Big Music reprises classic hit 'ISPs need to stop their customers torrenting or we'll sue'

Stop us if you think you've heard this one before: Legal supergroup demands billions from Verizon

Big Music has launched a fresh lawsuit aimed at forcing ISPs to take action against users who trade in stolen copyrighted content.

Over 20 record labels – among them giants such as Sony Music, Universal Music Group – last week lodged a complaint [PDF] that contents "Verizon is one of the largest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the country and knowingly provides its high-speed service to a massive community of online pirates, who it knows repeatedly use that service to infringe Plaintiffs' copyrights."

The complaint alleges that in recent years the plaintiffs "sent more than 340,000 infringement notices to Verizon" in which they pointed out "subscribers' blatant and systematic use of Verizon's internet service to illegally download, copy, and distribute Plaintiffs' copyrighted sound recordings through the P2P network known as BitTorrent."

The music companies allege that Verizon "contributed to and profited from pervasive copyright infringement by its subscribers on P2P file-sharing networks" and is therefore equally liable for IP theft.

The complaint saves particular scorn for the "specific recidivist infringers" that it argues Verizon could easily have identified and booted off its services.

The complaint was accompanied by a list of allegedly stolen works [2MB PDF] that includes The Smiths' 1987 ditty "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before."

We've singled out that tune from the 408-page list of allegedly stolen music because this is not the first time Big Content has taken issue with carriers allowing their customers to use BitTorrent.

Indeed, this case has made your correspondent nostalgic, recalling matters like Big Content's years of playing whac-a-mole with torrent-tracker The Pirate Bay and the strange attempt to invoice Australians suspected of having illegally watched the film Dallas Buyers Club.

Similar cases proliferated around the world. In many jurisdictions they left carriers and ISPs liable for their customers' actions only if they knew of their infringement, did too little to stop it, and therefore effectively profited from it – because illegal downloading isn't possible without an internet connection. In America, one law enforcing that position is US Code 512, which requires carriers to terminate repeat offenders.

This complaint seems an attempt to prove Verizon hasn't done so, and didn’t work very hard to consider allegations of piracy. The plaintiffs argue that Verizon accepted complaints about copyright infringement using peer-to-peer networks at just one e-mail address, limited the number of such emails any one copyright holder could send, didn't forward them to alleged infringers, and didn't process incoming allegations promptly.

Further, the plaintiffs allege that "more than 500 subscribers were the subject of 100 or more notices. One particularly egregious Verizon subscriber was single-handedly the subject of 4,450 infringement notices from Plaintiffs alone."

Verizon isn't commenting on the matter, and it will take ages to reach a court.

But the issue of carriers' liability for torrenting is back on the agenda. Just like old times.

Oh and let’s not forget that it’s not only individuals who steal content: Big Tech scraped the internet to build its AI models and claimed any content it could find was fair game. ®