The Supreme Court has decided a crucial but charmingly old-timey question over music piracy, siding against the music industry and actually citing even an even older technology case involving VCRs.
Internet service provider Cox Communications was vindicated after Sony and other industry titans claimed the ISP was negligent by failing to suspend users who had been flagged by industry sources for illegally sharing music files. Sued in 2018 by publishers and labels for enabling piracy, Cox pursued the case to the Supreme Court, which finally rendered a decision at a time when the very idea of “file sharing” is almost an afterthought among most artists and fans.
The Supreme Court decision was unanimous in Cox’s favor, though justices split on the rationale for their verdict. The majority opined that Cox was not liable for merely providing services to the public “with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights.”
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The provider of a service is liable for a user’s infringement “only if it intended that the provided service be used for infringement.” Which is to say: if Cox was advertising its services for file sharing, or if their ISP was specifically designed to enable infringement, then maybe they’d have a case. But “Cox neither induced its users’ infringement nor provided a service tailored to infringement; accordingly, Cox is not contributorily liable for the infringement of Sony’s copyrights.”
In an earlier decision in this case, Cox was held liable for 10,017 songs illegally shared by their users, with Sony being awarded $1 billion in damages.
The court’s opinion cited cases going all the way back to Grokster (a long forgotten file sharing platform) and even a 1984 decision brought by the television industry that Betamax VCRs could be used to infringe on broadcast TV shows.
Ironically, the owner of Betamax which successfully defended charges of infringement in that case was the same plaintiff which was arguing for them in this one — Sony.
