Cox gets massively shafted - Jury awards music industry 1 billion dollars from Cox over copyright infringers

[Trik'Stari]

6 hours ago, handymanshandle said:

Why hasn't copyright law been rewritten? Oh right, because corporations own copyright law.

I wouldn't be so sure, has anyone checked?

 

Has anyone tried?

 

Honestly, fuck these companies. I'd feel some sympathy for them if most of them didn't egregiously abuse the copyright and DMCA system for their own benefit.

 

Yaaaar. Sooner or later, with this kind of shit going on, I feel we'll see an uptick in either thumb drive sales, or optical drives (probably thumb disc drives).

[AngryBeaver]

I have a feeling this will get drawn out as they appeal to a higher court. Piracy sucks, but it isn't the ISP's responsibility to babysit everyone using their service. If you want to address the issue then keep trying to swat down the endless sources of obtaining that content. I mean just because they have an IP address doesn't even mean the user it is currently assigned to is guilty.

 

Do you know how easy it is to gain access to residential wifi without the owners permission? I mean WPA2 is a joke.

[rcmaehl]

2 minutes ago, AngryBeaver said:

Do you know how easy it is to gain access to residential wifi without the owners permission? I mean WPA2 is a joke.

If you mean WPA2 w/WPS or WPA2-TKIP, then yes. WPA2-AES is no joke.

[The1Dickens]

1 hour ago, Donut417 said:

Not illegal when a subpoena is involved. Trust me your better off letting the copy right holder have it. US federal law states that piracy is up to 5 years in prison and or a $250,000 or maybe it’s a $500,000 fine. Most of the time copy right holders will settle for thousands. 

Pretty sure this is still incorrect, but I'm not 100 per cent, and I'm just going to drive myself mad because I have strong feelings against the RIAA.

 

As for just folding to the copyright holder, I agree for most cases.

[AngryBeaver]

21 minutes ago, rcmaehl said:

If you mean WPA2 w/WPS or WPA2-TKIP, then yes. WPA2-AES is no joke.

It isn't the cracking of AES that is important though. It is how easy you can get the 4 way handshake or employ the new no handshake method to cracked the passphrase offline. Now if you are using an enterprise setup this doesn't work, but not many residential connections have a radius server setup for login/cert verification.

[Donut417]

@The1Dickens

 

A subpoena (/səˈpiː.nə/;^[1] also subpœna or supenna) or witness summons is a writ issued by a government agency, most often a court, to compel testimony by a witness or production of evidence under a penalty for failure. There are two common types of subpoena: 
 

That’s from Wikipedia. The fact is it’s a court document. ISPs are legally required to provide info when these are issues or they face penalties. 

[Lurick]

1 hour ago, Caroline said:

Because they're so poor...

The RIAA made ONLY $10 billion dollars. Think of how many jets this could buy their execs with the extra bonuses

[The1Dickens]

28 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

@The1Dickens

 

A subpoena (/səˈpiː.nə/;^[1] also subpœna or supenna) or witness summons is a writ issued by a government agency, most often a court, to compel testimony by a witness or production of evidence under a penalty for failure. There are two common types of subpoena: 
 

That’s from Wikipedia. The fact is it’s a court document. ISPs are legally required to provide info when these are issues or they face penalties. 

No, I get that. I understand what a subpoena is. I am doubtful as to the scope of the subpoena, and who then has access to that information (which should only be the courts, and representatives of the courts for the immediate case). But, again, I could be wrong. And I'll even admit that I am on this.

 

But how it should be handled versus what apparently happened here, which is RIAA said, "John Doe is pirating. Suspend/terminate their account," and Cox responded, "Kick rocks," (essentially), so the RIAA has taken them to court because someone who didn't receive a rightfully-deserved fair trial wasn't punished.

