One ISP says RIAA must pay for piracy protection
Jerry Scroggin, owner-operator of Bayou Internet and Communications, wants the music and film industries to know that he's not a cop and he doesn't work for free. — Scroggin, who sells Internet access to between 10,000 and 12,000 customers in Louisiana …
Context & Ripple Effects
By late 2008, the RIAA had spent years suing individual file-sharers — a strategy so costly it was even ordered to cover a suit target's legal fees — and commentators were openly asking whether the RIAA would survive 2008. Jerry Scroggin's demand that labels pay ISPs for filtering shifts that fight from end-users to the pipes themselves, prefiguring the industry's later pivot toward intermediary enforcement.
First-order effects
- Small regional ISPs like Bayou Internet's ~10,000-12,000 Louisiana customers face pressure to become enforcement points for music and film piracy, with Scroggin explicitly refusing unpaid 'cop' duty.
- The RIAA and studios must either budget compensation for ISP cooperation or abandon pipe-level filtering as an enforcement channel.
Second-order effects
- If enforcement costs get priced in, larger ISPs gain leverage to negotiate paid anti-piracy agreements while small operators may simply decline — fragmenting enforcement across the market rather than universalizing it.
- Rights holders' search for cheaper enforcement channels accelerates, pushing them toward graduated-response schemes built on ISP cooperation rather than per-user litigation.
Third-order effects
- The pattern Scroggin objects to — private infrastructure conscripted into rights enforcement at its own expense — becomes the structural fault line that later produces formalized ISP policing regimes like the six-strikes-style copyright alert system and, ultimately, label lawsuits against broadband providers such as the Frontier Communications settlement.
- Whether intermediaries bear enforcement costs voluntarily, contractually, or under legal pressure remains contested nearly two decades on, suggesting the economics of delegated enforcement never fully resolved.
The trend: This is one data point in the long migration of copyright enforcement from individual users to internet intermediaries, where the unresolved question of who pays keeps resurfacing as enforcement mechanisms formalize.