WASHINGTON—The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously last week against music industry record labels in a high-profile content piracy case brought against the country’s third-largest internet service provider (ISP). The ruling has implications that impact content piracy mitigation efforts in creative industries across the board, including adult entertainment.
One of the core sentiments in the Supreme Court's ruling is that an ISP cannot be held liable for the actions of a third party. In 2018, rights holders, including Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music, sued Cox Communications.
A lower court handed the music industry a verdict of about $1 billion a year later. But Cox was able to bring the case on appeal all the way to the high court.
There, the bench ruled, 9-0, in favor of the ISP because, per Justice Clarence Thomas writing for the court, "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."
The case was appealed to SCOTUS from the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled in 2024 that the $1 billion verdict was not justified and that the federal district court was not an appropriate venue for a new trial to determine a new sum for the aggrieved parties.
"Cox provided internet service to its subscribers, but it did not intend for that service to be used to commit copyright infringement," Thomas notes. "Holding Cox liable merely for failing to terminate internet service to infringing accounts would expand secondary copyright liability beyond our precedents."
The recording industry wasn't sold.
"We are disappointed in the court’s decision vacating a jury’s determination that Cox Communications contributed to mass scale copyright infringement, based on overwhelming evidence that the company knowingly facilitated theft," remarked Mitch Lazier, chair and chief executive officer of the Recording Industry Association of America, in a statement to Variety.
In its own statement to the outlet, Cox Communications countered, "This opinion affirms that Internet service providers are not copyright police and should not be held liable for the actions of their customers—and after years of battling in the trial and appellate courts, we have definitively shut down the music industry’s aspirations of mass evictions from the internet."
Now, the case is remanded to the lower courts, and the verdict of $1 billion is overturned.
"The Supreme Court’s decision is a significant shift in how copyright enforcement will function online, with ripple effects well beyond the music industry," said Corey Silverstein, an adult industry attorney speaking about the impact of piracy mitigation efforts in the adult entertainment space. "By holding that internet service providers are not liable for user infringement unless they actively induce it, the Court has effectively raised the bar for secondary liability.
"For the adult industry, this is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it reinforces the stability of the digital distribution ecosystem—platforms and ISPs are less likely to over-police or cut off access based on allegations alone, which protects lawful content distribution and user access," Silverstein added. "On the other hand, it makes enforcement against piracy more difficult. Adult content is among the most frequently pirated media online, and this ruling limits the ability of rights holders to pressure intermediaries like ISPs to act as enforcement gatekeepers. Instead, the burden shifts even more toward targeting individual infringers or platforms that actively facilitate infringement."
Lawrence Walters, another adult entertainment industry attorney, agreed with Silverstein's sentiments.
"Moving forward, in order to prove contributory infringement against an ISP, the claimant must show that the ISP specifically induced the infringement or that the service was tailored to facilitating piracy," Walters said. "Mere knowledge of ongoing infringement will be insufficient. The case involved an ISP, not a tube site or content creator platform. Future cases will decide whether this new legal standard for ISPs will have a trickle-down effect on claims against online adult platforms."
He added, "But efforts to hold upstream ISPs liable for copyright infringement have been made more difficult as a result of the SCOTUS decision."
