SSTLR

By Bert Kaufman

ABSTRACT:
In order to compete in a satellite and cable television marketplace, Verizon Internet Services has one new product to the mix of services consumers can use to get hundreds of channels into their homes. In 2005, the telecommunications giant began launching its “Verizon Fiber Optic Service” (FiOS) in select markets throughout the United States. The service, which would allow municipalities to receive pay television and other services, such as high-speed internet and telephone, over its fiber optic, internet service network, marks the entry of Verizon into the highly competitive content-delivery marketplace.

Like cable and satellite providers, Verizon must make deals with content owners and broadcast networks in order to carry programming for FiOS TV and make its service viable as a business and marketable to the consumer. However, a recent deal between Verizon and Disney may function to undercut a 2003 decision by the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit which sustained due process protections in how content and internet service providers subpoena possible copyright violators and do copyright tracking.

According to terms in the recent agreement, “Verizon would forward and track notices to its subscribers allegedly engaged in the unauthorized distribution of Disney’s copyrighted works, without identifying the subscribers to Disney….” The 2003 ruling by the D.C. Circuit essentially required content owners, like Disney, to sue individuals for copyright piracy before Internet Service Providers, like Verizon, disconnected the alleged violators. This most recent agreement between Verizon and the Walt Disney Company may mean Verizon could “terminate…services to individuals who infringed upon Disney’s copyright” by passing along information to Disney without first subpoenaing alleged infringers.

This note will examine how the recent deal between Verizon and Disney squares with the 2003 holding by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit that “a subpoena may be issued only to an ISP engaged in storing on its servers material that is infringing or the subject of infringing activity” pursuant to § 512(h) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It will also examine other market and legal factors that contributed to Verizon’s decision to reach the type of agreement with Disney that it, in some ways, refused to do with the RIAA.

NOTE: Footnotes in this abstract were omitted.