Cable firm Cox’s Supreme Court win may help all tech providers, not just ISPs.

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.

...read more at arstechnica.com