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Supreme Court to hear Cox v. Sony — why another bad SCOTUS ruling could turn our ISPs into meddlesome copyright cops

Amid a quiet pre-holiday news cycle, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that could determine how much our internet service provider messes with us as we download, stream and share music, movies and other content.

Sony Music Entertainment and several other labels sued Cox Communications in 2018, alleging the privately held cable operator was responsible for broadband customers’ digital piracy. In 2019, a Virginia Court found Cox liable for “contributory” and “vicarious” infringement. It awarded the labels a staggering $1 billion in damages.

A federal appeals court overturned the huge award and part of the verdict in 2024, ruling that Cox didn’t directly profit from users’ IP abuse. But the court also ruled that Cox was still liable for “willful contributory infringement.” Cox appealed again, filing a petition with SCOTUS, which last week published a list of orders granting a hearing.

So what’s at stake?

“While the rejection of vicarious liability and the vacating of the staggeringly disproportionate award may seem like a reprieve for Cox, the court’s approach to contributory liability remains troubling,” wrote Public Knowledge’s John Bergmayer. “It could force ISPs to become copyright cops, monitoring their users and cutting off essential internet access based on mere accusations of infringement. This threatens to worsen the already stark digital divide that runs counter to the fundamental idea that broadband is an essential service that ISPs should provision on a non-discriminatory basis as common carriers.”

— Daniel Frankel

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Next Text: Will Paramount dance to the right? Will ‘Squid Game’ get the respect it deserves? And will the kids ever stop sharing our passwords?

Our weekly text exchange between veteran reporters David Bloom and Daniel Frankel also ponders the loss of ‘The Residence’

DANIEL FRANKEL: Hello David. I know you Cape kids like to blow stuff up — blow it up good! — with military-grade ordinance on the Fourth, so I hope this missive finds your appendages well. For more than a decade, our holiday tradition has involved lighting a few sparklers and Piccolo Petes, while watching stadium fireworks with friends Brendan and Jerri, high above the Rose Bowl at their house in Altadena, now recovering from January’s devastating Eaton Canyon wildfire. (Check out Cosmopolitan’s interview with Bren’s daughter Lucy, standing amid the ruins of her bedroom.) The image of Bren’s place below is but one of 6,000 local Charter passings incinerated to a dirt lot. But with the help of a few lawn chairs and a cooler full of Simple Times lager, we kept our Fourth-of-July tradition alive Friday. It was plenty safe. Until Stephen Miller’s ICE goons stop hunting the men who would otherwise rebuild Altadena’s homes, there’s not much left to burn high up here on Wapello Street.

Speaking of watching things burn, Shari Redstone and Paramount said they’ve settled Donald Trump’s frivolous 60 Minutes lawsuit for $16 million, a reasonable figure compared to previous speculation. Paramount also said its capitulation was just about the money, but Trump claimed he carved out a separate deal — worth more in air time than the actual settlement — with buyer David Ellison to run right-wing PSAs on CBS. What do you make of this ugly bargain with the devil?

DAVID BLOOM: A $16 million payoff seems a bargain in this particular political shakedown, but those undisclosed devilish details will emerge soon enough. Almost certainly the settlement won’t help California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s similar but less decisively leveraged suit against Fox News. What’s important for Redstone is she again preserves her tattered, wildly over-leveraged patrimony after So. Much. Crap. Hope she gets past the thyroid cancer. Meanwhile, David Ellison hasn’t evinced many political bona fides, but dad Larry certainly has, as one of Don Trump’s closest pals who, thanks to ever-rising Oracle stock, may be the world’s wealthiest human, with around a quarter-trillion dollars in da bank. That makes Daddy Larry the ultimate political and financial backstop for David’s little takeover, as bond issuers know well. Once in charge, will David hew more to Larry’s techno-libertarian leanings or sister Megan’s leftie prestige impulses (at Annapurna, she’s made Oscar-nominated Zero Dark Thirty, Her, and Phantom Thread among much else)? I’m guessing lean right. First tea leaves to parse: changes at CBS News and especially among the defiant, genuine journalists at 60 Minutes. 

