http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080911-committee-amends-approves-enormous-gift-to-big-content.html"The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved the EIPA (the Enforcement of Intellectual
Property Rights Act of 2008), which would create copyright cops. And these cops would
take over the RIAA's War on Sharing by filing civil lawsuits and using civil forfeiture
laws to take any and all computers engaged in infringement. Worse, they would even seize
computers (such as servers or database farms) that house the data of innocent people, and
these people would not have any right to get their data back. At best the 'virtual
bystanders' who happened to have data on a computer used for infringement could get a
protective order saying that no one should go rummaging through their stuff."
This is bad, in the event a customer is hosted on our servers and they have copyright
data (mp3's, movies) located on the server even for backup purposes, our entire business
would be affected as a result due to this new bill being passed.
The method of copyright infringement used to work like this.
User is downloading blah.mp3 on public tracker, MPAA or RIAA collects lists of IP
addresses and they are reverse checked for ISP information (who owns the IP addresses),
ISP is contacted and verifys the IP address, time/date the abuse report was sent and who
that IP is assigned to (customer wise), customer information is kept safe as a result of
privacy policy, customer is notified by ISP of possible copyright infringement and is
warned to deleted the file and that if caught again, they face termination of their
account.
In the event that MPAA or RIAA wants to take action against a individual, they would
request a subpoena against the ISP and the ISP would then be forced to hand over records
of the customer which the customer is then sued for criminal copyright infringement (a
federal felony) or it is settled out of court.
Realistically, the MPAA and RIAA cannot go after everyone because there are too many
people engaged in this.
The issue is that this new bill affects businesses as well, previously, a host would
cooperate with the law enforcement if a lawsuit came up in regards to file sharing, the
new law appears to allow law enforcement to actually confiscate server(s) without actual
evidence of files present on a server which would cause damages to the business.
If this is the case, how should we prepare against this bill since it appears to directly
affect all hosting companies? We cannot control what our customers upload nor can we
assume what materials are copyright and what materials are not copyright unless it is
reported to our abuse department. The time needed to individually check each file and
their copyright would be substantial.
Topic: New piracy laws affect my business (Read 1666 times)