Powerful record labels including UMG Recordings, Warner Music and Sony Music filed a lawsuit on Friday accusing Verizon of willfully ignoring its customers’ copyright infringements in order to profit. global music business.
The plaintiffs say they are entitled to seek damages of up to $150,000 per violation under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), for a total of $2.6 billion.
The lawsuit includes 17,335 track listings from artists or groups including Elvis Presley, Matchbox Twenty, Goo Goo Dolls and Brandy. (If you want to know more, you can check out the list below — starting with Sam Cooke and ending with Wiz Khalifa.) The label says they’ve sent “nearly 350,000 infringement notices” to Verizon since 2020, claiming the company Ignoring the fact that people are cited multiple times for illegally sharing files because they pay more for faster, better internet service.
Verizon’s failure to take meaningful action against its infringing users has attracted users who engage in online piracy to purchase Verizon’s services so that these users can infringe Plaintiffs’ (and others’) copyrights and avoid legally obtaining copyrighted rights. protected content. Verizon’s services attract infringing users, partly because of the company’s lenient policies on copyright infringement, and partly because faster Internet speeds favor those who are willing to pay more to use P2P protocols. Verizon’s lax policies encourage its users to infringe by providing a safe haven for infringement. The specific infringing subscribers identified in Plaintiff’s notice, including the particularly egregious infringers described above, knew that Verizon would not terminate their accounts and that they remained Verizon subscribers despite receiving multiple notices identifying them as infringers. So that they can continue to illegally download copyrighted works.
The lawsuit accuses Verizon of copyright infringement and asks a judge to impose maximum fines plus attorney fees for each song on the label’s list.
Previous copyright disputes include Viacom v. YouTube, where the latter successfully argued that it met the DMCA’s “safe harbor” provision, while a $1 billion judgment against Cox Communications was overturned on appeal after a court said the ISP did not receive any compensation from the DMCA. profit from the terms.
