One thing that leaps out at me about this ruling is that courts understand the internet a lot better nowadays. A decade or so ago Sony would have probably gotten away with the argument that Cox profited from the users’ piracy; nowadays judges themselves use the internet and are going to go “lolno, they probably would have been Cox customers anyway. It’s not like anyone pays for internet connection solely to pirate. And in most areas people don’t even have a choice of provider, so how is Cox profiting from this?”
It’s not “like”, that has been the argument with these piracy cases for ages. If I pirate 100 movies, it obviously means that if I couldn’t have I would have gone to the shop to buy each and every one of them. It’s even worse for anyone caught distributing the downloads, where a site host can be hit with this logic for every user download ever.
Apparently these days they are claiming that movie and TV piracy costs the US film industry $29-71 billion a year and the US GDP a cool $115 billion in total
Because, you know, we have all that money just floating in our pockets now thanks to piracy.
US GDP is not 115 billion. My tiny European country’s GDP is like 700 billion. The US’s must be well into the trillions
Edit:
It’s 28 trillion. That’s 28’000 billions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States
