Cox Plans To Take Piracy Liability Battle To the Supreme Court (torrentfreak.com) 70
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Cox Communications doesn't believe that ISPs should be held liable for the activities of their pirating subscribers. After a disappointing verdict from a Virginia jury and an unsatisfactory outcome at the Court of Appeals, the internet provider now intends to escalate the matter to the Supreme Court. If the present verdict stands, innocent people risk losing their Internet access, the ISP notes. [...] That's notable, as it would be the first time that a "repeat infringer" case ends up at the highest court United States. Cox asked the court of appeals to also stay its mandate pending its Supreme Court application, as this could steer the legal battle in yet another direction.
According to Cox, the Supreme Court has substantial reasons to take on the case. For one, there are currently conflicting court of appeals rulings on the "material contribution" aspect of copyright infringement. The Supreme Court could give more clarity on when a service, with a myriad of lawful uses, can be held liable for infringers. In addition, Cox also cites the recent 'Twitter vs. Taamneh' Supreme Court ruling, which held that social media platforms aren't liable for terrorists who use their network. While that's not a copyright case, it's relevant for the secondary liability question, the ISP argues. "Though Twitter was not a copyright case, it confronted a directly analogous theory of secondary liability: that social-media platforms, including Twitter and YouTube, could be liable for continuing to provide services to those they knew were using them for illegal purposes," Cox writes.
Finally, Cox notes that the Supreme Court should hear the case because it deals with an issue that's 'exceptionally important' to ISPs as well as the public. If the present verdict stands, Internet providers may be much more likely to terminate Internet access, even if the subscriber is innocent. "This Court's material-contribution standard provides powerful incentives for ISPs of all stripes to swiftly terminate internet services that have been used to infringe -- no matter the universe of lawful uses to which those services are put, or the consequences to innocent, non-infringing people who also use those services. "That is why a chorus of amici urged this Court not to adopt this standard at the panel and en banc stages, and will likely urge the Supreme Court to grant review as well," Cox adds, referring to the support it received from third-parties previously. "Cox hasn't filed a writ of certiorari yet and still has time, as it's due June 17, 2024," notes TorrentFreak. "The intention to go to the Supreme Court would be another reason to halt the new damages trial, according to Cox, but the court of appeals rejected the request."
"This means that the new damages trial can start, even if the case is still pending at the Supreme Court. However, it's clear that this legal battle is far from over yet."
According to Cox, the Supreme Court has substantial reasons to take on the case. For one, there are currently conflicting court of appeals rulings on the "material contribution" aspect of copyright infringement. The Supreme Court could give more clarity on when a service, with a myriad of lawful uses, can be held liable for infringers. In addition, Cox also cites the recent 'Twitter vs. Taamneh' Supreme Court ruling, which held that social media platforms aren't liable for terrorists who use their network. While that's not a copyright case, it's relevant for the secondary liability question, the ISP argues. "Though Twitter was not a copyright case, it confronted a directly analogous theory of secondary liability: that social-media platforms, including Twitter and YouTube, could be liable for continuing to provide services to those they knew were using them for illegal purposes," Cox writes.
Finally, Cox notes that the Supreme Court should hear the case because it deals with an issue that's 'exceptionally important' to ISPs as well as the public. If the present verdict stands, Internet providers may be much more likely to terminate Internet access, even if the subscriber is innocent. "This Court's material-contribution standard provides powerful incentives for ISPs of all stripes to swiftly terminate internet services that have been used to infringe -- no matter the universe of lawful uses to which those services are put, or the consequences to innocent, non-infringing people who also use those services. "That is why a chorus of amici urged this Court not to adopt this standard at the panel and en banc stages, and will likely urge the Supreme Court to grant review as well," Cox adds, referring to the support it received from third-parties previously. "Cox hasn't filed a writ of certiorari yet and still has time, as it's due June 17, 2024," notes TorrentFreak. "The intention to go to the Supreme Court would be another reason to halt the new damages trial, according to Cox, but the court of appeals rejected the request."
