The Supreme Court sided with internet provider Cox Communications, holding that it cannot be held liable for music piracy even if they did not take adequate steps to curb the copyright infringement.
The justices, in a 9-0 ruling, were weighing on a lengthy legal fight between Cox and Sony Music Entertainment, which had sought huge damages against the internet provider for not blocking service to those who egregiously downloaded protected works.
“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 be used by some to infringe copyrights,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the 9-0 ruling.
Cox Communications had used a service called Mark Monitor to track infringement of Sony’s copyrights, and the ISP said that it took steps to terminate accounts of repeat infringers after multiple warnings — 13 notices, per the high court’s opinion.
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But Sony said that, during a certain time frame, Cox terminated only 32 accounts, a contrast to the hundreds of thousands of accounts dropped for non payment.
A district court sided with Sony, ruling that Cox was liable for both “vicarious” and “contributory” infringement, and awarded $1 billion in statutory damages. An appellate court tossed out Cox’s liability for “vicarious” infringement, but kept in place the ruling for “contributory” piracy. It ruled that “supplying a product with knowledge that the recipient will use it to infringe copyrights is exactly the sort of culpable conduct sufficient for contributory infringement.”
The justices, though, ruled that mere knowledge was not enough to meet the threshold for liability. They found that Cox did not “induce” or “encourage” subscribers to pirate works, which plaintiffs have to show to prove that defendants are liable for “contributory” infringement.
“Cox provided Internet service to its subscribers, but it did not intend for that service to be used
to commit copyright infringement. Holding Cox liable merely for failing to terminate Internet service to infringing accounts would expand secondary copyright liability beyond our precedents,” Thomas wrote in the majority opinion.
More to come.