{"id":6711,"date":"2025-07-01T04:15:48","date_gmt":"2025-07-01T04:15:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/supreme-court-will-weigh-music-piracy-liability-in-1-billion-cox-case\/"},"modified":"2025-07-01T04:15:48","modified_gmt":"2025-07-01T04:15:48","slug":"supreme-court-will-weigh-music-piracy-liability-in-1-billion-cox-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/supreme-court-will-weigh-music-piracy-liability-in-1-billion-cox-case\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court Will Weigh Music Piracy Liability in $1 Billion Cox Case"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

\n\tT<\/span>he U.S Supreme Court has agreed to review a billion-dollar lawsuit brought by the major record labels against Cox Communications and decide whether internet service providers can be held liable when their users download music illegally.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe justices\u2019 order list from Monday (June 30) grants Cox\u2019s petition to review a $1 billion jury verdict won by Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group in 2019. The case held that Cox was responsible for its users\u2019 music piracy because it failed to terminate subscribers who were repeatedly accused of violating copyright law.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn granting the petition, the Supreme Court is agreeing to decide on a broad scale whether the country\u2019s various internet service providers can be held liable for piracy under a legal theory known as contributory copyright infringement.<\/p>\n

\n\tCox says the \u201cdraconian\u201d ruling in this case improperly punishes ISPs for the behavior of their users and \u201cthreatens mass disruption\u201d across the internet. The Justice Department has sided with Cox, warning that innocent Americans could lose access to the internet if connections used by entire families, businesses or universities are terminated because of infringement by a single user.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe major labels, meanwhile, did not want the Supreme Court to weigh in on the matter. They maintain that the lower court was right on the issue of contributory infringement and that \u201cCox\u2019s contrived arguments about the tenuous state of the internet are both wrong and disingenuous.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tUniversal, Warner and Sony all sued Cox in 2018 over its users\u2019 alleged copyright infringement. ISPs like Cox are often shielded from such lawsuits by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), but a Virginia federal judge ruled ahead of trial that Cox had forfeited that protection by failing to terminate repeat piracy offenders.<\/p>\n

\n\tStripped of that immunity, jurors held Cox liable in December 2019 for the infringement of 10,017 separate songs and awarded the labels more than $99,000 for each song \u2014 adding up to a whopping $1 billion.<\/p>\n

\n\tA mid-level appeals court upheld Cox\u2019s liability last year but ordered the damages to be recalculated. The record labels then filed their own Supreme Court petition asking to reinstate the $1 billion verdict, but the justices declined that on Monday.<\/p>\n

\n\tA spokesperson for Cox said in a statement that the company is \u201cpleased the U.S. Supreme Court has decided to address these significant copyright issues that could jeopardize internet access for all Americans and fundamentally change how internet service providers manage their networks.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cToday\u2019s development supports our goal of protecting consumers, preserving open internet access and ensuring that broadband remains a reliable resource for the communities we serve,\u201d added the Cox spokesperson. \u201cWe look forward to presenting our arguments to the court.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said in a statement of its own on Monday that under the DMCA, ISPs like Cox must face monetary liability if they do not \u201cimpose real consequences on users who repeatedly violate creators\u2019 rights.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe are confident that on full review of the record, the court \u2014 like the trial and appellate courts did before it \u2014 will find that Cox\u2019s willful failure to follow well-settled law contributed to massive infringement of the plaintiffs\u2019 copyrights and will return the case to the trial court for final determination of damages,\u201d said the RIAA on behalf of the record labels.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The U.S Supreme Court has agreed to review a billion-dollar lawsuit brought by the major record labels against Cox Communications and decide whether internet service providers can be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6712,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1370,294,143,6393,4577,593,2500,533,775],"class_list":["post-6711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-billion","tag-case","tag-court","tag-cox","tag-liability","tag-music","tag-piracy","tag-supreme","tag-weigh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6711\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}