DMCA: How can ISP ever avoid liability, ISP always gets financial benefit from user content infringement
<p>According to DMCA, to avoid liability the ISP must not financially benefited from the infringement.
But ISP is always making money in one or many ways from infringement (ads display, subscription, marketing, publicity, traffic)
Especially when the infringed content is popular, the revenue must be there more than usual.</p>

<p>so how can ISP ever be innocent?</p>

<p><strong>Addition from comments:</strong></p>

<p>I think the key for this is DMCA does not specify indirect or direct benefit of ISP. So lawyers can always say that ISP gained "a benefit". Also most of shady file hosting sites their main purpose is obviously make money from illegal content in a short time until reported. When someone upload a popular illegal content on youtube, gets 1 million view in a day then deleted by google. Google already made big ads revenue, which is the main business model of the website. That is completely a direct benefit out of it. With full purpose and intention of Google.</p>

<p>The normal scenario is that a user illegally downloads a movie. The IP owner identifies that someone illegally downloaded a movie from some IP address assigned to the ISP. They send a notice to the ISP, the ISP sends it on to the person the IP address was assigned to. The ISP doesn't benefit directly from the infringement.</p>

<p>The other scenario is that the ISP gives storage space to users. A user stores an illegal copy of a movie and shares it. The IP owner finds out people are downloading from this IP address, sends a notice to the ISP and the ISP forwards the notice to the user and may delete the infringing content. Again, the ISP doesn't benefit directly from the infringement. </p>

<p>Now, if the ISP advertises itself as a place to download movies or becomes aware that infringing content is located on their servers and does nothing, then yes, they become eligible for liability. (Of course, since the DMCA is a US law, they have to be also in the US or a nation willing to help the US enforce the DMCA)</p>

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