The appellate ruling forcing RIAA to file suit to get the names o...
The appellate ruling forcing RIAA to file suit to get the names of those accused of unauthorized Internet music sharing doesn’t help anyone, including the individual targets, music industry attorney Jeffrey Knowles said. The Verizon decision by the U.S.…
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Appeals Court, D.C., means people will find themselves sued before they can address any mistakes, whereas they could be resolving prelitigation last year while RIAA was using a streamlined Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) procedure, he told Santa Clara U.’s symposium on “The Digital Challenge to Copyright Law.” Gerard Lewis, senior counsel-chief privacy officer, Comcast Cable, disagreed, saying the costs of suing first might produce “more deliberation” before RIAA went after a person. Demands to identify subscribers accused of infringement put a heavy burden on Comcast, which has received the most RIAA subpoenas of any ISP and more than all but a couple of others combined, including 200 immediately after the July 4 holiday, Lewis said. Content owners may think it’s easy to put a name to a supplied IP address, but it isn’t -- there’s no “magic database.” “I wish our systems worked that well or that clearly, but they don’t,” he said. “There’s a certain amount of manual labor involved.” Lewis said: “It’s an awful lot of work” and “it doesn’t scale” with the volume of requests. Raising the stakes is the great importance of accurate identification. It’s just one of the ways ISPs are “in many ways called upon to be the hall monitors of the Internet,” he said.