I should have discussed this earlier, but inCox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment, the Supreme Court ruled (9-0) that simply providing internet access to someone is not contributory infringement of copyright.
This is a good ruling.
Sony and other major record labels recently suffered a thorough defeat at the Supreme Court in their attempt to make Internet service providers pay huge financial penalties for their customers’ copyright infringement. Sony’s loss is certain to have wide-ranging effects on copyright lawsuits, offering protection for ISPs, their customers, and potentially other technology companies whose services can be used for both legal and illegal purposes.
In Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment, the Supreme Court ruled that cable Internet firm Cox is not liable under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) when its customers use their broadband connections to download or upload pirated materials. Music copyright holders claimed that once Cox was informed that specific users repeatedly infringed copyrights, it should have terminated their accounts.
A jury agreed with Sony in 2019, hitting Cox with a $1 billion verdict. While the damages award was overturned by an appeals court in 2024, that court gave Sony a partial win by finding that Cox was guilty of contributory copyright infringement—a type of secondary liability for contributing to others’ infringement.
Cox was facing the prospect of another damages trial until the Supreme Court took up its case and unanimously ruled in its favor on March 25 of this year. The court found that Cox isn’t liable for its customers’ misdeeds because it did not induce them to infringe copyrights and did not “tailor” the broadband service so that it could be used for infringement.
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While the Cox ruling’s most immediate effect is on other ISPs that were also sued by record labels, one of the attorneys who represented Cox at the Supreme Court told Ars that the decision seems to apply broadly to all other kinds of technology platforms.
“I think it applies to any technology provider. I didn’t see any basis in the opinion or its reasoning for limiting it only to a particular type of technology provider,” attorney Christopher Cariello said. Whether Cox applies to another case “basically just depends on if it’s the same configuration, providing technology that someone else uses for infringement, then it’s the same analysis,” he said.
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Sony itself laid the groundwork for its 2026 defeat in 1984 when it convinced the court that the Betamax was capable of noninfringing uses and that selling it did not constitute contributory infringement. The 1984 Betamax case and the 2005 ruling in MGM Studios v. Grokster both factored heavily into the Cox decision authored by Justice Clarence Thomas.
A Sony victory against Cox could have made it easier for copyright owners to sue companies whose offerings have both legitimate and illegitimate uses. The firm’s loss will surely make such cases more difficult. As Thomas wrote in Cox, a service provider can be held contributorily liable “only if it intended that the provided service be used for infringement.” Such intent “can be shown only if the party induced the infringement or the provided service is tailored to that infringement,” he wrote.
This means that when a service is capable of “substantial” or “commercially significant” noninfringing uses, its provider can worry a bit less about being held liable for infringement. Users of those services can also worry a bit less about the service provider aggressively terminating accounts.
I think that this is an indication of a cultural shift, where even institutions like SCOTUS are thinking that the current IP regime is way over its skis.
I could not imagine such a ruling even a decade ago.
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