Time Warner Cable Throws Legal Monkeywrench Into U.S. Copyright Group’s Lawsuit Plans
By David Chen/May 16, 2010 12:42 pm EST
It’s a classic, time-honored way of ruthlessly extracting money from people that want your product, used by the RIAA back in its golden years. But it turns out, Time Warner Cable isn’t too happy with the plan.
According to court filing (written up in detail by Ars Technica), Time Warner Cable (TWC) has better things to do with their time than to match names with IP Addresses. See, it’s not that TWC believes that the lawsuits are a grave breach of privacy; it’s that they are a huge pain in the ass, which TWC can’t afford right now. The company typically receives 567 IP lookup requests per month, mostly for law enforcement reasons. Each IP lookup costs the company about $45, and it only has four full-time staff devoted to taking care of these duties.
You can quickly see why receiving requests for thousands of names names within the span of a month from one company might tax TWC’s resources. TWC writes:
Essentially, it is impossible for TWC to comply with these requests. TWC continued:
TWC also alleges that U.S. Copyright Group is responsible for abusing the discovery process in several other ways as well. So what now? TWC wants the subpoena quashed, and Comcast and Cablevision may do the same thing if they can’t work out an arrangement to make the workflow easier. One possibility is that the cable companies may opt turn over only a few names per month. But either way, it looks like U.S. Copyright Group’s plans to get the names of huge swaths of people may not work out as easily as they’d hoped.
If the Court compels TWC to answer all of these lookup requests given its current staffing, it would take TWC nearly three months of full-time work by TWC’s Subpoena Compliance group, and TWC would not be able to respond to any other request, emergency or otherwise, from law enforcement during this period…TWC has a six-month retention period for its IP lookup logs, and by the time TWC could turn to law enforcement requests, many of these requests could not be answered.
