Cox stiffed for $25m after letting subscribers pirate music online

Piracy, it ain't all black and white in terms of what BMG like to call 'theft'

It should really convert the overall fine amount into how much BMG would get for each equivalent Spotify/Youtube play, equating one download = one play. BMG seem to forget how much free publcity a downloaded track can generate via word of mouth (if its a good track)

It's why so many albums need to be offered for free streaming to start with.

Downloading via P2P (if the P2P is instigated by the record company and you don't know some of it isn't) is like offering free parking at Lidl with the potential to charge £75 if you overstay 2 hours, you're ignoring the fact that it drives sales into your actual stores.

If Lidl made a market rate charge for parking without the threat of £75 penalty, see how many still shop at a Lidl store, it would be a lot less. Just because its downloaded for free is not necessarily a 'lost sale', either, it also might be a potential word of mouth sale to others too.

Piracy (what BMG like to call theft) is not as black and white as they try and make it look.

The American legal system

The American legal can be summed by two statements:

"He who has the gold makes the rule." And, "We have the best government money can buy."

BMG probably spent more on lawyers for this case than would have made on the lost sales.

It gets complicated

"... complaints by BMG that Cox ... and had blacklisted some of the services BMG used to track and report music piracy ..."

Would those be the torrent sites that BMG had seeded with their own torrents/seeders (for their own detection and tracking purposes) which had been blacklisted by Cox because they were under court order to do so as a result of other legal action?

.

Well, time to boycott BMG ( oh, I wasn't buying anyway ) ...

... and time to thank Cox for recognizing BMG's bad marketing plan ( sue your potential customers into oblivion INSTEAD of catering to them and finding ways to profit from supplying and fulfilling potential customer's preferences and demands ).

The PROBLEM was Cox's non-creative non-mastery of the DMC snit-pile that the judge had to enforce -- judges are incredibly stupid, and somehow never demanded convictions in support of BMG's claims -- but then, the Big Music Gangstas ( BMG? ) wrote the law to NOT require proof of anything, making it so that unsubstantiated complaints are all that is necessary to take legal action.

This 'fine' equals 0.27% of Cox's revenue, and 0.13% of BMG's parent company's income ( yes, that's both less than 1%, less than a single day's revenue for either of them ), so this is all for show, petty lawyers justifying their petty jobs -- what, did anyone actually misinterpret that BMG was in the customer service business?

Torrent on ...

... and proxy.

.