 

The scope of what information a subpoena can take, what is required to issue it, and how it's issued, and served, etc., none of that matters, because it requires a defendant in any case. Either the end-user/customer of Cox, or Cox itself (which I very much doubt they would have ignored it regardless). But as it currently reads, none of that due process was taken. The RIAA simply took Cox to court, because it didn't respond the way the RIAA wanted them to, simply because the RIAA said so. Just like they won that case against the founders of Napster (I think, or maybe it was LImewire?), for something like 14x the global GDP.

[Donut417]

7 minutes ago, The1Dickens said:

he scope of what information a subpoena can take, what is required to issue it, and how it's issued, and served, etc., none of that matters, because it requires a defendant in any case

Thats called an IP address. All the RIAA does it figure out which ISP owns the IP address. Then the ISP supplies the customers information if subpoenaed. Its pretty standard practice. Hear about this happening all the time. From their the customer in question gets their "Trial" or settles out of court. Sobpoena's are much like warrants, you just need a bit of evidence. Showing that some one from an IP address is sharing or downloading copy righted goods is enough. From that the copy right holder then gets the info and decides to try to get them to settle out of court, or takes them to court. OR asks the government to file criminal charges. As piracy falls under both Civil and Criminal. 

 

What im guess is Cox was ignoring subpoena's or at the very least not contacting users to tell them to stop. Most ISP's I have heard will at least suspend your internet until you acknowlege that you are commiting a crime and agree to stop. 

 

Now the issue now a few years back a Federal Court rules on the rights of prisioners having internet access. Im pretty sure they stated that they have the right. Which means that this could very well be over turned at some points. Stating that internet access is a human right. Its hard to say. The only sure thing is that if people continue to pirate then the copy right holders will find ways to push the blame on to someone who can do something. Because sending threatening letters and suing people are not working. But if they can get ISP's held accountable then the ISP's have to become traffic cops. But then VPN use will sky rocket and the copy right holders will be back to square one. At least until VPN's are outlawed. 

[AngryBeaver]

1 hour ago, Donut417 said:

@The1Dickens

 

A subpoena (/səˈpiː.nə/;^[1] also subpœna or supenna) or witness summons is a writ issued by a government agency, most often a court, to compel testimony by a witness or production of evidence under a penalty for failure. There are two common types of subpoena: 
 

That’s from Wikipedia. The fact is it’s a court document. ISPs are legally required to provide info when these are issues or they face penalties. 

So here is what generally happens.

 

People get illegal content via bittorrent without using any way of masking their real IP address. The big copyright holders have people who literally sit there and log all of these IP addresses. They then lookup the IP owner (ISP) and reach out to them directly with a cease and desist. The ISP is then suppose to send that to the person that was using that IP address at the time. The previously rule has been that if you receive 3 of these strikes they terminate your service for (in most cases) about a year.

 

The Copyright holders are always wanting the ISP's to just hand over their customers and the ISP's for the most part will not do so without a warrant. The warrant pretty much never happens because of the agreement above they have with most copyright holders. So I guess the argument is they were not sending over the cease and desist orders or that they were not terminating customers after X amount of times.

 

Not sure how the copyright holders could prove that information. As for the government using a subpoena for that information... if they never collected it then they cannot hand it over. This isn't a Litigation hold type scenario unless they have previously been ordered they had to keep a record of all of this. I feel this is very shaky ground and I am not sure it will hold up to higher court appeals. 

 

The RIAA is greedy as hell and very rarely does the money won from these cases go to the artists and people that produced the content to begin with. On top of that the fine/penalty is nowhere close to inline with the actual offense. The problem here though is that COX 100% will have all of that information as all of the ISP's keep anything they can on us so they can turn around and sell that data. That statistic information is worth a lot of money.

 

In the end Cox should have just cut off the users who got 3+ letters. Chances are that after the 1st or 2nd the user would either stop doing it or get smart enough to use ways they didn't get flagged again. Hell I am guessing a fair bit of these is from a kid or relative in their house doing it without them even knowing. How many parents do you think concern themselves to whether or not their kid is downloading anything that might not be legal?

