how embarassing it would be to have their name publicly associated with a lawsuit regarding this type of content. If they drag it out long enough, many people don't know or are to scared to fight it and settle out for 2,500 or so a piece. Anyone who fights back, or in many cases simply ignores them is eventually dropped from the lawsuit.
Some of the site owners have been bragging that they made more from the lawsuit settlements than all their memberships fees for the year.
Re:Hooray! Copyright fight becomes meaningful (Score:4, Informative)
That's the best part. A large conglomerate is about to start a nasty internal lawyer fight. Can't wait to see how that is going to pan out.
I broke down and read the article. The people requesting the subpoenas Comcast is fighting are all in the porn industry. So, not RIAA/MPAA. Some high-level executive is probably on the subpoena list :)
Either way, setting the precedent is good.
This is about keeping customers and making money! (Score:5, Informative)
First, and foremost Comcast is in business to make a profit. Make no mistake, if they thought they could profit from turning folks in, they would. Read some of the supporting documents. Verizon (a Comcast competitor) has taken a stand and started saying "Nope" to the courts/. Apparently they have enough legal ground to quash the "track this IP for us" requests. This is a two fold benefit to any ISP. First, you don't have to waste time and money having your staff searching though logs to find out who had that IP at that time. Second, you keep a small segment of your customers who care about such things from running to your competition.
Surely this problem will go away for all ISP's in fairly short order. Once an ISP starts successfully protesting such requests for information, the guys doing the shakedowns will eventually stop wasting time/money making the requests. ISP's will have to pay their lawyers a bit more up front to stop such requests, but eventually this will get them OUT of the business of turning in their subscribers by keeping them out of court. With the profits fading away, the shakedown artists will have abandon the courts and try to come up with some other way to do their shakedowns.
This is NOT over. Verizon, Comcast and others have signed on to start giving their customers warnings on behalf of various copyright holders for various types of infringing content passing over their networks. It's called something like "six strikes" and the providers are hoping it will allow them to generate more business for their "legal" services, by working in cooperation with MPAA and others. I hold now illusions that this "solution" is a good thing for anybody, except perhaps for the ISP's who see it as a marketing opportunity. I wonder if my bittorrent activity (all legal by the way) will draw a warning from Verizon (my ISP). I know they don't like bittorrent and it sure seems that they throttle my connection when I have active transfers, so I'm half expecting to be "warned" about the Ubuntu, Fedora, and CentOS distributions I try to seed over my 25Mbit connection.
They are in this for the profit. If they got a percentage of the shakedown take, you'd bet they be out there actively turning folks in before they got asked. They are simply making a business decision that it will cost less and maximize profits to take this route, and given that there seems to be legal justification now for saying "Nope!" that the court is accepting you can bet this will continue. If alternate legal tactics alter the economics for the ISP's, you can bet they will be turning folks in once more. If it proves profitable to start the "warning" process with their customers, even before a copyright holder complains, you can be the will do that too.