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Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/us/politics/supreme-court-cox-music-copyright.html
82•oj2828•1h ago

Comments

SunshineTheCat•1h ago
https://archive.is/mEgaK
xhkkffbf•1h ago
Sweet. Some copyright infringement to start things off.
SirFatty•30m ago
Now that is some first class irony.
tolerance•25m ago
The System working as intended per SCOTUS!
ls612•1h ago
9-0 against the record labels. This effectively ends a long running strategy of trying to milk ISPs for people torrenting without a VPN. At the same time it likely puts things like the *Arr stack at more risk given their more tailored nature.
pfdietz•52m ago
And a slapdown to the lower courts being reversed.
tbrownaw•45m ago
> At the same time it likely puts things like the *Arr stack at more risk given their more tailored nature.

Well, those would be in the same position now that they previously were I think.

akersten•39m ago
> 9-0 against the record labels.

Love to see it. I'm still mad about the Sony rootkit[0] and the people sued for absurd amounts over downloading a few MP3s back in the 00's.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

tracker1•36m ago
I still haven't bought a Sony labelled product since... though I may or may not have consumed Sony content. They've definitely lost more than they gained.
dylan604•31m ago
> They've definitely lost more than they gained.

That's a pretty good sized ego you got yourself there. The number of people that cared about the rootkit in the general populace was insignificant to Sony. Only tech nerds like us even knew about the rootkit or how insane it was to use. Unless you were a huge flagship purchaser of Sony's latest/greatest each year, they don't even notice you when you buy a TV or any other item.

People barely remember the studio getting hacked and releasing a film

tracker1•17m ago
> Lost more than they gained (from me, implied).

Maybe, just maybe assume the best in people instead of jumping to the worst interpretations you can.

m-s-y•32m ago
I still boycott Sony over this. Made me a PC gamer, too.
Mindless2112•1h ago
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-171_bq7d.pdf
thot_experiment•49m ago
A tiny victory. Copyright should not be more than a decade. This intellectual property system is one of the worst things to happen in modern society is what I would have said a few years ago, now I got bigger problems but I'm still mad.
f1shy•45m ago
Leave it in 2, like patents. Even 3 could be tolerated. But current standard is crap.
ronsor•39m ago
The reason copyright doesn't get fixed or removed is largely because the general public is worried more about other things and the big rightsholders continue their monthly payments—err, lobbying.

Though AI might change that. In the end, large corporations get what they want.

thmsths•29m ago
The general public also get sold on the rosy idea that copyright (and patents to a certain extent), protect the little guy, that thanks to this mechanism their work will not be stolen by opportunistic freeloaders. It also resonates with the "one day I will strike rich" mentality.

What they usually "forget" to tell you is that your IP is absolutely worthless if you don't have the resources to defend it in court, which in turns actually advantages freeloaders who either have relatively low costs to sue (patent trolls are basically an example of this) or enough money that they don't feel the pain if they lose.

The current system basically incentivizes suing over IP NOT creating it.

Covzire•35m ago
IANAL but it seems to have major implications beyond music piracy, like into the realm of ISPs and free speech in general, it seems the court (rightly) sees ISPs as a common carrier (like water pipes) and we may see more opinions of the kind that reach into the space of monopolies or duopolies in social media next.
bushbaba•25m ago
Big tech should loose its safe harbor protection. It’s both an aggregator AND a curator. The algorithms showing you what to see is no different than a newspaper editor. Just like newspapers big tech should be liable for their “feeds” showing harmful and defamatory information
Covzire•19m ago
I would be happy if congress passed a law saying a social media has no liability for anything their users post as long as the algorithm is completely open source. If we had social media like that, they'd even have APIs that let users design their own algorithm and we'd see a golden age of social media emerge from it. Twitter seems to moving in this direction but they enjoy no legal protections from being open at the moment. Blusky is already this way I believe, but without a neutral and trusted centralized control it's a bit different of an animal.
mannyv•27m ago
Why 10 years? Why not 9 years? 8 years? If one year doesn't make a difference then 1 year? How about 11?

If you made anything that was worth protecting you might feel differently.

izacus•25m ago
Because it sounds like a nice round reasonable number. Like many others in the law.

Now stop being a clown.

stavros•23m ago
> If you made anything that was worth protecting you might feel differently.

How do you know they didn't? Oh, because of the No True Scotsman of "no person who truly made something worth protecting can have this opinion".

As if none of us have released anything under an MIT license. Ridiculous.

applfanboysbgon•23m ago
Why do we send X person to prison for 5 years, and not 4 years, or 6 years? Clearly the only rational choices are life sentence or no prison time.

Or, why protect it for 70 years? Why not 69 years? Why not 68 years? etc. Such a useless argument in every way.

wat10000•20m ago
I think I've made plenty and I don't feel differently.