[AngryBeaver]

17 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

Thats called an IP address. All the RIAA does it figure out which ISP owns the IP address. Then the ISP supplies the customers information if subpoenaed. Its pretty standard practice. Hear about this happening all the time. From their the customer in question gets their "Trial" or settles out of court. Sobpoena's are much like warrants, you just need a bit of evidence. Showing that some one from an IP address is sharing or downloading copy righted goods is enough. From that the copy right holder then gets the info and decides to try to get them to settle out of court, or takes them to court. OR asks the government to file criminal charges. As piracy falls under both Civil and Criminal. 

 

What im guess is Cox was ignoring subpoena's or at the very least not contacting users to tell them to stop. Most ISP's I have heard will at least suspend your internet until you acknowlege that you are commiting a crime and agree to stop. 

 

Now the issue now a few years back a Federal Court rules on the rights of prisioners having internet access. Im pretty sure they stated that they have the right. Which means that this could very well be over turned at some points. Stating that internet access is a human right. Its hard to say. The only sure thing is that if people continue to pirate then the copy right holders will find ways to push the blame on to someone who can do something. Because sending threatening letters and suing people are not working. But if they can get ISP's held accountable then the ISP's have to become traffic cops. But then VPN use will sky rocket and the copy right holders will be back to square one. At least until VPN's are outlawed. 

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2678098/update--judge-rules-riaa-can-t-subpoena-file-trader-information.html

 

An older article, but the RIAA lost the ability to subpoena a users information. They also tried a technique of doing a subpoena of John Does directed at the ISP to attempt to obtain information on the users. This is why the 3 strike policy came in to play. The ISP's agreed to help police the users who were downloading copyright material. This normally case as those cease and desist notices and after 3 strikes your service was terminated.

 

So for the RIAA to get a users information they would need to get a warrant, but without very clear terms of what will be searched, where it will be searched, what the scope and target of the search is... etc. It is hard to get one that doesn't also violate the privacy of innocent people. 

 

 

Now this is not to be confused with a site or service that is doing the same thing. If it is a website or someone running a full blown illegal content website out of their basement then this would be a different scenario and a subpoena would probably be issues. That being said the ISP can still petition the court to squash it.

[Donut417]

6 minutes ago, AngryBeaver said:

but the RIAA lost the ability to subpoena a users information

Well that explains why they are going after Cox then doesnt it. So instead of going after the users they will go after the ISP's. We were probably better off letting them get that information rather they fucking us as a whole. Because big brother is going to start watching everything we do now. 

[AngryBeaver]

4 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

Well that explains why they are going after Cox then doesnt it. So instead of going after the users they will go after the ISP's. We were probably better off letting them get that information rather they fucking us as a whole. Because big brother is going to start watching everything we do now. 

Again though a subpoena can easily be fought. It also has to be very specific. It would to contain the IP address, the file, and the exact time it occurred. It is in the ISP's best interest to fight these requests btw.

[The1Dickens]

13 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

What im guess is Cox was ignoring subpoena's or at the very least not contacting users to tell them to stop. Most ISP's I have heard will at least suspend your internet until you acknowlege that you are commiting a crime and agree to stop.

This would make much more sense, now. A thousand thanks.

[Sauron]

9 hours ago, handymanshandle said:

Why hasn't copyright law been rewritten abolished? Oh right, because corporations own copyright law.

FTFY

[Donut417]

6 minutes ago, Sauron said:

FTFY

Copy Right law is Constitutional law here in the US. Part of the job of the government is to protect peoples work. Not sure if you know the length required to do an admendment to the Constitution? But lets just say in the type of political environment we have in the US, it would be nearly impossible. 