"This means that the new damages trial can start, even if the case is still pending at the Supreme Court. However, it's clear that this legal battle is far from over yet."
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
Cox Communications doesn't believe that ISPs should be held liable for the activities of their pirating subscribers.
yea well I dont believe that pirating subscribers should be held liable for their activities
Yea well, #unfair as it may be, people's legal right to demand payment for your use of their products trumps your deeply held beliefs.
Re: shiver me timbers (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Yea well, #unfair as it may be, people's legal right to demand payment for your use of their products trumps your deeply held beliefs.
I have no problem with paying for new content. I have a problem with paying for content that's decades old and should be public domain.
Remember the point of copyright? The creator gets a limited monopoly in exchange for making content public because the printing press made it easy for anyone to make copies. That's why everything copyrighted has a copyright date. After that date, the public is supposed to get that content for free and to be able to make derivative works. Copyright is so long now, conten
Re: (Score:1)
What you originally said amounted to a bold sweeping claim you are entitled to get any and all digital content for free.
i stand by this
Re: (Score:2)
You have that backwards. The copyright date is the year that the copyright starts, not ends. In order to find out when it ends, you take that year, add the number of years copyright lasted in that year and that's when it ends.
Re: (Score:1)
you really blew it that time, didnt ya AC?
Re: (Score:2)
If you actually just demanded the payment instead of wanting some sort of petty legal revenge, people probably would pay for it.
Some would gladly if it's a product that is not available on their country or anywhere as well.
Re: (Score:2)
Pieces of nine: Parity error
Re: (Score:2)
Cox Communications doesn't believe that ISPs should be held liable for the activities of their pirating subscribers.
yea well I dont believe that pirating subscribers should be held liable for their activities
I don't believe anyone who uses FOSS in their for-profit software should be held liable for their activities.
pirating subscribers should have an court say they (Score:3)
pirating subscribers should have an court say they are pirating and not some bot with weak evidence. Also must be able to have fair use per the laws and not what some content maker says what is fair use.
Re: (Score:1)
On point dude. You've nailed one of Trump's primary beliefs - that he's not responsible for anything he did. That includes the related corollary that other people are responsible for things they didn't do.
utilities are not liable and have must service law (Score:5, Insightful)
utilities are not liable and have must service laws the really limit when they can cut some one off.
Now internet services may need to become one. Before we get to issues like
an city getting cut off for someone useing free wifi for piracy?
an collage getting cut off?
Can they cut off land line phone as part of the ISP service?
an full building getting cut off due to one tenant doing piracy.
Also the big issue of guilty till proven innocent
Re: (Score:1)
See I think ALL of those events would be WONDERFUL outcomes. I really hope the courts rule against COX here on this issue.
Stuff like that is what it will take to get real IP reform done and real sense applied to enforcement.
A good example is why is the FBI running around looking for copyright violations. Nobody for the FBI on down to local sheriff has ever preemptively come to me a said 'hey are you missing any property? I could launch a dragnet at tax payer expense to go look for it!" Heck you can barely g
Re:utilities are not liable and have must service (Score:4, Insightful)
Stuff like that is what it will take to get real IP reform done and real sense applied to enforcement.
Really got drunk on the kool-aid this morning didn't you? /s
You know damn well that won't be the result. If the government starts banning people's ability to communicate, there's not going to be any changes what so ever. Especially given that most of the organizational efforts necessary to effect change are often made on the to be banned means of communication in the modern era. It would effectively cut off those affected (and thus have the grounds to sue) from each other. Turning them into complete social pariahs. Assuming they don't flat out loose their livelihoods over it.
The best way to get real meaningful change is the let the IP industry inconvenience a whole lot of people with their over zealous actions.
