Music Industry Goes To Court With Verizon

from the fighting-for-your-rights dept

About a month ago we had the story of why Verizon was pushing back against Hollywood's attempt to get them to name an ISP customer who was accused of sharing copyrighted materials. Today, that case goes to court, as the RIAA tries to force Verizon to give up the name. Verizon fears that if they're forced to just give up the name, it'll open the floodgates, as Hollywood will send out so many letters that it will be impossible to keep up. There's good reason to think so, as the industry is already been shown to bully networks about blocking their users, and often these complaints are based on faulty reports compiled by automated programs. Interestingly, Verizon points out that the customer, whose info is at stake in this case, probably has no idea that all of this is going on, since no one has informed him or her.
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  • identicon
    Andre Black, 4 Oct 2002 @ 5:53pm

    In for a penny, in for a pound...

    If the RIAA wins suits like this, then it becomes the ISPs responsiblility to police all traffic going through their servers. Think about all of the technology they'd be responsibly for blocking: File sharing programs, email, instant messenging, irc chat, usenet, websites, blogs... That's just unreasonable.
    It's like asking the US postal service to open and inspect all mail that goes through their carriers to see if copied CDs are inside. Would the government take a request like that seriously?

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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