Two music groups are currently battling it out in court with Cox Cable over the company's refusal to terminate the Internet accounts of subscribers the groups say committed ongoing copyright infringement by illegally downloading material. Now, a brief has been filed in support of Cox by two digital rights groups.
The court case was initiated by BMG Rights Management and Round Hill Music, who, last year, sued Cox Communications. An anti-piracy group, with which both music groups are affiliated, known as Rightscorp, delivered millions of copyright infringement claims to Cox. Cox refused to forward the claims, which were coupled with settlement demands, to its subscribers, calling the process "harassment."
The music groups are claiming that Cox's refusal is violating the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and that the company has refused to close repeat copyright infringers' Internet accounts. Now, two digital rights groups, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge, have joined forces to support Cox in an effort to protect potentially innocent Internet subscribers from losing their service.
"It is simply unthinkable that a person could be deprived of a basic, vital service, practically essential to contemporary societal participation, based on nothing more than unadjudicated, unverified, unreliable allegations of civil wrongdoing," the groups argue. "But that is precisely what Plaintiffs seek in this case: disconnection of Internet service of 'large numbers of subscribers' based on automatically generated, robosigned claims of copyright infringement."
They proceed to explain that, although a copyright infringement may in fact occur through the subscriber's account, it does not automatically mean that the account holder is the one committing the infringement. For example, users who have unsecured Wi-Fi connections or even secured connections utilized by multiple users could be held responsible for acts that they did not commit or of which they didn't even have knowledge.
The groups are also concerned about the precedent of allowing the accusations to be forwarded along with monetary settlement demands.
"Denying Cox [safe harbor] protection [...] would potentially open consumers up to extortive demands, declare them guilty as 'repeat infringers' without trial or jury, and deny them access to a necessary service, perhaps innocently, perhaps without cause," they write in their amicus curiae brief.
An amicus curiae brief is submitted by a party who has an interest in a case but is not a party to the specific legal proceeding and hasn't been specifically invited by either of the actual parties to participate. Therefore, the judge in the case will have to rule on whether the argument presented by the two digital rights groups will be accepted prior to handing down the ruling on the case itself, which will have important precedent for how ISPs handle these types of copyright claims in the future.
