On 5/11/11 11:19 AM, Marshall Eubanks wrote:
On May 10, 2011, at 8:30 PM, Jimmy Hess wrote:
On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 8:54 AM, Mark Radabaugh<m...@amplex.net> wrote:
On 5/10/11 9:07 AM, Marshall Eubanks wrote:
A good reason why every ISP should have a published civil subpoena
compliance fee.
23,000 * $150 each should only cost them $3.45M to get the information.
Seems like that would take the profit out pretty quickly.
+1.
But don't the fees actually have to be reasonable?
If you say your fee is $150 per IP address, I think they might bring
it to the judge
and claim the ISP is attempting to avoid subpoena compliance by charging an
unreasonable fee.
They can point to all the competitors charging $40 per IP.
I am not a lawyer, and you would be a fool to use NANOG for legal advice, but
if I were to charge something for this, I would want
to be able to justify the charge in front of a judge, regardless of what anyone else
charges. In other words, something like "we find it typically takes $ 100 to get the
backups out of storage, 15 minutes @ $X per minute for a tech to find the right backup
disk and 10 minutes at $Y per minute for a network engineer to review the dump."
Regards
Marshall
Don't forget to include your attorneys time to verify that the subpoena
is actually legal. That would add another $100 to the cost at a minimum.
We recently almost released information on a customer in an attempt to
comply with what appeared to be a valid subpoena. The subpoena was
invalid and thankfully our attorney noticed it. I fully expect the
bill for the legal advice to be at least $100.00
Really the point though is to charge *some* fee for complying. It
doesn't really matter what the fee is. The reason they sue 10,000
defendants in one case is to avoid having to pay the $350 (or similar)
fee to the court for each defendant. If the ISP's don't charge for
providing this information a copyright holder can file a civil suit,
issue subpoena's based on the filing, and intimidate defendants with
settlement offers before the case gets thrown out of court for
improperly joining defendants.
http://houstonlawyer.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/over-10000-internet-users-dismissed-from-copyright-infringement-lawsuit-in-a-slight-of-hand-letter-to-the-court/
Add any significant cost to the process of figuring out who the actual
customers are and the profit motive goes out the window.
--
Mark Radabaugh
Amplex
m...@amplex.net 419.837.5015
