Court Says ISPs Must Advise Customers Before Providing Their Information to Third Parties Under Subpoena   - 1,456 Views, 1 Comment

Summary: A U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania ruled last week that ISPs must put their customers on notice before turning customer information over to a subpoenaing party, in this case the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Because customers of ISPs are often not in ...

Previous Article « Newly Discovered URL Spoofing Trick Affects I.E. and Safari
Read Next Article » Beware This Spam Scam!

  Follow Anne on Twitter     Friend Anne on Facebook

A U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania ruled last week that ISPs must put their customers on notice before turning customer information over to a subpoenaing party, in this case the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

Because customers of ISPs are often not in the same jurisdiction as the ISP, a customer may have a valid basis for raising the issue of whether the Court issuing the subpoena has jurisdiction over them at all, and may therefore be able to successfully contest the subpoenaing of their personal information from the ISP.

In fact, the Court’s ruling includes an order that ISPs in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania are required to provide notice to their customers who are the subject of such a subpoena, advising them of their rights and even including a list of attorneys who can help the customer determine their best course of action.

No matter where you come down on the issue of the sharing of music files, it is comforting to know that, at least in some districts of the United States, your ISP has a duty to inform you if someone is seeking to subpoena your personal information.

Court Says ISPs Must Advise Customers Before Providing Their Information to Third Parties Under Subpoena

 Follow Anne on Twitter

 Twitter Explained in Plain English

 Friend Anne on Facebook

Previous Article « Newly Discovered URL Spoofing Trick Affects I.E. and Safari
Read Next Article » Beware This Spam Scam!

Read more:

»  What Do You Think ISPs Should Do About Their Customers with Infected and Infested PCs?

»  Newsflash! Federal Court to RIAA: No, You CAN’T Have that Peer-to-Peer User’s Information!

»  90,000 Registered Sex Offenders Found on MySpace

»  Survey Says! Best ISP Is…

For additional similar stories check out our archives on Everything Else

NOTE: We never, ever, ever will recommend any product or service on this site that we have not regularly used ourselves and do not wholeheartedly believe in. That said, in some cases after being very pleased with a product or service, we may enter into a relationship with the provider of that product or service such that if someone purchases that product or service based on our recommendation, we may get a small payment. Such payments go towards the upkeep of the Internet Patrol.

 

1 Comment »

  1. A U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania ruled last week that ISPs must put their customers on notice before turning customer information over to a subpoenaing party, in this case the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Because customers of…

    Comment by Lockergnome's Political Geeks — 11/2/2004 @ 12:39 am

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

Warning! All comments which contain URLs and are clearly just spam to generate a link back to the URL will be deleted on sight. Don't bother wasting your time!

If you are going to include a URL in your comment,
please keep it under 25 characters in length,
or use TinyURL to shorten it before including it in your comment.

Line and paragraph breaks are automatic, your email address is never displayed.
HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

(required)

(required)


If you have not posted a comment here before, we apologize for having to ask you to enter the letters and numbers you see in the image above to validate your comment, but we are being attacked by thousands of comment form spams every day! You only need to do this once; once you have successfuly posted a comment here you will not be asked to do this again. Thank you for your understanding!

 
 This article first appeared on 11/1/2004
The Internet Patrol
Patrolling the Internet for You!