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A federal judge has ordered (PDF) Cox Communications to pay a bruising $8 million in legal fees to BMG Rights Management after the ISP lost a landmark case over Internet piracy.
The legal case began in 2014, when music publishers BMG and Round Hill Music took the long-threatened step of actually suing a major Internet provider for its users' infringement, saying that Cox didn't do enough to stop the piracy. BMG and Round Hill were both clients of Rightscorp, an anti-piracy outfit that produces millions of e-mail notices to consumers alleged to have infringed its clients' copyrights by using BitTorrent software. Rightscorp warns ISPs that if they don't forward the notices to subscribers, they're risking a massive lawsuit.
Turns out, in this case, the threat was real. After a year of litigation, the case went to trial in December 2015. Before the trial, the judge had already ruled that Cox unlawfully blew off key provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and so wasn't protected by its "safe harbor" against litigation. The jury found against Cox and ordered the cable company to pay $25 million. That result is now on appeal, but in the meantime, US District Judge Liam O'Grady considered various post-trial motions, including one in which BMG requested legal fees.
O'Grady chose to award BMG $8.38 million in attorneys' fees, which is 80 percent of what the company asked for. BMG's motion for "nontaxable expenses" like travel expenses and expert witness fees, which asked for nearly $3 million, was denied. BMG's request for court costs such as transcripts, copies, and filing fees was granted, with the judge finally arriving at $146,790.76 after making various deductions.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snotnose on Tuesday February 21 2017, @02:05AM
Big company gets slammed with millions. If you get arrested and charged with something you didn't do it's gonna run 5 figures. Most people can't afford that, they take a plea deal even though they did nothing wrong. Someone does you wrong, it's gonna take you 5-6 figures to pursue it. If you lose you could also be on the hook for the other side's legal fees.
The price of accessing the justice system in the USA has flat out been a disgrace for years, yet I don't hear anyone calling them out on it.
My ducks are not in a row. I don't know where some of them are, and I'm pretty sure one of them is a turkey.
(Score: 2) by Some call me Tim on Tuesday February 21 2017, @02:47AM
And, since all parties involved are cox, there really isn't any one to root for.
Questioning science is how you do science!
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 21 2017, @04:04AM
Cox should get a fair shake, shouldn't they?
(Score: 4, Funny) by Bogsnoticus on Tuesday February 21 2017, @05:41AM
But only 3 shakes, then it goes to the FCC for indecency.
Genius by birth. Evil by choice.
(Score: 3, Informative) by gidds on Wednesday February 22 2017, @01:41PM
The flip side of that, though, is that if you win, you may not have to pay any legal costs.
Which seems a good thing to me! Of course, no court is infallible; but this is fairer as long as the result is just more than half the time. (And if not, then you have bigger problems than who gets awarded the legal costs!)
If each side is expected to pay their own legal costs, then there's a huge incentive for the defendant to settle — losing both reputation and cash, even if innocent. Whereas if the loser pays all costs, then an innocent defendant has much less incentive to settle, knowing that if they prevail, they won't have to pay anything.
Similarly, a loser-pays scheme discourages people from pressing baseless lawsuits.
Here in the UK (and in fact in almost every Western democracy other than the US), loser-pays is standard (though I think at judge's discretion). In fact, it's commonly called the English rule [wikipedia.org].
I'm no legal expert, but from what you see in the popular media, the American system doesn't seem noticeably fairer...
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