A Virginia jury in 2019 smacked Cox Communications, the cable giant, with a $1 billion penalty for allowing its customers to use its networks to pirate music. The plaintiffs, Sony and other major record labels, said Cox should have cracked down on the IP addresses associated with Sony’s piracy.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday unanimously tossed that verdict, ruling that Cox wasn’t liable for not cutting off customers who used its networks to pirate digital content. The company wasn’t doing anything wrong, Clarence Thomas stated in the court’s opinion, by “merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights.”
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“This opinion affirms that internet service providers are not copyright police and should not be held liable for the actions of their customers,” Cox trumpeted in a press release.
The statement gets at the key problem: Who should be copyright police?
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