The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a lawsuit between Sony Music Entertainment and Cox, an internet cable company. After winning a Federal appeals court, Cox now faces one final barrier that may once again jeopardize internet access for millions of internet users.
As we’ve previously written, Cox has said that letting the piracy ruling stand “would force ISPs to terminate Internet service to households or businesses based on unproven allegations of infringing activity and put them in a position of having to police their networks.”
Copyright holders hire services that use bots to monitor file-sharing networks and send ISPs millions of notices a year alleging infringement by someone at a particular IP address, Cox told the Supreme Court. Cox said that ISPs “have no way of verifying whether a bot-generated notice is accurate” and that even if the notices are accurate, terminating an account would punish every user in a household where only one person may have illegally downloaded copyrighted files.
The Cox/Sony case is one of numerous lawsuits filed by major record labels against ISPs. In one case, the conservative-leaning US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled in October 2024 that Grande Communications should have terminated Internet users accused of piracy. Another case ended a month ago when Internet service provider Frontier Communications reached an undisclosed settlement with Universal, Sony, and Warner.
Just in case this case turns out for the worst, bots could arbitrary disconnect internet access for users accused of piracy. Do you think VPN or VPS users will be affected?