The major labels have officially asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on an appellate court’s ruling in a marathon copyright battle with Cox Communications. Photo Credit: Adam Michael Szuscik
The major labels have fired back against Cox Communications in their long-running copyright battle, asking the Supreme Court to review an appellate ruling that tossed a $1 billion infringement penalty.
Universal Music, Sony Music, and Warner Music just recently submitted their petition for a writ of certiorari, after Cox itself asked the Supreme Court to step in. At this point, even a semi-detailed recap of the underlying courtroom confrontation, which has delivered more than a few twists, would prove lengthy.
Keeping the focus on brass-tacks takeaways, however, a jury in December of 2019 ordered Cox to pay a whopping $1 billion over the alleged recording and compositional infringement in question. Predictably, the ISP promptly began working to beat the fine – ultimately achieving (partial) success in February of 2024.
That’s when an appellate court overturned Cox’s vicarious infringement liability and ordered a fresh trial to calculate damages owed. Explaining the ruling, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals spelled out that it had “reversed the vicarious liability verdict because Cox did not directly profit from its subscribers’ infringement.”
Of course, the position didn’t sit right with the major label plaintiffs, nor did the adjacent conclusion that “under the correct legal standard, no reasonable jury could find that Cox received a direct financial benefit from its subscribers’ infringement.”
Consequently, when Cox moved forward with its request for Supreme Court clarification, the majors disclosed plans to seek a review of different elements.
Said review, the music companies have now relayed in many more words, would determine whether vicarious infringement’s profitability requirement encompasses any expected gain for the wider commercial offering at hand or, in keeping with the Fourth Circuit’s findings, exclusively refers to expected gains directly from the infringement.
“This Court has never addressed the contours of vicarious liability for copyright infringement,” the close to 50-page filing reads in part, “but lower courts have long understood that the Copyright Act permits copyright owners to pursue claims for vicarious liability where the defendant expects to profit from the broader operation in which infringement occurs.”
Not stopping there, the legal text indicates that the Fourth Circuit’s ruling “stands opposite to the rest of the field” and “is contrary to Congress’s stated purpose in enacting the 1976 Amendments to the Copyright Act.”
“And it eliminates an especially important tool in the digital age where pursuing direct infringers—in this case, thousands of faceless individuals who cannot be identified except through an internet service provider like Respondent—is impractical at best and impossible at worst,” the document drives home of the Fourth Circuit findings.
While the potential answer to the key copyright law question is certainly important, so is the corresponding effort to restore the original $1 billion damages verdict against Cox. With the majors stressing that the appellate court’s “erroneous interpretation of the vicarious-liability standard wiped out a $1 billion jury verdict,” the push to reverse the ruling is likewise a push to bring back the massive penalty.
As a result, it’ll be interesting on multiple levels to see how the dispute, which has already spanned the better part of a decade, concludes. Furthermore, perhaps in light of the ultra-involved showdown, different ISPs are opting to settle infringement complaints against them.
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