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Phoenix666 writes:

A district judge last week denied two activist groups the chance to file a supporting motion in a copyright case. In a stinging and derisive rejoinder, he compared their complaints to those of a spoilt boy.
...
It's part of a court case that stateside ISPs and rights-holders are watching with keen interest.

Cox Communications is the only major US ISP not to participate to the "Six Strikes" Copyright Alert System, where an ISP acts on "red flag" knowledge of a persistent infringer by kicking them off their network. Cox preferred to implement its own "10+" graduated response program. Two music publishers, BMG and Round Hill, weren't impressed, and a year ago they sued Cox, arguing that they never kicked even the most hardcore freetard off their networks. As evidence, they picked the IP addresses of the 250 most persistent freetards on Cox's network over the preceding six months.

"Cox directly profits from repeat infringers," they argued in their lawsuit. "Cox collects significant fees from its subscribers and subscribers that frequently upload media content often pay higher monthly premiums for higher bandwidth. Plaintiffs' agent has identified – and notified Cox of – over 200,000 repeat infringers on the Cox network. On information and belief, the number of actual repeat infringers on the Cox network not known to Plaintiffs or their agent is substantially higher."
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Enter the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge, two slacktivist groups who howled (predictably) that the internet would break if Cox did what it promised and kicked off the most high volume torrenters. Both groups applied to file amicus, or 'Friend of the Court', briefs. But Judge O'Grady rejected the applications, saying they were irrelevant.

Interestingly, he went even further, apparently mocking the applications, and arguing that the two "digital rights" groups were fundamentally compromised.

Original Submission