WASHINGTON, Sept. 8, 2025 \u2013 The U.S. Solicitor General joined consumer advocates, tech firms, and broadband providers Friday in warning the Supreme Court that a Fourth Circuit ruling against Cox Communications risks cutting households offline and destabilizing the internet economy.<\/p>\n
The case, Cox v. Sony, stems from a Virginia jury\u2019s 2019 decision to impose $1 billion in damages after finding Cox had allowed subscribers to remain online despite multiple infringement notices from record labels. The Eastern District of Virginia found the ISP secondarily responsible for its customers\u2019 piracy, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld the judgment.<\/p>\n
On Friday, a wave of amicus briefs landed in Cox\u2019s favor. The most sweeping came from the Common Sense Copyright Coalition, spearheaded by USTelecom and joined by ACA Connects, CTIA, the Internet Infrastructure Coalition, NTCA, and WTA. <\/p>\n
The coalition told the Court the Fourth Circuit\u2019s approach would be \u201cunworkable and chaotic,\u201d forcing providers to terminate service on the basis of IP-address notices.<\/p>\n
\u201cMany IP addresses serve entire institutions, such as schools and hospitals, or hundreds of different customers in cloud environments \u2013 meaning that a single infringing user could trigger a duty for an ISP to disconnect thousands of innocent people,\u201d the trade groups, represented by counsel of record Tom Johnson, Jr., told the Court<\/a>.<\/p>\n The groups argued the Fourth Circuit \u201cadopted an extreme, novel form of contributory copyright infringement\u201d and compounded it by subjecting all secondary infringers to quintuple statutory damages under \u201can erroneous, watered-down willfulness standard.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe result of the Fourth Circuit\u2019s errors will be disastrous for Internet access, broadband deployment, and the digital economy,\u201d the groups wrote.<\/p>\n Providers say decision ‘imperils public access to the internet’<\/p>\n Broadband providers Altice USA, AT&T, Charter Communications, Frontier Communications, Lumen, T-Mobile, and Verizon argued the decision \u201cimperils public access to the internet.\u201d<\/p>\n In their filing<\/a>, the companies stressed that Cox was not alone. Frontier Communications was currently defending a $400 million lawsuit, while Altice USA faces a case with a vast range of potential statutory damages, and press reports suggest Verizon could be on the hook for as much as $2.6 billion in another copyright case.<\/p>\n Public Knowledge likewise cautioned that the ruling, if affirmed by the Court, would \u201cset a dangerous precedent,\u201d in a release<\/a> Friday.\u00a0<\/p>\n