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The internet service provider Cox Communications on Friday
asked the Supreme Court to reverse a lower court’s decision holding the company responsible for illegal music downloads by broadband subscribers.
Unless overturned, that ruling “will yield
mass evictions from the internet,” Cox writes, adding that the ruling will
force providers like itself “to terminate the connections of homes, barracks, hospitals, and hotels, upon bare accusation” of infringement.
The company adds that it “did not engage in a single
affirmative act with the purpose of furthering infringement — and gained nothing from users’ infringing conduct.”
Cox’s argument comes in a battle dating to 2018, when Sony Music
Entertainment and other music companies sued Cox for allegedly facilitating piracy.
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The music companies alleged that 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. The maximum statutory damages for copyright infringement is $150,000 per work infringed.
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.
The Supreme Court agreed earlier this year to hear Cox’s appeal of that ruling.
Cox isn’t the only internet service provider sued by record labels. Verizon is currently facing a similar suit, and other broadband providers —
including Frontier and Charter — have settled lawsuits by music companies over downloads by users.
Verizon and other internet service providers backed Cox’s petition for review, arguing to the
Supreme Court that failing to disconnect suspected infringers isn’t grounds for liability.
Cox argues in its appeal that merely provides “communications infrastructure to the general public on
uniform terms.”
“Imposing contributory liability in these circumstances flouts a century of this Court’s case law in the copyright context and in analogous cases where plaintiffs sought to
hold defendants liable for another’s wrongs,” the company writes.
Cox says it provides service to more than six million homes and businesses — including hotels and universities — and that it
around 1% of those homes or businesses were accused by the record labels of infringement.
“Within that home or business, one user may infringe while many others do not,” Cox writes, adding
that can’t control what its users do online, or monitor their activity.
“Some infringement allegations are false,” Cox writes. “Others concern infringements that the customer was unaware of or
disputed…Even if Cox presumes an accusation is accurate, it cannot know which user did it.”
The company adds that it disconnected some subscribers, 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 writes.
The music companies are expected to respond to Cox’s arguments by October 15.
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