After Cox ruling, Supreme Court docket wipes out Grande Communications’ $47M music piracy verdict
The Supreme Court docket on Monday (April 6) vacated a decrease courtroom ruling that ordered web supplier Grande Communications to pay $46.7 million in damages to a bunch of file labels for infringement in November 2022.
The best courtroom within the US wrote: “The petition for a writ of certiorari is granted. The judgment is vacated, and the case is remanded to the US Court docket of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit for additional consideration in gentle of Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Leisure.”
The choice comes as the Supreme Court docket final month dominated unanimously in Cox v. Sony Music that web service suppliers can’t be held chargeable for copyright infringement dedicated by their customers, except the supplier actively induced the infringement or offered a service tailor-made to that infringement — that means a service not able to substantial noninfringing makes use of.
In 2019, a jury in Virginia discovered Cox responsible of oblique copyright infringement carried out by its customers. It awarded damages of $99,830.29 for every of 10,017 infringed musical works, amounting to barely over $1 billion.
Nonetheless, in early 2024, the 4th Circuit Court docket of Appeals partially overturned that verdict, deciding that Cox couldn’t be held chargeable for “vicarious” copyright infringement, as a result of it wasn’t confirmed that the corporate straight profited from its subscribers’ piracy.
Cox then filed a petition for certiorari with the Supreme Court docket in August 2024, and by June 2025, the Supreme Court docket agreed to listen to the case.
“The petition for a writ of certiorari is granted. The judgment is vacated, and the case is remanded to the US Court docket of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit for additional consideration in gentle of Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Leisure.”
Supreme Court docket
Following the landmark ruling on Cox v. Sony, handed down on March 25, Grande Communications, a Texas-based subsidiary of Astound Enterprise Options, filed for its petition for certiorari, or a overview of a decrease courtroom’s choice, after dropping its copyright infringement case in opposition to a bunch of file labels in 2022.
When the ruling was handed down in 2022, the RIAA mentioned the courtroom discovered the corporate to be chargeable for “willful infringement of 1,403 copyrighted sound recordings.”
The RIAA famous in its press launch on the time that beneath federal legislation, web suppliers usually are not allowed to be “willfully blind to on-line piracy on their networks”.
Nonetheless, within the newest ruling in favor of Cox in its Sony case, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote: “Below our precedents, an organization will not be liable as a copyright infringer for merely offering a service to most of the people with data that will probably be utilized by some to infringe copyrights.”
In 2023, the trial courtroom denied Grande’s movement and by October 2024, the Fifth Circuit Court docket of Appeals upheld the legal responsibility discovering, prompting Grande to file for a petition for certiorari.
Grande was sued by the key labels in 2017, alleging it ignored years of infringement notices and took no significant motion to discourage what they describe as “theft” of copyrights, in response to the unique criticism, which you’ll learn right here.
The Supreme Court docket’s newest order vacated the 2022 judgment and remanded the case to the Fifth Circuit for reconsideration in gentle of Cox v. Sony Music.
The Cox v. Sony ruling is anticipated to ripple past Grande. Elon Musk’s X Corp has already cited the choice to argue that music publishers’ long-running copyright infringement case in opposition to the platform must be thrown out.
In a courtroom submitting obtained by MBW, dated March 27 — simply two days after the Cox choice was handed down — X’s attorneys informed the Nashville federal courtroom that “beneath Cox, the legal responsibility theories that survived X’s movement to dismiss fail as a matter of legislation.”
X has requested a standing convention with the courtroom and signaled its intention to file a movement for judgment on the pleadings, arguing that the Supreme Court docket’s new authorized customary renders the publishers’ surviving claims defunct.
Except for Grande, file labels Sony, Common, Warner and ABKCO Music additionally filed a $2.6 billion lawsuit in opposition to Verizon in 2024 over comparable allegations.
Elsewhere, Meta lately invoked the Cox ruling in its newest abstract judgment submitting in opposition to Epidemic Sound. Epidemic Sound filed a second copyright infringement lawsuit in opposition to the Fb mother or father in December, alleging that the tech large continues to infringe the music firm’s catalog throughout Fb, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Epidemic filed its first lawsuit in opposition to Meta in July 2022, which stays lively earlier than Choose Jacqueline Scott Corley in the identical courtroom. That case sought at the very least $142 million in damages.
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