WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court made it harder for music and movie makers to sue for online piracy, ruling Wednesday that internet providers are usually not liable for copyright infringement even if they know their users are downloading copyrighted works.
In a 9-0 decision, the justices threw out Sony’s lawsuit and a $1-billion verdict against Cox Cable for copyright infringement.
Lower courts upheld a jury’s verdict against Cox’s internet service for contributing to music piracy, which the company did little to stop.
Sony’s lawyers pointed to hundreds of thousands of instances of Cox customers sharing copyrighted works. Put on notice, Cox did little stop it, they said.
But the high court said that is not enough to establish liability for copyright infringement.
“Under our precedents, a company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court.
Two decades ago, the court sided with the music and motion picture producers and ruled against Grokster and Napster on the grounds their software was intended to share copyrighted music and movies.
But on Wednesday, the court said “contributory” copyright infringement did not extend to internet service providers based on the actions of some of their users
“Cox provided Internet service to its subscribers, but it did not intend for that service to be used to commit copyright infringement,” Thomas said. “Cox neither induced its users’ infringement nor provided a service tailored to infringement.”
In its defense, Cox argued that internet service providers could be bankrupted by huge lawsuits for copyright infringement, which they said they did not cause and could not prevent.