Supreme Court to Weigh in on Cox Copyright Case
Justices agreed to weigh in on whether Cox should be liable for subscribers' piracy.
WASHINGTON, June 30, 2025 – The Supreme Court agreed Monday to weigh in on whether Cox Communications is liable for its subscribers’ piracy and copyright infringement.
Justices granted Cox’s request to hear the company’s appeal of a Fourth Circuit decision that threw out a $1 billion penalty awarded by a Virginia jury but said the company still had some liability. The ISP argued it should not be liable at all for the copyright infringement at issue.
“We are pleased the U.S. Supreme Court has decided to address these significant copyright issues that could jeopardize internet access for all Americans and fundamentally change how internet service providers manage their networks,” a Cox spokesperson said.
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The case stems from a 2018 suit brought by more than 50 record labels, who sued Cox for not taking subscribers offline fast enough after being notified they repeatedly pirated songs.
The Fourth Circuit last year ruled Cox didn’t profit directly from the piracy, which nixed the jury’s massive penalty, but agreed that Cox was still liable because it was notified of the subscribers’ offenses but didn’t cut their connections.
Cox, which is in the process of being acquired by cable giant Charter, counts more than 6 million broadband subscribers. About 57,000 of them were alleged to have pirated music in the case. Cox claims it dealt with infringement notices by sending subscribers email warnings and sometimes suspending or discontinuing service if infringement persisted.
Also Monday, the court denied a request from the record labels to review the Fourth Circuit’s decision to toss out the fine. Sony Music Entertainment, which led the record labels, was looking to reinstate the fine and separately urged justices not to grant Cox’s request to review whether the ISP was liable in the first place.
Cox said in its petition to the high court that it shouldn’t be penalized for not cutting connections on which piracy occurred, arguing many of the offending accounts were used by large numbers of people that mostly were not pirating music.
“In practice, the accounts that continued to rack up notices without termination were regional ISPs, universities, hotels, military housing, and other business accounts used by hundreds or thousands of individual users,” Cox wrote.
The Trump administration took Cox’s side, urging justices to take the provider’s case and to deny Sony’s in a May filing.
“Because a single internet connection might be used by an entire family – or, in the case of coffee shops, hospitals, universities, and the like, by hundreds of downstream users – the decision below could cause numerous non-infringing users to lose their internet access,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote.
Sauer served as a federal prosecutor and Missouri's solicitor general, and was President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer. He represented Trump in the presidential immunity case last year.
“The government’s recommendation to grant Cox’s petition while denying Sony’s is bewildering,” Sony countered in a June 10 brief. “The government urges the Court to grant (limited) review and to bail-out an ISP that could have avoided liability entirely by availing itself of an easily satisfied safe-harbor but instead chose to look the other way and hope that its ‘unwritten semi-policy’ would not come out in litigation.”
