On 5/11/11 11:19 AM, Marshall Eubanks wrote:
On May 10, 2011, at 8:30 PM, Jimmy Hess wrote:
On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 8:54 AM, Mark Radabaugh<mark@amplex.net> wrote:
On 5/10/11 9:07 AM, Marshall Eubanks wrote: A good reason why every ISP should have a published civil subpoena compliance fee. 23,000 * $150 each should only cost them $3.45M to get the information. Seems like that would take the profit out pretty quickly. +1. But don't the fees actually have to be reasonable? If you say your fee is $150 per IP address, I think they might bring it to the judge and claim the ISP is attempting to avoid subpoena compliance by charging an unreasonable fee.
They can point to all the competitors charging $40 per IP.
I am not a lawyer, and you would be a fool to use NANOG for legal advice, but if I were to charge something for this, I would want to be able to justify the charge in front of a judge, regardless of what anyone else charges. In other words, something like "we find it typically takes $ 100 to get the backups out of storage, 15 minutes @ $X per minute for a tech to find the right backup disk and 10 minutes at $Y per minute for a network engineer to review the dump."
Regards Marshall
Don't forget to include your attorneys time to verify that the subpoena is actually legal. That would add another $100 to the cost at a minimum. We recently almost released information on a customer in an attempt to comply with what appeared to be a valid subpoena. The subpoena was invalid and thankfully our attorney noticed it. I fully expect the bill for the legal advice to be at least $100.00 Really the point though is to charge *some* fee for complying. It doesn't really matter what the fee is. The reason they sue 10,000 defendants in one case is to avoid having to pay the $350 (or similar) fee to the court for each defendant. If the ISP's don't charge for providing this information a copyright holder can file a civil suit, issue subpoena's based on the filing, and intimidate defendants with settlement offers before the case gets thrown out of court for improperly joining defendants. http://houstonlawyer.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/over-10000-internet-users-dism... Add any significant cost to the process of figuring out who the actual customers are and the profit motive goes out the window. -- Mark Radabaugh Amplex mark@amplex.net 419.837.5015