• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, October 15, 2015

Last year, two music publishers accused broadband provider Cox of contributing to copyright infringement by failing to disconnect subscribers accused of sharing files.

BMG Rights Management and Round Hill Music alleged in a lawsuit against Cox that they informed it about “thousands of repeated and blatant infringements,” but that it didn't move against the subscribers.

The case appears to mark the first time a content owner tried to hold a broadband provider responsible for piracy by users.

Now, the digital rights groups Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge are seeking to weigh in on the case. The organizations say in a proposed friend-of-the-court brief that broadband providers have no legal obligation to disconnect subscribers based solely on "robosigned" allegations of copyright infringement.

"It is simply unthinkable that a person could be deprived of a basic, vital service, practically essential to contemporary societal participation, based on nothing more than unadjudicated, unverified, unreliable allegations of civil wrongdoing," the EFF and Public Knowledge write in papers filed this week with U.S. District Court Judge Liam O'Grady in the Eastern District of Virginia. "But that is precisely what Plaintiffs seek in this case: disconnection of Internet service of 'large numbers of subscribers' based on automatically generated, robosigned claims of copyright infringement."

They add that BMG and Round Hill can't show a record warranting the "uniquely harsh penalty" they're asking Cox to impose on its subscribers.

The groups flag several problems with the music companies' theory. One is that the notices sent to Cox only state that its subscribers made music files available online -- which doesn't necessarily mean that they infringed copyright. "Courts have clearly held that it is not an act of copyright infringement to merely make content available without an actual transfer of that content," the EFF and Public Knowledge argue.

Also, the notices only identify the Cox account holder, who might not be the same person that allegedly infringed copyright.

"Besides being legally wrong, it is concerningly bad policy to attribute the acts of a third party to the Internet connection subscriber," the digital rights groups say. "Doing so would discourage the widespread practice of Internet connection sharing which, besides being an unavoidable fact of life today, promotes numerous public benefits."