 

 

Article I Section 8

 

"

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow money on the credit of the United States;

To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;

To establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States;

To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures;

To provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States;

To establish post offices and post roads;

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

To constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court;

To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations;

To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;

To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;

To provide and maintain a navy;

To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;

To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

To exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States, and to exercise like authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state in which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings;--And

To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.

"

 

Copyrights are ingrained in to the constution of the US. While they could change the laws on the books, they will never drop the laws. WIth how corporations pump money in to congress, I highly doubt the laws would ever change. 

 

[yolosnail]

8 hours ago, The1Dickens said:

Call me paranoid, but I have a feeling this will result in a stronger push to track and log every step end-users take online, making VPNs all but illegal.

Cries in Snoopers Charter

[Sauron]

6 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

Copy Right law is Constitutional law here in the US. Part of the job of the government is to protect peoples work. Not sure if you know the length required to do an admendment to the Constitution? But lets just say in the type of political environment we have in the US, it would be nearly impossible. 

Yeah, in the political environment where a large part of the senators are in the pockets of corporate lobbies it's impossible.

[Thaldor]

16 minutes ago, AngryBeaver said:

So here is what generally happens.

People get illegal content via bittorrent without using any way of masking their real IP address. The big copyright holders have people who literally sit there and log all of these IP addresses.

There's actually "couple" companies that provide CR holders the data. Most of them circle around guy named Patrick Achache who has build quite an empire around copyrighttrolling with his Guardaley/Maverick Eye/Texcipion/whatever-dormant-company-they-today-use -scheme that started in Germany, got bigger with Dallas Buyer Club in US and has been a huge cancer in EU for years. They collect the IP addresses from bittorrent nodes they uphold and sell for royalties them outward, mostly they use the data themselves by setting up more dormant companies (like Crystal Bay Corporation, Crystalis Entertainment, Interallip LLP, Copyright Collections Ltd (these were creating havoc in Finland at least) and Dallas Buyers Club LLC, Malibu Media (and yes, every single one of these are somehow bound to Patrick Achache or the small circle of people running Guardaley/Maverick Eye/whatever) which one way or another get some P2P-distribution rights for movies/TV-series, they then get some lawfirm to handle the whole scheme in some country (getting the IP-address owner information from courts, send "cease and desist" blackmailing letters (yes, they are blackmailing in this case) to the IP-address owners and in very rare cases to take IP-address owners to court to get some terror-examples (never with criminal case because with criminal case they couldn't ask crazy amounts of money as "compensation for damages" and wouldn't get the terror-effect they are after) and happy fuckfest called copyrighttrolling begins (Article how the fuckfest works).

Just EXTREMELY shady "companies" running EXTREMELY shady software (from which both seem to very oddly change their names once some judge/court demands more proofs than a list of IPs with some other numbers and couple of printouts from their logging software, which are just PCAP headers, the Guardaley/whatever provides printable copies (yes, they are only printed, million times edited, non-proofed copies, they claim to save the data to tapes but somehow magically those tapes are either destroyed or lost while in transit to courts or more likely the case is withdrawn once asked) to their lawyers) with people in the background who are either always "unavailable" or even couple times found to be completely fabricated (sounds like a companies I would buy some information, <- sarcasm, I really wouldn't be surprised if someone actually one day found some ties to some organized crime from their backgrounds).

 

RIAA and other mainly big corporation puppet organizations hop into the bandwagon when they sniff that they could get some random party to pay huge sums for them to make their pile of gold even bigger after they have burned most of their money to lobbying copyrightlaws that we currently have (what were they supposed to pay for some piss poor artists, LoL, nope, at best they pay for the best selling artists some royalties). Most of the time RIAA/MPAA jumps up when someone in right position even coughs to change some IP-law a way that would take even a cent from the mega corporations (Sony Entertainment, Universal, Disney and so on). Usually as long as Mickey Mouse and Elvis stay copyrighted and there isn't a lot of numbers as "compensation" RIAA and MPAA don't even fart that way.

