RIAA Sued ISP for Failure to Disconnect Pirates

The Recording Industry Association of America has sued a Texas-based ISP Grande Communications, accusing it of failing to take action against its pirating customers. The RIAA claims that the ISP's subscribers infringe more than a million titles via BitTorrent, but Grande Communications doesn’t take any meaningful action to discourage this behavior.




So far, major copyright holders have failed to do much to stop millions of BitTorrent-based infringements that occur every day. But they keep trying: a number of music labels, including UMG Recordings, Capitol Records, Warner Bros, Sony Music, Arista Records and Atlantic Records sued the ISP over the infringements of its subscribers. They claimed that the ISP had been notified that its subscribers have engaged in infringements of copyrighted works over BitTorrent systems, but have permitted

them to use the Grande service to continue infringing.

In fact, this case is similar to that against Cox Communications, where the ISP was accused by publishing company of failing to take significant action against infringing subscribers. This case also aims to deprive the ISP of the right to be protected by the DMA “safe harbor” provision: according to the law, by not taking “meaningful action” against repeat infringers, the service provider can be held liable for the copyright infringements of its customers.

Moreover, the RIAA claims that the ISP extracted revenue from pirating subscribers, so it is also liable for inducement of copyright infringement. Like in the Cox’s case, the anti-piracy outfit Rightscorp is involved in litigation against Grande as well, claiming to identify repeat infringers using the data it collected from the times it worked with the ISP.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.