Music publishers sue an ISP over piracy
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Combined with the fact that many municipalities only have one option for a broadband provider, the implied assertion that an ISP should terminate service for a customer, likely leaving the customer with no option to connect to the Internet, is an impossible suggestion. As a society we are converging on the consensus that Internet access is a basic human right. Copyright offenses, by one member of a household, should not be reason to suspend or terminate the right of that household to access the Internet. Moreover, no corporation should ever control the right of a private citizen to access the Internet. It's simply wrong.
(Off-topic) It's a bit fun we seem to have skipped postal mail, telephony and especially amateur radio communications. Or maybe I'm unaware of those being considered as such, but I'm almost certain the latter isn't considered one, as it's something you (generally, not sure this is universal for every jurisdiction on the planet, huh) need to obtain a license for.
Besides, in the US, the FCC did indeed decide that plain-old telephone service was indeed so important to our society that they created regulations to provide access to service at the same price no matter how distant people lived from the nearest 'central office.' I don't believe anyone has ever had any ability to remove telephone service from a home except the home owner and phone company and only for reasons of non-payment of the bill.
I'm honestly not sure if that constitutes the US government supporting it as a human right, but I can't think of a more direct way of going about it (aside from waiting to later add it to the Bill of Rights).
To be fair, Congress could have been crap at setting the postal service up and been completely negligent, but that didn't really happen. Most of us hope the Internet is eventually entrenched similarly. Somehow.
It's not the ISP's job to enforce another company's copyright.
Please don't associate the violent deprivation of property with voluntary exchange violating state frameworks to promote intellectual publication. It is disingenuous to the argument and hurts arguments on both sides of "piracy is bad". If a company is an enabler of violence and actively work to intentionally promote it, of course they should be liable for their behavior.
Your sentence
> If a company is an enabler of violence and actively work to intentionally promote it, of course they should be liable for their behavior.
doesn't respond to anything in the parent comment you're allegedly replying to. No one is saying, or thinking, that road builders work to promote robbery by road users. What they are saying, correctly, is that road builders are enablers of violence that otherwise wouldn't occur (ever heard of "highwaymen"?). They're also enablers of more useful, fruitful, and desirable phenomena.
> doesn't respond to anything in the parent comment you're allegedly replying to
Except it does. You say yourself, banks would have a better case, but when you say it out loud it sounds absurd. The only time a business is an accomplice to bank robbery is when they are intentionally promoting it explicitly, but when their business enables it. To degrade that argument to civil conflicts and then claim ISPs are responsible for their users is more ridiculous.
Hey, what a funny coincidence. If only there were some well-known style of argument with such a feature.
It could be called something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduction_to_absurdity
You seem to have confused an argument against ISP liability for customer behavior with an argument in favor of the same.
There is a city where a road service provider (RSP) builds and maintains all roads. At strategic places, there are road checkpoints where the RSP can block traffic.
Recently, there has been a series of bank robberies. The city has strange laws: Bank robberies are illegal in he city, but hard to prosecute directly. The bank, knowing who participated in the robberies, asks the RSP to block the robbers' traffic.
The RSP refuses, bank sues the RSP.
The analogy falls apart here anyway because bank robbery is a criminal offense and the police are around specifically to deal with it. Piracy is a civil offense. I don't know of any comparable civil case where a private third party is required to enforce a contract they're not involved in.
One would expect if 200,000 people out of a few million (I guess, I don't know the size of Cox) didn't respect a law, then the law would be under scrutiny.
If the majority populace is committing illegal acts it's often because they believe the act should not be illegal. I believe that many/most laws exist for the exact opposite reason. Murder is illegal because most people believe it's wrong. So we created a law saying so.
Not only has Cox has been the most vocal about supporting its users' rights, but aside from a couple TV stations and newspapers they aren't big players in the content producing industry.
sorry I'm not up to date on the legal process but its been going on for a while.
While we are at it, lets sue car manufacturers for car crashes caused by drunk drivers and lets sue companies like HP for providing the computers that infringers are using to download pirated material? The madness just does not yet. The entertainment industry has far more overreach than it should. People getting their homes raided by SWAT teams because a publisher thought someone downloaded and shared a movie or music album.
Your tax dollars hard at work, people.
Maybe they will learn it when that is an indisputable fact. Suing does get them somewhere.
Their remit is to engage in aggressive, quasi-legal practices intended to frighten people away from the sharing of copyright material without having the legal repercussions from using these tactics backfiring on the copyright holders themselves.
While this lawsuit seems crazy and immoral, there is method in Rightscorp's apparent madness and badness, and it is certainly consistent with their other practices. This lawsuit will hit the news just like all their other antics, and create a general level of FUD that will induce people to think twice before they download copyright material, just in case they find themselves at the wrong end of a lawsuit that they cannot afford to defend.
That's an interesting point of view. Another one would be that shutting down too many Youtube accounts like that will tarnish the Youtube brand itself and will encourage the use of alternatives like Vimeo. Any single account may be inconsequential, but becoming ban-happy won't exactly fix the problem either.
Couldn't Cox make the case that the information being provided could be from multiple subscribers?
I don't think Cox would simply let it go unless their legal bills could be significant more. I really hope that all ISPs back this and counter sue the music companies.
I seriously hope Cox replies with a one-page brief reading only "FUCK YOU PAY ME".