Organizations representing broadband carriers are urging the Supreme Court to reverse a lower court decision holding Cox Communications responsible for subscribers’ piracy, arguing
that the ruling could result in millions of people losing the ability to go online.

That decision, issued by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, “will be disastrous for Internet
access, broadband deployment, and the digital economy,” organizations including US Telecom–The Broadband Association and CTIA–The Wireless Association say in a friend-of-the-court brief filed Friday with the Supreme Court.

The groups add that the 4th Circuit’s ruling would expose internet service providers “to the risk of ten-figure judgments unless they terminate subscribers upon receipt of barebones,
unverifiable notices that typically consist of little more than a timestamp and an IP address.”

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They are weighing in on a battle dating to 2018, when Sony Music Entertainment
and other music companies sued Cox for facilitating piracy by allegedly failing to disconnect subcribers who were accused of illegally downloading music.

Sony and others
claimed they sent “hundreds of thousands” of notifications about piracy to Cox, and that the company failed to terminate repeat offenders.

Cox was found liable and,
in late 2019, a jury ordered the broadband provider to pay $1 billion to the record companies — or nearly $100,000 per work for around 10,000 pieces of downloaded or shared music.

Cox appealed to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld a finding that Cox contributed to copyright infringement by failing to disconnect alleged file-sharers, but returned the matter to the trial court for a new trial on
damages.

Cox is now appealing to the Supreme Court. The internet service provider argued in papers filed late last month that it merely provides “communications infrastructure
to the general public,” and isn’t responsible for subscribers’ activity.

The company also said it disconnected some subscribers after receiving notices regarding alleged
copyright infringement, but that many of the most frequently accused accounts were regional internet service providers, university housing, military barracks and multi-unit dwellings.

In those cases, “termination would have meant throwing innocent users off the internet en masse,” Cox wrote.

The broadband industry groups add that terminating
internet access to everyone at an IP address based solely on allegations that someone at that address infringed copyright “would be unworkable and chaotic,” given that many IP addresses serve
hospitals, schools or other institutions with numerous customers.

“This ham-fisted, terminate-first-ask-questions-later approach is infeasible, nonsensical, and threatens to
cut off millions of Americans from the Internet,” the groups say.