Record companies Sony, Warner and Universal have asked the US Supreme Court to help them kick pirates off the internet, demanding that internet service providers disconnect subscribers who have been repeatedly accused of copyright infringement.
Record companies Sony, Warner and Universal have asked the US Supreme Court to help them kick pirates off the internet, demanding that internet service providers disconnect subscribers who have been repeatedly accused of copyright infringement.
This is reported by Ars Technica, referring to the labels' lawsuit against Cox Communications, which provides digital cable television, telecommunications, and home automation services.
A lower court has rejected music labels' demands to mass disconnect broadband subscribers accused of repeated copyright infringement. The Supreme Court’s final decision in the case could determine whether internet service providers must shut down the accounts of alleged pirates to avoid significant financial liabilities.
Cox Communications says that copyright infringement notices sent by record labels, which are generated by bots and tag users based on their IP addresses, are unreliable. The company’s lawyers said that ISPs cannot verify whether the notices are accurate and that terminating an account would punish all users in a household where just one person may have illegally downloaded copyrighted files.
The record companies urged the Supreme Court to reject this argument. Its lawyers pointed out that the company disconnected 619,711 subscribers for non-payment during the same period when it terminated access to only 32 subscribers for serial copyright infringement.
«And while Cox Communications is stoking fears that innocent grandmothers and hospitals will be disconnected from the Internet for violations committed by someone else, Cox has provided no evidence that any subscriber here falls into that category,» the label representatives said.
The company’s lawyers' words refer to the part of Cox’s statement that claimed that «a grandmother would be disconnected from the Internet because her grandson illegally downloaded several songs» when he came to visit her.
The record companies' complaint alleged that torrents gave Internet users easy access to pirated content. They also didn’t like Cox Communications' use of a «13 strikes policy,» which allowed subscribers to download pirated material multiple times before facing any consequences.
While copyright owners have filed numerous lawsuits against ISPs, the Cox Communications case has been the central battleground for several years. In 2019, a jury ordered Cox to pay more than $1 billion, but that was not the final decision in the case.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit overturned this ruling in February 2024. The judges concluded that Cox did not directly benefit from the copyright infringement committed by its users and overturned the finding that the company was guilty of indirect copyright infringement.
In the winter of 2025, the National Council for Television and Radio Broadcasting of Ukraine expanded the list of prohibited domains of pirate sites such as Baskino, Filmix, and HD REZKA, which are subject to restriction.
In the spring, it added 9 more media services to the list of banned ones in Ukraine.
