A federal court in Georgia has quashed an expansive Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) subpoena that would have required Internet Service Provider (ISP) CBeyond to turn over the identities of alleged BitTorrent pirates. The judge ruled that ISPs do not have to hand over any personal data because they are not storing any infringing materials themselves.

BitTorrent is a software application that takes a torrent file and downloads the associated data.


Only a BitTorrent client can make sense of a BitTorrent file, which tells the program what data is being downloaded and where to go to find it. The program finds multiple people also running the software who have the same file and download it in pieces from several sources at once. The file will download far quicker than a normal direct download, which is one of the reasons for the popularity of BitTorrent. While the technology itself is perfectly legal, most use BitTorrent to download television shows, films, games, and other files for free, thereby engaging in piracy. Websites like The Pirate Bay have continually had their servers raided by police because of allegations of copyright infringement, with its owners imprisoned. However, this has not deterred the website from continuing its operations.

Last year, Rightscorp began sending DMCA subpoenas to numerous small ISPs in the United States on behalf of companies such as Warner Brothers and Sony-BMG. Unlike a traditional subpoena, these do not require review by a judge.

Instead, they merely require a signature from a court clerk.

Generally, these subpoenas are not applicable to file-sharing cases. However, dozens of ISPs have still complied with these requests, turning over the identities of their customers who have then received settlement demands for their alleged wrongdoings.

CBeyond is one of the few ISPs that has refused to turn over the identities of their customers. Owned by Birch Communication, CBeyond filed a motion to quash the subpoena filed by Rightscorp on the basis that the DMCA does not allow copyright holders to identify file-sharers and only apply to services that host infringing material, as was the case in a recent dispute between Marvel and Google over the leaked trailer for “Avengers: Age of Ultron.”

Rightscorp argued that the subpoenas were critical because without them, copyright holders would not be able to stop and deter infringements of this nature.

The Court agreed that Rightscorp’s subpoena exceeded the scope of the DMCA and quashed the subpoena. Consequently, the subscribers accused of file-sharing do not have to be identified.

To address Rightscorp’s concerns regarding copyright holders, Magistrate Judge Janet King stated that it was Congress’s duty to rewrite the law if there was insufficient redress available:

“It is the province of Congress, not the courts, to decide whether to rewrite the DMCA in order to make it fit a new and unforeseen Internet architecture and accommodate fully the varied permutations of competing interests that are inevitably implicated by such new technology.”

This decision upholds the precedent set in RIAA v. Verizon over a decade ago, in which the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that these subpoenas could only be issued to ISPs who hosted infringing content directly on their servers. They are further inapplicable because the storage actually occurs on the user’s personal systems, which mirrors the facts of the CBeyond and Rightscorp dispute.

CBeyond also requested the court sanction Rightscorp, but the court declined to do so.

While this decision is an excellent outcome for the affected subscribers, their victory may be short-lived because Rightscorp has appealed the decision.

However, until the ruling is re-examined, it is unlikely the company will file any more of these DMCA subpoenas against smaller ISPs pending the ultimate resolution of this dispute.