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upstart writes:

$1 billion piracy ruling could force ISPs to disconnect more Internet users:

A jury ruled in December 2019 that Cox must pay $1 billion in damages to the major record labels. Sony, Universal, and Warner had sued the cable ISP in 2018 in US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. A district judge upheld the verdict in January 2021, approving the $1 billion judgment and paving the way for to Cox appeal to the 4th Circuit.

[...] "The core question in this litigation is whether an Internet service provider (ISP) was sufficiently aggressive in terminating the accounts of thousands of subscribers, and if not, the consequences of that policy decision," the advocacy groups wrote in their court brief. "The district court's answer misconstrued the law, the actual relationship between ISPs and subscribers, and the public interest. Affirming it would have dangerous consequences far beyond this case."

Terminating Internet service "means withdrawing an essential tool for participation in daily life," and cutting off an account because of the actions of one user "potentially cuts off every household member or—in the case of a school, library, or business—every student, faculty member, patron, and employee who shares the Internet connection," they wrote. "And with little or no competition among broadband ISPs in many areas of the country, those users may have no other way to connect."

[...] "Even for residential accounts, the consequences of terminating Internet access will not be confined to individual repeat infringers," the filing also said. "In other file sharing cases, rightsholders have estimated that 30 percent of the names of account holders identified as infringers were not responsible for the alleged infringement."

[...] In its complaint against Cox, the record labels claimed that Cox "knowingly contributed to, and reaped substantial profits from, massive copyright infringement committed by thousands of its subscribers." The ISP "deliberately refused to take reasonable measures to curb its customers from using its Internet services to infringe on others' copyrights—even once Cox became aware of particular customers engaging in specific, repeated acts of infringement," they claimed.

Despite receiving "hundreds of thousands of statutory infringement notices" from record labels, "Cox unilaterally imposed an arbitrary cap on the number of infringement notices it would accept from copyright holders, thereby willfully blinding itself to any of its subscribers' infringements that exceeded its 'cap,'" the record labels also argued.

At trial, the record labels "presented to the jury a total of 10,017 copyrights that Defendants' subscribers allegedly infringed upon during the claim period" of February 2013 to November 2014, District Judge Liam O'Grady wrote when he approved the jury verdict. "The Court found during summary judgment proceedings that Plaintiffs owned all of the copyrights in suit within the meaning of the Copyright Act, and that Cox had sufficient knowledge of the alleged infringement to satisfy the knowledge element of the contributory infringement claim." The jury ultimately "returned a verdict holding Cox liable for both vicarious and contributory infringement of all 10,017 claimed works," and it awarded the plaintiffs statutory damages of $99,830.29 per work, for a total of $1 billion.

[...] In its complaint against Cox, the record labels claimed that Cox "knowingly contributed to, and reaped substantial profits from, massive copyright infringement committed by thousands of its subscribers." The ISP "deliberately refused to take reasonable measures to curb its customers from using its Internet services to infringe on others' copyrights—even once Cox became aware of particular customers engaging in specific, repeated acts of infringement," they claimed.

Despite receiving "hundreds of thousands of statutory infringement notices" from record labels, "Cox unilaterally imposed an arbitrary cap on the number of infringement notices it would accept from copyright holders, thereby willfully blinding itself to any of its subscribers' infringements that exceeded its 'cap,'" the record labels also argued.

At trial, the record labels "presented to the jury a total of 10,017 copyrights that Defendants' subscribers allegedly infringed upon during the claim period" of February 2013 to November 2014, District Judge Liam O'Grady wrote when he approved the jury verdict. "The Court found during summary judgment proceedings that Plaintiffs owned all of the copyrights in suit within the meaning of the Copyright Act, and that Cox had sufficient knowledge of the alleged infringement to satisfy the knowledge element of the contributory infringement claim." The jury ultimately "returned a verdict holding Cox liable for both vicarious and contributory infringement of all 10,017 claimed works," and it awarded the plaintiffs statutory damages of $99,830.29 per work, for a total of $1 billion.

Original Submission