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, Interesting)
The motive is probably based on $$$$$. Comcast probably wastes a lot of money handling these supeona requests, and they finally decided it was cheaper to say "no" then to comply.
Re:Yay Comcast. (Score:3, Interesting)
The enemy of my enemy is my friend - until they give me shitty service again.
Re:Plus 1 for Comcast! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The Twilight Zone (Score:5, Interesting)
"lose safe harbor protection"
Lose what?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act [wikipedia.org]
The Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act is United States federal law that creates a conditional safe harbor for internet service providers (ISPs) by shielding them from potential secondary liability for the infringing acts of others.
If Comcast can be found to be aiding and abetting infringers, they may end up being judged directly responsible for the infringement carried on by others who happen to participate in a bit torrent of infringing media. Safe harbor is granted to ISPs to prevent them from having to monitor every packet transiting their network. However the media industry is sure to claim that comcast became a participant in infringement the minute they stepped in and tried to quash these subpoenas. Watch and see.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The real reason is money. (Score:4, Interesting)
From having worked at a regional ISP I can verify we made money off law enforcement requests because we billed their jurisdiction a reasonable rate. We made money off "real" civil suits because we could roll our bill into a trial. However, how would an ISP make money off an extortion ring, like this situation? We tended to bill kind of on the hefty side, so we'd be getting a significant fraction of the extortion money, which the extorters are not going to like and probably are not going to pay. Further 4000 users a week means hiring and staffing a small department which is not going to be cheap.
Now if the extorters would split the money 50:50 with the ISP, then they'd be talking... if and only if all the ISPs were doing that. 4000 users per week is a pretty large number of customers to send to our competitors, and hilariously maybe they're only sending requests to Comcast and not AT+T and they know it.
Re:Yay Comcast. (Score:5, Interesting)
Bear with me for a second:
Pirating customers are heavy users.
Comcast is implementing usage-based tiered billing.
It is now in Comcast's best interest for customers to pirate, because it means they get more money.
Re:Hats Off (Score:2, Interesting)
I had my doubts about Comcast for some time now, but if they keep this up, they may keep me as a customer.
Eh. Ironically, Comcast has made it pretty clear in other reports that this is about the costs involved with complying with the subpoenas.
So, basically, Comcast is saying "We were fine with fucking over our own customers, but you guys have made it too expensive!".
Which amazes me, mostly because Comcast had a chance to finally appear consumer-friendly, and they go around and make sure everybody knows that they're being consumer friendly THIS time, but they don't really mean it, baby, they haven't changed...
Re:The Twilight Zone (Score:5, Interesting)
When I worked for an small ISP (roughly 80,000 subscribers), subpoenas were not a matter of a minimum wage clerk handling these. All subpoenas were routed to the legal department where they were reviewed. Once legal was satisfied that everything was in order they would hand it to operations to actually retrieve the requested data. Once the request was complete, operations would hand it back to legal who would then give it to the proper authorities.
It is important to note that subpoenas were not rubber stamped by the legal team. They would often deny subpoenas as unrealistic (IP address, connection start time, connection end time, Name, billing address, for every subscriber in every jurisdiction over a two week period) or not possible to fulfill. So I would not be surprised if the cost of fulfilling the subpoenas at Comcast is significant.
Re:The Twilight Zone (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, it also takes lawyers to say yes and hand over the reports.
Saying "no" is a lot cheaper because it involves the lawyer only. Saying "yes" means you need to get technicians involved as well and a bunch of other people, who probably get paid to do other work than look at logs all day. Plus, it's easier for a lawyer to say no to a lawsuit with 4000 John Does on it than to have to look up those 4000 people, retrieve their customer records, sanitize what isn't in the request, and then provide it. Saying no probably takes a lawyer a day to do. Doing the 4,000 lookups... a few days of several people including a lawyer to ensure that the request was fulfilled properly.