The Supreme Court has unanimously refused to let the recording industry turn internet providers into copyright enforcers with the power to cut millions of people off from modern life.
The ruling, handed down Wednesday in Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment, kills a legal theory that would have given ISPs one rational choice when they received a copyright complaint: sever the connection first, figure out the truth later.
We obtained a copy of the order for you here.
All nine justices thankfully agreed that Cox Communications bears no liability for the piracy of its subscribers.
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Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, stated: “Under our precedents, a company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights.”
The real significance of the ruling isn’t what it means for Cox’s balance sheet. It’s what prevents it from happening to everyone who depends on an internet connection to live, work, and communicate, which in 2026 is functionally all of us.
Consider what the recording industry was actually proposing. Sony Music Entertainment and more than 50 other labels, representing artists like Sabrina Carpenter, Givēon, and Doechii, wanted courts to hold ISPs financially liable for not disconnecting users accused of piracy.
Not convicted. Accused.
The accusations themselves came from an automated system paid for by the Recording Industry Association of America, which hires an anti-piracy company to blast notices at internet providers whenever its software detects possible infringement. Nobody reviews these notices with any care. Nobody checks whether the flagged activity was actually illegal, whether it fell under fair use, or whether the person named on the account was even the one responsible.
Under the legal standard the labels wanted, an ISP that received enough of these automated complaints and didn’t disconnect the account could face catastrophic financial liability. A Virginia jury bought that theory in 2019 and hit Cox with a verdict of over $1 billion.
The incentive structure that kind of liability creates is terrifying if you think it through for more than a few seconds. When an ISP faces billion-dollar exposure for not cutting people off, the only financially rational response is to start cutting people off aggressively.
Cox, the largest private broadband provider in the country with more than six million homes and businesses on its network, tried to explain the human consequences. Its lawyers argued that disconnecting service “after receiving automated notices accusing an unknown user at a home or business” of infringement would force the company to kill internet access at entire locations based on a “bare accusation” against a single user.
A family of five loses their connection because one teenager allegedly downloaded a song. A hospital serving hundreds of patients and their families goes dark because someone on the guest Wi-Fi triggered an automated flag. A university campus gets throttled or disconnected because students were doing what students have always done.
“That notion turns Internet providers into Internet police and jeopardizes Internet access for millions of users,” Cox told the Court.
The ACLU put the stakes in plain terms: “Parents’ Internet access…may be terminated based on the conduct of their children – over even their children’s friends. A hospital that offers internet access to dozens or even hundreds of patients and their families could find critical access shut off.”
That’s what the Fourth Circuit’s legal standard actively encouraged. The appeals court had upheld Cox’s contributory liability while tossing the $1 billion damages figure, creating a rule that treated an ISP’s failure to disconnect accused infringers as grounds for massive financial exposure. If the Supreme Court had let that stand, every broadband provider in America would have been weighing the cost of a lawsuit against the cost of disconnecting a customer. The customer would lose that calculation every time.
And this would have landed hardest on the people with the least power to fight back. A corporate law firm with a dedicated IT department and legal counsel can challenge a wrongful disconnection. A single parent relying on one broadband connection for remote work, their kids’ schooling, telehealth appointments, and every other essential function that now runs through the internet cannot. The recording industry’s preferred enforcement model would have created a system where the most vulnerable internet users bore the greatest risk of losing access based on the flimsiest evidence.
