{"id":9718,"date":"2026-03-26T01:30:12","date_gmt":"2026-03-26T01:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/9718\/"},"modified":"2026-03-26T01:30:12","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T01:30:12","slug":"high-court-makes-it-harder-to-sue-internet-providers-for-online-piracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/9718\/","title":{"rendered":"High court makes it harder to sue internet providers for online piracy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

WASHINGTON\u00a0\u2014\u00a0The Supreme Court on Wednesday made it harder for music and movie makers to sue for online piracy, ruling that internet providers are usually not liable for copyright infringement<\/a> even if they know their users are downloading copyrighted works.<\/p>\n

In a 9-0 decision, the justices threw out Sony\u2019s lawsuit and a $1-billion jury verdict against Cox Communications for copyright infringement.<\/p>\n

Lower courts upheld the lawsuit against Cox\u2019s internet service for contributing to music piracy, which the company did little to stop. <\/p>\n

Sony\u2019s lawyers pointed to hundreds of thousands of instances of Cox customers sharing copyrighted works. Put on notice, Cox did little to stop it, they said. <\/p>\n

But the high court said that is not enough to establish liability for copyright infringement, which remains a hot button issue in the music and film industries with the advent of AI tools that have spread the misuse of copyrighted content and sparked lawsuits between studios and AI companies.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnder 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,\u201d Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court.<\/a><\/p>\n

Two decades ago, the court sided with the music and motion picture producers<\/a> and ruled against Grokster and Napster on the grounds their software was intended to share copyrighted music and movies.<\/p>\n

But on Wednesday, the court said \u201ccontributory\u201d copyright infringement did not extend to internet service providers based on the actions of some of their users.<\/p>\n

\u201cCox provided Internet service to its subscribers, but it did not intend for that service to be used to commit copyright infringement,\u201d Thomas said. \u201cCox neither induced its users\u2019 infringement nor provided a service tailored to infringement.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mitch Glazier, the chairman of the Recording Industry Assn. of America, said he was \u201cdisappointed\u201d in the court\u2019s ruling, as the case was \u201cbased on overwhelming evidence that the company knowingly facilitated theft.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTo be effective, copyright law must protect creators and markets from harmful infringement and policymakers should look closely at the impact of this ruling,\u201d Glazier said in a statement. \u201cThe Court\u2019s decision is narrow, applying only to \u2018contributory infringement\u2019 cases involving defendants like Cox that do not themselves copy, host, distribute, or publish infringing material or control or induce such activity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Karyn Temple, senior executive vice president for the Motion Picture Assn., said in a statement that the decision \u201cupends the critical legal doctrine of contributory infringement for copyright.\u201d She added: \u201cUnfortunately, the Court\u2019s opinion today ignores this well-established rule and congressional intent, which is particularly disappointing amidst a growing consensus about the need for more accountability for facilitating harmful online conduct, not less.\u201d<\/p>\n

In its defense, Cox argued that internet service providers could be bankrupted by huge lawsuits for copyright infringement, which they said they did not cause and could not prevent. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe decision means that the Supreme Court isn\u2019t coming to the entertainment industry\u2019s rescue,\u201d said attorney Michael K. Friedland. \u201cThe copyright infringement problem is a technological problem. The modern internet makes infringement really easy. The decision means that the industry is going to have to solve the problem itself \u2014 by developing its own better technology to protect its intellectual property.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rachel Landy, who teaches copyright law at Cardozo Law School in New York, said the music industry has no good options and may need to go to Congress.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe record industry could go after the individual users who share works online without authorization, but that led to suboptimal outcomes in the past: bad publicity and judgment-proof defendants,\u201d Landy said. \u201cAnd now, the court has narrowed the contributory liability doctrine such that they are also unlikely to get recourse from the deeper pockets. It may be that their best recourse is to go to Congress for a fix.\u201d<\/p>\n

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Democracy and Technology joined the case in support of Cox and welcomed the decision.<\/p>\n

It is \u201ca win for freedom of speech,\u201d said Samir Jain, a CDT attorney. \u201cIf the court hadn\u2019t decided in favor of Cox, it would have turned internet service providers into censorship machines acting on behalf of powerful rights-holders.\u201d<\/p>\n

Times staff writer Cerys Davies in Los Angeles contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON\u00a0\u2014\u00a0The Supreme Court on Wednesday made it harder for music and movie makers to sue for online piracy,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9719,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[5153,7098,7099,8,7102,7100,7101,221,9,5342,5523,145,1748,7,7103,6558,1362,4843],"class_list":{"0":"post-9718","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-top-stories","8":"tag-company","9":"tag-copyright-infringement","10":"tag-cox-cable","11":"tag-headlines","12":"tag-high-court","13":"tag-internet-provider","14":"tag-movie-maker","15":"tag-music","16":"tag-news","17":"tag-service","18":"tag-sony","19":"tag-supreme-court","20":"tag-thousand","21":"tag-top-stories","22":"tag-user","23":"tag-verdict","24":"tag-wednesday","25":"tag-work"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@news\/116292892915353409","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9718\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}