Music labels suing Verizon for over $2.6 billion

Leading record labels including UMG Recordings, Warner Music and Sony Music filed a lawsuit on Friday alleging that Verizon is knowingly ignoring its customers’ copyright infringement in order to make profits. Reports Global Music Business.

The plaintiffs claim that under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), they are entitled to damages of up to $150,000 per violation, which could total up to $2.6 billion.

The lawsuit includes a list of 17,335 songs from artists and bands including Elvis Presley, Matchbox Twenty, the Goo Goo Dolls and Brandy.See the list here (If you want to know more, read this song that starts with Sam Cooke and ends with Wiz Khalifa.) The labels have sent “approximately 350,000 infringement notices” to Verizon since 2020, claiming that the company is ignoring people who are repeatedly accused of illegally sharing files because they pay higher prices for faster and better internet service.

Verizon’s failure to take effective action against pirate subscribers encouraged subscribers engaged in Internet piracy to purchase Verizon’s service, which in turn enabled those subscribers to infringe Plaintiff’s (and others’) copyrights and avoid obtaining that copyrighted content through legal channels. Piracy subscribers were attracted to Verizon’s service both because of the company’s lax policies regarding piracy and because of its high-speed Internet, which made it easy for people willing to pay more to use P2P protocols. Verizon fostered a safe haven for infringement in light of its lax policies, thereby encouraging its subscribers to infringe. Certain infringing subscribers identified in Plaintiff’s notices, including the particularly egregious infringers identified above, remained Verizon subscribers so they could continue to illegally download copyrighted works, knowing that Verizon would not terminate their accounts despite receiving multiple notices identifying them as infringers.

The lawsuit accuses Verizon of both conspiracy and indirect copyright infringement, and asks the judge to order the record companies to pay the maximum fines and attorneys’ fees for all of the tracks listed.

Previous copyright battles include Viacom v. YouTube, which won by arguing it fell within the DMCA’s “safe harbor” clause, and a $1 billion judgment against Cox Communications that was overturned on appeal, when the court found that ISPs did not profit from ignoring music piracy.