New York Newsday: Verizon Hears the Music
Posted: Wed Jan 22, 2003 1:14 pm
From New York Newsday:
I hope for the day that the recording industry will go bankrupt. They're nothing but greedy people who don't know a good song or good artist!
This such a huge load of crap. The RIAA can't tell Verizon, a privately owned company what they can and can't do on their network. It's Verizon's duty to enforce things on their network. Not the recording industry.Verizon Hears the Music
Judge orders company to release ID of online music swapper
COMBINED NEWS SERVICES
January 22, 2003
Washington - In a victory for the music industry, a federal judge yesterday ordered Verizon Internet Services to hand over the identity of a customer who had downloaded more than 600 songs from the Internet in a single day.
The decision by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates upheld the recording industry's power under a 1998 law to compel Internet providers to identify customers who allegedly violated music or movie copyrights by downloading or sharing files.
Bates acknowledged that the case was an important test of subpoena powers Congress granted to copyright holders under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The judge said that controversial law, which was enacted to uphold copyrights online, permits music companies to force Internet providers to turn over the name of a suspected pirate upon subpoena from any U.S. District Court clerk's office, without a judge's order. Some critics have argued for greater supervision of this process by a judge.
Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, said once the group identified the customer, it would "let them know that what they are doing is illegal."
But Verizon promised to appeal and said it would not immediately provide its customer's identity, nor would it change its Internet access to disrupt file-sharing. The ruling had "troubling ramifications" for future growth of the Internet, said Verizon's associate general counsel, Sarah B. Deutsch.
During a contentious hearing in October, the judge lamented ambiguities in the copyright act, saying that Congress "could have made this statute clearer." At the time, the music industry indicated that a ruling in its favor could result in reams of warnings to scare Internet pirates into taking their collections offline.
Verizon, the biggest U.S. local-telephone company, argued that the music industry doesn't have authority to obtain such information because the music isn't stored on the service provider's network.
The case began last summer when the music industry association served a subpoena on Verizon, seeking information about an anonymous user who had downloaded the songs through the Kazaa file-sharing network. The music association said it had been able to identify the Internet Protocol, or IP address of the computer, as well as the time of day the downloads had taken place.
I hope for the day that the recording industry will go bankrupt. They're nothing but greedy people who don't know a good song or good artist!