The same government that has the FBI "running around and proactively making sure nobody hosting to many Metallica MP3s", actively provides material and political support for genocide in other countries, threatens it's citizenry and employees on a regular basis with "government shutdowns", flat out refuses to maintain it's infrastructure until it kills someone important, loves child labor, starves children trapped in their state mandated school systems, actively kills it's own citizens rather than uphold due process, etc. is suddenly going to care about their donors "inconveniencing" the public by prohibiting their ability to communicate??? I think you are giving the government far too much credit that it does not deserve.
Re: (Score:2)
It would effectively cut off those affected (and thus have the grounds to sue) from each other. Turning them into complete social pariahs.
People fall into this state every day by the hundreds. It is by economic necessity. Those people can't contribute enough to society in the way society demands so we push them out into the wilderness and have people hunt them with hammers and guns. I can't wait to become homeless again. Next hospital visit?
Re: (Score:2)
Can they cut off land line phone as part of the ISP service?
In the US, I doubt it due to laws related around 911. I wonder if your only phone is a COMCAST Phone if those laws would revent COMCAST from cutting your internet ?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
highways are state owned, Electric and Water are (Score:2)
highways are state owned, Electric and Water are utilities. ISP are not.
Now one good thing about makeing them utilities is that CAPS will have to go away or they will forced to have the same type of meters that Electric and Water have.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
people own cars and it's not like Tesla is liable when you deal drugs out of one.
Re: (Score:2)
people own cars and it's not like Tesla is liable when you deal drugs out of one.
You don't seem too good at understanding parallels.
Re: (Score:2)
cox is running the network. Tesla does not own / maintain the road you are driving on.
So you are say that dell is at fault if you run pirated software on an dell.
Re: (Score:2)
Not if there's a federal law that explicitly declares that middlemen are liable if they don't comply with the DMCA process, while there isn't a federal law saying car manufacturers are liable for speeding.
You might be looking at the underlying principles and making common sense value judgements, instead of reading what the law says.
This is ultimately why politics exists: to influence what the law is, in an attempt
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
The deal with the DMCA is that the service provider is not liable for infringement IF it takes prompt corrective action when notified by the copyright holder. IIRC, Cox was basically glad-handing the folks who filed DMCA take downs and doing nothing at all about the infringing customers. Consequently, they lost the DMCA's liability shield. Naturally this upsets them. But I don't think they have a viable appeal.
Re: (Score:2)
COX weren't hosting the content. They just provide transit services. The seeder of the torrent was hosting it. The DMCA notice should have gone to the subscriber. If you stick a movie in an S3 bucket, the DMCA notice will go to AWS, not Amazon's ISP.
Re: (Score:2)
If you make the case that you're not an participant in the activity then you can't be a participant. Cox was shielding the identities of the offending customers. That made them an active participant.
In other words, if you get a DMCA notice you can respond, "No, that should have gone to so-and-so with this contact information."
When you say, "Sorry, we're not the right people to contact. And no, we won't tell you who is paying us for that IP address," that doesn't work out in court. It obstructs the process.
Re: (Score:2)
That's what discovery is for. They should sue the John Doe at IP address a.b.c.d and then subpoena the account information.
Re: (Score:2)
Multiple courts have considered and disagreed with that assessment, including the Cox court. The last non-anonymous entity in the chain is the one responsible for enforcing the DMCA takedown notices.
Re: (Score:2)
The true issue here is that intent can not be known by the ISP. Is a particular stream of data harmful? How does an ISP know? All it knows are streams of data are happening. The only way for an ISP to actually KNOW what a person is doing is to monitor their actions on the device that is initiating the streams... and even then, the behavior might still be legal and merely appear to be illegal. Identifying behaviors automatically is not really in the realm of AI yet. Humans get it wrong an awful lot too.
Re: (Score:1)
an city
an collage
an full building
Blow up the bridge! (Score:2)
Should any copyright infringer drive over it FFS!
