Judge sides with Rightscorp, says DMCA doesn’t protect Cox | Hacker News Reader

Judge sides with Rightscorp, says DMCA doesn’t protect Cox

arstechnica.com

24 pointspavornyoh14 comments

Wouldn't enforcing such a ruling require Cox to monitor all traffic? It would be like requiring the USPS to open all packages and read all letters.

From what I gather, Rightscorp sent Cox a list of repeatedly infringing customers (presumably as IP addresses and time of infringement) and requested that those Cox customers be notified that they should pay $20 per song or face lawsuits. Cox declined to notify the customers.

There is no monitoring involved here, nor any technical difficulty for that matter : any ISP should know what customer owned which IP at a given point in time, and have contact information on file for that customer.

The real question here is a legal one: is the list provided by Rightscorp really "identifying repeat infringers" in the sense of the DMCA (in which case, refusal to act would void the DMCA safe harbor for Cox)?

Later on in the article Cox says it does process other companies requests, it's just Rightscorp that they have issue with because they don't provide enough proof and spam them with requests.

  any ISP should know what customer owned which IP at a given point in time

Should they? Because as far as I can tell, there is no legal requirement to store this data in the US unless specifically compelled to do so by the government.[0] Is there anything DMCA/safe harbor-related that goes beyond these requirements?

The parameters for mandatory data retention -- if, what, for how long -- are contested in the EU. ISPs should not store anything they aren't legally required to store; and arguably they must not store this kind of data where it is identifiable.

[0] https://www.eff.org/issues/mandatory-data-retention/us

I am in the process of starting a small, rural WISP, and I have absolutely no plans to store this data. As you said, I plan to store as little as possible about my customers.

I think the smaller you are the less you need to store in terms of customer data, this is certainly the case in the EU/UK. The aim being to ensure that regulations are not too onerous on smaller organisations.

Of all the data they could store about me, having a 6-month (or 12 or 24 etc) long cache of "account X had IP Y at time Z" sounds like the most benign. As long as that data is only given out in response to a court order, I don't have a problem with it. ISPs shouldn't be burdened with providing anonymity to their subscribers in the face of the law, even if said law has debatable utility.

There are three states the law can have with respect to something like this: The ISP can be required to keep the information, prohibited from keeping it, or left to their own discretion. The default state is the third one.

I think it would just require Cox obey the requests of anyone claiming to be a "rightsholder" and disconnect customers, levy fines and penalties without a shred of evidence of actual infringing, simply a claim. In particular, apparently Cox complies with most requests but considers this particular group abusive scam artists and blacklisted their requests, so they are suing Cox

Anyone have a road map for starting a tiny ISP?

One of the hardest problems with this would be getting connections to customers. I wonder how effective wireless connections could be. I know of a couple companies that do it for whole apartment buildings but I've never heard of it for just one house.

Wireless for houses is, especially in rural areas like where I live. I am in the process of starting a WISP right now to serve my rural area.

The biggest challenge in any area is how crowded the spectrum is. Crowded spectrum will ruin your available bandwidth.

I'm in the process of starting a small, rural WISP. My contact details are in my profile... no 'road-map' though. It can be very different depending on your situation. Still, I am interested in collaborating with others!

Good on Cox for going to bat for its users.

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