Seth Schiesel
As the recording industry pursues its lawsuits against those it says are digital music pirates, SBC Communications has emerged as the only major Internet service provider that has so far refused to identify computer users whom the industry suspects of copyright infringement.
Since early July, major high-speed Internet providers — including BellSouth, Comcast, EarthLink, Time Warner Cable and Verizon — have complied with more than 1,000 subpoenas from the record industry's lobbying arm, the Recording Industry Association of America, to turn over the names of their customers who are otherwise known only by the murky screen names and numeric Internet Protocol addresses used in cyberspace.
SBC, the No. 2 regional phone company and a major local telecommunications service provider in the Midwest and West, has received about 300 such subpoenas and has refused to answer any of them. It has stuck to that position even though Verizon, the biggest local phone company — which has most of its customers along the East Coast — lost a major lawsuit this year against the recording industry.
"We are going to challenge every single one of these that they file until we are told that our position is wrong as a matter of law," James D. Ellis, general counsel for SBC, said yesterday in a telephone interview.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/16/bu...rtne r=GOOGLE