Meanwhile, I spent the week as a bachelor dogsitter, my spouse gamboling at a ridiculously excellent wellness retreat north of San Diego. After eight years with me, she deserved it. So, I joined millions of others in watching the most-watched movies on several streaming services. Glory be, I kept running across Skydance as the production company behind several services’ chart-topping “original movies,” including the last two Mission: Impossible installments (Paramount, though Final Reckoning is still in theaters), The Old Guard 2 (Netflix), and three Apple TV+ projects, Fountain of Youth, The Gorge, and Ghosted. They’re part of 10 Skydance films released in just two years. Ellison’s team clearly knows how to churn out big-budget, audience-friendly action features for many masters. Let’s see if that eye-popping output shifts purely to Paramount, or if SkyPar becomes a Sony-style arms dealer.

FRANKEL: I was sort of surprised that 44% of American adults say they watch Paramount+, ranking it just behind Disney+ on the use index’s higher side, according to an impressively girthed Pew Research Center survey of 9,397 consumers. Despite the vaunted password-sharing crackdown in the U.S., I was not surprised to see that 47% of young adults are still cribbing someone else’s SVOD account. I assume your solo holiday binge was paid by you, DB.

BLOOM: I definitely help finance the sometimes dubious decisions of streaming executives, no doubt. Also, three names account for Paramount Plus Popularity: Taylor Sheridan, Tom Cruise, the NFL. Among my non-Skydance inputs, I caught Amazon’s most-watched movie, the amusing John Cena/Idris Elba action comedy Heads of State, which improbably argues a solid case for preserving NATO (the one that doesn’t represent theater owners). The week’s big disappointment was from Skydance: Old Guard 2. The original released mid-pandemic, featuring a compelling Charlize Theron as very old soul/stunning action hero/leader of chaotic-good immortal assassins. It delivered an intriguing, queer-friendly take on superhero tropes. Alas, five years later, v. 2.0 suffers from an excruciating bout of sequelitis, killing off formerly immortal running buddies (loophole!), disappearing others, adding Uma Thurman wielding a Kill Bill-style katana, all setting up v. 3.0 without making a coherent 2.0. Now I understand why Netflix took so long to release the damned thing. I avoided Squid Game’s final season, almost certainly the planet’s most watched show last week. That particular dystopian social critique isn’t my jam, though it certainly is for many tens of millions of others, proving Netflix can deliver effective sequels not called Old Guard 2.

FRANKEL: Netflix’s most popular show of all time deserves a requiem. Squid Game Season 3 arrived with slightly softer reviews compared to the first two iterations (a 78 Rotten Tomatoes score versus S1’s 95 and S2’s 83). And after one week on the global Netflix platform, it doesn’t appear S3 will reach S1/S2's lofty first-28-day audience heights, which rank Nos. 1 and 4 respectively on Netflix’s pantheon of most watched content of all time (measuring by hours viewed). While S1 was a sensation debuting in stages across the globe, building its massive audience over time, S2 debuted all at once as a known quantity, peaking out the gate. After premiering to a still-pretty-darned-impressive 368.4 million viewing hours and 60.1 million views, S3 will likely have the same but smaller trajectory as S2. For seasons 2 and 3, New York Times TV critic Mike Hale contends, creator/writer/director Hwang Dong-hyuk “needed to do something to surprise us” after successfully adapting Survivor-style reality competitions into fictional dystopian life-or-death drama with an “Instagram-friendly visual wrapping.” I’ll contend, however, that Hwang Dong-hyuk and Netflix have certainly accomplished enough with this series. And its end deserves to be recognized. Would Netflix commit $2.5 billion to Korean production without this show? Speaking of Netflix, I was surprised to see a rare Shonda Rhimes miss — there won’t be a second season of White House-set whodunit The Residence (which was the holiday binge of choice for the wife and I). Oh, and I thought about something you said last week about Amazon potentially swallowing Roku when I saw this — according to Hub Entertainment Research, Roku- and Amazon-made smart TVs are currently experiencing the fastest growth in terms of consumer usage.