Obligatory (Score:2)
Digital Rights Management [xkcd.com]
--
The revolution will not be streamed. [But it will be torrented. - Ed.]
Re: (Score:1)
Agreed. I use torrents because streaming services scramble their packets (hello Netflix) which means that my Raspberry Pi Kodi box won't play it.
Also, titles on streaming services have a bad habit of disappearing down The Memory Hole[tm] which means that if I want to watch it again, I'm out of luck--and if a title is still available, I have to waste bandwidth for an encore performance. This is bad for the health of the internet at large.
Not to mention that because of DRM, it is difficult and inconvenien
This isn't like the social media censorship cases (Score:2)
The defendant in this case isn't a social media company that makes money by placing advertisements on content written by its subscribers. Cox is a national ISP that provides connectivity. [Disclaimer: I am a long-time Cox customer]. Several major record labels sued Cox because it didn't take strong enough measures to remove copyright repeat offenders, in their opinion. Cox lost that case in a jury trial, but the damage award of $1 billion (!) was later overturned on appeal. Cox remains on the hook for "cont
Re: (Score:3)
I've been accused of file sharing some porn film - it was at least 10 years ago - but proving a negative turned out to be impossible with the legal situation the way it was then, all I could do was limit the damage. My ISP did not drop me, although I later dropped them because I was still furious about the way things went down. I live in a decent sized city and have a choice when it comes to selecting an ISP.
Imagine a situation where an ISP is forced to drop customers based on data which can be spoofed, a
just go an public Library for online where they ca (Score:2)
just go an public Library for online where they can't filter / must have an "unblocking" option.
did an court say it was copyright infringement or (Score:2)
did an court say it was copyright infringement or just some record label say cut it off now and now wait for an full trail to say it's copyright infringement?
Were there DMCA notices? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's unclear from the articles whether or not this happened: did the record labels send DMCA notices to Cox, which Cox blew off (thereby becoming liable in place of the original suspected infringer)? Or did the record labels just sue 'em first?
Prior to 1998 they wouldn't have been liable (just like Western Digital and Seagate aren't liable for whatever I may be suspected of doing) but DMCA makes hosting services (and networks? hmm...) a special case, unlike power utilities, computer equipment manufacturers, etc.
Re: (Score:1)
I'm not sure what you think a DMCA notice is, but it doesn't apply in this case. A DMCA notice is only sent to a service provider to take content down, it's not used for pursuing a legal case against someone for copyright infringement. A person's internet connection isn't content. You can't send a DMCA takedown notice in this case.
Re: (Score:2)
The story is light on details so I ass/u/me some things. The copyright infringement was likely due to torrents, i.e. from the internet's point of view, addresses owned by Cox were publishing/hosting content (under the hood: really Cox's customers seeding torrents).
So if I were an MPAA/RIAA -member company, I'd send Cox a DMCA notice ("Cox, stop sharing my copyrighted work") which really means "Cut that customer off or otherwise make them stop, or else get a DMCA counternotice from them, so I can go after th
Re: (Score:2)
The case revolves around subscribers who received repeated notices but they allegedly never stopped their infringements and cox never disconnected them. This was a problem because the DMCA has language about repeat infringement, strikes, and removal/disconnection but doesn't specify what qualifies as infringement or how many strikes is too many.
The jury seemed to decide that accusations qualify as infringement, and whatever number of strikes was considered "reasonable" was largely ignored since cox alleged
Re: (Score:2)
However regrettable, it's easy to understand how that can happen.
The jury could have just been told testimony that "we saw xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx was seeding our movie" (with screenshots of MPAA's torrent client showing a seeder at that address and the packets they got from that address correctly matching the torrent's checksum). Meanwhile, Cox wouldn't have any evidence refuting it (even though the assertion isn't proven; the "screenshots" could ha
Easy win (Score:2)
Cox doesn't have the $$$ (Score:2)
The argument doesn't matter if you don't have the $$$ to bribe enough of the judges on the court. The media industry has the money and don't think that their artists' "left" leaning politics will undo the owners bribes.
