Eric Mack, Fox News ; Supreme Court tosses $1B copyright verdict in record companies' battle over illegal internet downloads
"The Supreme Court unanimously ruled Wednesday that internet providers are not liable for copyright infringement by their users, delivering an opinion in Cox v. Sony and tossing a $1 billion verdict."
Ann E. Marimow, The New York Times ; Supreme Court Sides With Internet Provider in Copyright Fight Over Pirated Music
Leading music labels sued Cox Communications for failing to terminate accounts of subscribers flagged for distributing copyrighted music.
"The Supreme Court unanimously said on Wednesday that a major internet provider could not be held liable for the piracy of thousands of songs online in a closely watched copyright clash."
SCOTUSblog; Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment
"Holding: Internet service provider Cox Communications neither induced its users’ infringement of copyrighted works nor provided a service tailored to infringement, and accordingly Cox is not contributorily liable for the infringement of Sony’s copyrights.
Judgment: Reversed and remanded, 9-0, in an opinion by Justice Thomas on March 25, 2026. Justice Sotomayor wrote an opinion concurring in the judgment, joined by Justice Jackson."
"Facebook parent-company Meta is currently fighting a class action lawsuit alleging copyright infringement and unfair competition, among others, with regards to how it trained LLaMA. According to an X (formerly Twitter) post by vx-underground, court records reveal that the social media company used pirated torrents to download 81.7TB of data from shadow libraries including Anna’s Archive, Z-Library, and LibGen. It then used this information to train its AI models.
The evidence, in the form of written communication, shows the researchers’ concerns about Meta’s use of pirated materials. One senior AI researcher said way back in October 2022, “I don’t think we should use pirated material. I really need to draw a line here.” While another one said, “Using pirated material should be beyond our ethical threshold,” then they added, “SciHub, ResearchGate, LibGen are basically like PirateBay or something like that, they are distributing content that is protected by copyright and they’re infringing it.”"