[PhantomJaguarr]

6 hours ago, Founders said:

Hopefully you have an alternative available in your area. Many people don't have an alternative due to the monopolistic way some regions are broken up into zones specific to certain ISP's.    

I'm one of those who don't have another choice unfortunately.  At least it's not Comcast.

[Founders]

3 minutes ago, WhiteJaguar77 said:

I'm one of those who don't have another choice unfortunately.  At least it's not Comcast.

Comcast is pure concentrated evil. 

[amdorintel]

its one thing to lose a court case and have to pay $1B - start shuffeling money around, and divide up or merge aspects of the biz to cut the loses.

 

its one thing to win a court case and be awarded $1B - its a totally another deal collecting your money!

[mr moose]

I like how people forget that copy right holders can only sue when work they own is used without their permission.    Don't want to be sued then don't al;low your business to profit from piracy.

 

16 hours ago, The1Dickens said:

This sounds just outright illegal. If an ISP provides your information to anyone, is that not a breach of privacy? They should only provide your private information to law enforcement in response to a warrant, and shouldn't then be handed off to a private party for any purpose.

 

As bad as Cox is, RIAA just saying "terminate this customer's contract because we suspect them of piracy" is wrong. If they have evidence, they should go through the whole legal process. This is punishment without a trial. And because Cox didn't comply, they are now being sued for being complicit, or worse, primarily responsible? If they have any evidence on specific individuals, enough that they presented it to Cox with the request to terminate an account, they have enough to take that individual to trial, win, and have some limit placed on their future computer use.

 

The RIAA absolutely should not win this. Unless I'm missing something.

 

They do have evidence, and they did go through the entire legal process.  What are you talking about "punishment without trial"? they sent repeated notices to COX to cease illegal activity on their network and they refused to do anything, so they sued them for infringement and won, because they both followed the legal procedures and had evidence. Now they have won, It's a small step to get the user data from cox (assuming it still exists) they might be able to go after the individuals regardless of how COX's appeal goes.

 

 

It's common practice for these companies to monitor where their content is being seeded from.  This is just like the dallas buyers club lawsuit here in Australia.   The only reason the movie industry lost that one was because they wanted to invoice everyone for  stupid amounts, the courts said you can;t do that so you get nothing.  But make no mistake it had an impact on the system, we now have mandatory ISP meta data collection.

 

 

[straight_stewie]

I think it is time to start publicly protesting (in countries where it is legal to do so), for our online rights.

This decision sets a precedent that it is now the ISPs responsibility to track and censor your online activity at the direction of private entities rather than court orders and warrants, else they face government supported massive financial retaliation.

This decision has eroded our last online privacy rights in the US, and cannot be allowed to stand under any circumstances.

[Thaldor]

50 minutes ago, mr moose said:

It's common practice for these companies to monitor where their content is being seeded from.  This is just like the dallas buyers club lawsuit here in Australia.   The only reason the movie industry lost that one was because they wanted to invoice everyone for  stupid amounts, the courts said you can;t do that so you get nothing.  But make no mistake it had an impact on the system, we now have mandatory ISP meta data collection.

If you talking about the Guardaley/Maverick Eye shitshow, it has almost nothing to do with the movie industry. Apparently they then had quite a different impact in Australia than they had in Finland; Finnish ISPs used to held their IP-address information and some traffic data for 3 years before Patrick Achache came and public opinion was, let's say it nicely, not good for them and now ISPs hold their IP-address data for max. 3 months and some of them go actively against the subpoenas that Achaches lawyer friends still have time and care to write (Finnish highest court gave out statement that the information ISPs are by the law required to store for long time is only for official (cops and so on) use and cannot be accessed by anyone even with subpoenas, also that EU gave the verdict on some copyright case in Sweden where they clearly draw the line that privacy goes before copyright and so the trolls need to have very good and pressing evidences to get the IP-addresses owners information).