I'm going to be waiting on news of Thomas's free Disney cruises...
infringement vs criminal activity (Score:2)
Lots of crime happens over internet connections, I think swatting is a good example. When someone does repeat swatting over their internet connection is the ISP liable? No, and we should apply the same standard to infringement.
utilities are not liable for criminal activity (Score:2)
utilities are not liable for criminal activity.
and multi tenant building / cases can't not lead to the full building being cut off when just one tenant may have an pot farm in the building.
I don't think you can cuff an FULL data center when just one tenant is hosting pirated content.
Re: (Score:2)
Why this civil matter then?
orly? (Score:4, Insightful)
Pick a lane (Score:1)
1) The US claims basic internet is a necessity to function in modern society. You canâ(TM)t simply deny them that supposed right regardless of an issue with a company.. can you?
2) ISP shouldnâ(TM)t police their users unless they are allowed to intercept the traffic.
3) Social media can and should be liable if its messaging system is used for public facing crazies, internal messaging not so much.
4) DMCA is sometimes nuts. We all read plenty of stories where the pirate police went too far or shutdown
Re: (Score:2)
make internet an utility with.
State controlled rates and fees like with other utilitys
State controlled metering like with other utilitys
State controlled must service rules so no billing big install fees over $25,000+ to install (when neighbors have service, the isp has an junction box across the street and the website says that your address can get service)
utilitys do not really police their users for usage and the courts / laws really limit what they can cut you off for.
and make it so that DMCA goes direct
DMCA notices are not at the jury court level of (Score:2)
DMCA notices are not at the jury court level of standard of evidence.
Now maybe if the end users had an full trail with all the rights then after an judge / jury says so then you can cut people off.
Re: (Score:2)
They are if you contest them and then get sued.
Monitoring Would Require Breech of Privacy (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
it would require them to spy on their clients, a breech of trust and privacy
So I'm guessing you never received a "We saw you were torrenting this movie..." letter from Comcast or Charter/Spectrum?
They absolutely already do this across the board. It's not illegal, and is actively encouraged by the government because they can then subpoena anything they snooped on very easily without even telling you.
Re: (Score:2)
In the same way, should the government be responsible if their roads carried thugs?
License plate readers, RFID readers in overpasses (tires), surveillance cameras, etc are all employed on the roads along with a police presence that constantly patrols them. You freedom of speech will be monitored and censored just like your freedom of movement. Deal with it.
Makes sense (Score:2)
If broadband is going to be a "right" that everyone should have access to, and the government is going to regulate it like a utility, they really shouldn't be on the hook for something someone does on that connection any more than the power company is liable for someone building a pipe bomb with a drill press they powered.
Re: (Score:2)
As much as I hate giant corporations, I kind of agree with them on this one. If broadband is going to be a "right" that everyone should have access to, and the government is going to regulate it like a utility, they really shouldn't be on the hook for something someone does on that connection any more than the power company is liable for someone building a pipe bomb with a drill press they powered.
I would agree with you since the logic could be extended to say (for example):
"The electric company can be found liable for you running a 24x7 lit-up 'drug house' that creates deadly forms of narcotics."
Or, "The trash company could be found liable for you dumping illegal and toxic waste into your trash bin that the trash company picks up every week."
Or, "The petrol station could be found liable for selling you the petrol that fueled the car that you street-raced and then killed an innocent bystander while y
'World owes me' (Score:2)
When a terrorist posts on the internet, a corporation doesn't lose revenue (according to Hollywood accounting). When a terrorist bombs a street parade, a corporation doesn't lose money (according to Hollywood accounting). At least, a corporation hasn't convinced a jury that selling merchandise to a terrorist is the legal alternative.
The government hasn't arrested a corporation under civil forfeiture, hasn't sentenced a corporation to death under felony homicide. It's easy to see who has more rights her