BLOOM: I’m not surprised The Residence won’t get a second run (how many White House chiefs of staff can you kill?), but that doesn’t mean we won’t ever again see Uzo Aduba’s delightful if slightly bonkers super detective, Cordelia Cupp, spotting elusive birds and murderers. Maybe she’ll pop up in a crossover episode of The White Lotus in its next body-count vacation season. A man can dream.

Elsewhere, MoffettNathanson dug deeper on the Warner Bros. Discovery unwinding, assessing likely prospects for the two planned pieces. Private equity or even SkyPar might be good strategic partners to acquire that 20% stake of Streaming & Studios that will be immediately on sale. Along with mountains of refinanced debt, Global Networks starts with that stake in its former sibling, but must sell it within a year to preserve favorable tax treatment: “How will David Ellison, after taking control of (Paramount), view the importance of scaling streaming by taking ownership of a treasure trove of IP for a combined studio to monetize? Of course, we cannot forget NBCU (RemainCo.) and other streaming/digital companies that should be interested in any library full of high-quality content – and a lot of it." A 20% stake may dodge TrumpCo shakedown opportunities, while setting the price for a full acquisition. And that could generate even more Par+ programming than even Taylor Sheridan can dream up over a slow holiday week on the ranch.

FRANKEL: I want to give another shoutout to Charter for recognizing there are no slow weeks on the ranch, not with this administration. If you want to get something done, you need to ramp up the drama. Copper theft in the San Fernando Valley is absolutely rampant. My older brother says metal bandits have taken down his AT&T DSL internet three times in the last year. So after 13 Spectrum cables were cut June 13, affecting 2,600 customers for more than a day, Charter CEO Chris Winfrey deftly declared the event an act of domestic terrorism, drafting behind an administration peddling “law and order” for ubiquitous danger. In the semi-famous, highly flammable words of The Office’s Michael Scott, Charter issued a “Threat-Level Midnight” warning.

“These criminal attacks on our country’s vital communications networks are intentional and cause outages that put lives at risk,” Winfrey said. “This requires immediate attention from federal and state legislation classifying these attacks as a felony, dedicated engagement from federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, and swift, aggressive prosecution of those criminals.” The LAPD found the declaration a bit … overstated. But the story was all over local news last week. Smart, aggressive PR move.

As for not-so-smart moves, Major League Baseball is back talking with ESPN, perhaps realizing that if you’re only getting $10 million a season to let Roku stream Sunday-afternoon games, getting paid $200 million for Sunday-evening contests is probably not a deal you should walk away from. Meanwhile, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr was in Sioux Falls, S.D. (or, as he described it in a senseless kick to San Francisco’s ribs, “the real SF”), tossing out the usual Biden recriminations and Trump suck-ups, while laying out an actually sensible-sounding policy agenda: ditch aging DSL copper lines, free more Upper C-Band spectrum, streamline satellite-launch regulations, and generally “delete, delete, delete” what he described as “obsolete” rules. Carr took aim at the Biden Administration’s “reams of red tape and progressive policies that needlessly delayed the promise of new infrastructure builds.” I can’t quibble with that.

BLOOM: I’d say penny for your thoughts, but pennies are too valuable now. Some other notable news bits:

• Private equity giant Oaktree Capital Management has bought OG niche streaming service FilmRise, and combined it with Shout! Studios, which Oaktree bought two years ago. The combination of 70,000 titles in the library, FilmRise’s many FAST channels across streaming platforms, and Shout! production facilities is most interesting. So is Oaktree plans to make further acquisitions, creating the ‘independent distributor of choice’ for content owners and platforms.

• After Netflix’s TF1 deal in France, Amazon will carry pubcaster France TV’s live channels and content. Sacre bleu!

• Netflix, meanwhile, will give customers access to NASA’s streaming service, NASA+. A fine public service that further buffs Netflix skills streaming live events like rocket launches. To quote the ancient philosophers of Hot Chocolate: “Everyone’s a winner, baby, that’s no lie.”

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