US Supreme Court says ISPs aren’t liable for their users’ piracy — top judiciary body unanimously rules that Cox Communications did not commit copyright infringement

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Cox Communications after Sony Music Entertainment and several other labels sued the company for copyright infringement back in 2018. The internet service provider (ISP) actually lost the case back then after the music labels said that the company did not terminate its subscribers despite being repeatedly flagged for downloading and sharing pirated music. This ended with the jury awarding the plaintiffs $1 billion in statutory damages, although this was overturned on appeal, according to Engadget.

“Countless people use the Internet for legal activities, but some use it to illegally share copyrighted works, such as songs and movies…In this case, however, instead of suing those infringers, the copyright owners sued petitioners, Cox Communications, Inc., and its subsidiary, who provided the internet connections that the infringers used,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the decision. “Under our precedents, a company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will used by some to infringe copyrights.”

This ruling sets a precedent, saying that ISPs are not liable for the actions of their users. Although Cox has a clause in its service contract that prohibits users from distributing pirated content, it seems that quite a few of its six million subscribers ignore it. A Supreme Court of the United States document [PDF] showed that MarkMonitor, a firm that tracks the illegal uploading and downloading of pirated media, sent the ISP 163,148 notices that identified infringing IP addresses over a two-year period. But, out of its nearly 6 million subscribers, Sony says that the company only terminated 32 subscribers for their alleged illegal activities.

The court says that Cox has no contributory liability to the copyright infringement cases that Sony brought against it, as it needed to prove that the ISP either “affirmatively induced the infringement” or that it “sold a service tailored to infringement.” Furthermore, the court pointed out that “Internet service providers like Cox have limited knowledge about how their services are used; they know which IP address corresponds to which subscriber account but cannot distinguish individual users or directly control how services are used.”

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