You could ask the same questions about the actual duration of copyrights as they are today. You present those rhetorical questions as if they were some argument against this proposal, but they're just things you need to think about regardless of what scheme you come up with: why this, and why not something else? It's not like "life of the author plus 70 years, or 95 years from first publication, or 120 years from creation" is any less arbitrary.

We should remember that the purpose of intellectual property laws in the US is explicitly, per the US Constitution, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts...." The purpose is not to ensure that creators can keep collecting money decades after they created their works. It may be useful to ensure that as a way to promote progress, but it's just a tool, not the goal. If progress is better promoted with a 10-minute copyright term then we should do that instead.

prepend•20m ago
The current term in the US is like life +70 years, or something.

While 10 is arbitrary, I like it because it is much closer to balancing incentive for creativity vs stifling creativity.

I make software and data. It’s worth protecting. But I think the harm from copyright protection has been greater than the benefit.

Framing it as people who want reasonable copyright as anti-creator is so not cool and avoids discussion.

acomjean•11m ago
can’t IP be sold to a company that is “alive” for as long as it’s financially viable.

I always wonder when copyright runs out for artist who sold their collections to companies.

ndriscoll•11m ago
I'd expect most people in this forum have made something "worth protecting" or even make a living doing so. Certainly it's been my career. I still think we should drastically shorten copyrights and expect more to grant it (e.g. for software, require source escrow to the copyright office and probably require source availability to purchasers, and ban things like hardware that only runs signed software. For other works, registration fees should cover storage of a master copy until expiration + N years so it can be released to the public. Maybe "source material" there as well wherever it makes sense). I understand that might make my career less lucrative. That's fine.
rdiddly•5m ago
Whoever drafts the law has to arbitrarily choose a number, or there will be no end of litigation to settle it, and a judge will arbitrarily choose a number. OP's opinion is "not more than 10" so 9, 8 and 1 would all be fine with them, while 11 would be too long. Source: reading. Meanwhile you haven't even made clear where you stand on the issue or what point you're making ir in what way "differently" OP is supposed to feel.
xoa•23m ago
I'm not sure I agree that any single fixed term makes sense. Rather, I think it'd be better if the exponential cost to society (in terms of works that don't happen, and works that don't happen based on those works that didn't happen and so on compounding) was just part of the yearly renewal price. Do maybe everyone gets 7 years flat to start with, then it costs $100*1.3^(year). So after another 25 years it'd be around $70.5k renewal. At 50 years it'd be $50 million. At 75 years it'd be $35 billion. Fixed amount and exponential can of course be shifted around here but the idea would be to encourage creators to use works hard and if they couldn't make it work not sit on them but release them. Once in awhile something would be such a big hit it'd be worth keeping a long time, and that's ok, but society gets its due too. And most works would be allowed to lapse as they stopped being worth it.

Another alternative/additional approach would be to split up the nature of copyright, vs an all or nothing total monopoly. Let there be 7-10 years of total copyright, then another 7-14 years where no exclusivity of where it's sold or DRM is allowed, then 7/14/21 years where royalties can still be had but licensing is mandatory at FRAND rates, then finally some period of "creditright" where the creator has no control or licensing, but if they wish can still require any derivative works to give them a spot in the credits.

I think there is a lot of unexplored territory for IP, and wish the conversations were less binary.

calvinmorrison•15m ago
How about something like IP as a tax? IE: if you make profit off of it, then it cranks up. There's plenty of music artists who's song blow up a decade or more later.
acomjean•14m ago
I think this is a great idea.

Free then make it cost more. A lot could enter the public domain, and valuable IP could be kept by companies as long as they’re willing to pay.

autoexec•22m ago
I agree with you that 10 years is more than enough time for corporations to turn a healthy profit on something (not that they can't continue to make money off of works after something has entered the public domain) but this wasn't a small victory. If every ISP were at risk for endless billions in damages because of what their users did it would mean that ISPs would be forced to give in to the RIAA/MPAs demands to permanently terminate the accounts of internet users over completely unproven (and often inaccurate) accusations of piracy. It's worth noting that cox was actually doing this in a limited number of circumstances, and the media industry still wasn't satisfied.

The media industry insisted that they needed the power to get people's accounts terminated even though it would have left many people, including fully innocent ones, cut off from the internet entirely. This was a big deal and I'm honestly surprised to see the supreme court do the right thing.

selectively•43m ago
Rare good decision from SCOTUS.
baggy_trough•17m ago
It's not that rare, really.
kmeisthax•30m ago
So... does that mean we don't have to care about takedown notices anymore?

Like, the only reason to comply with such an onerous and censorious takedown regime was specifically to disclaim contributory copyright liability that SCOTUS just unanimously decided to erase. Is it such that as long as people aren't stupid and don't market their services as an infringement facilitator, which most don't, that they don't have to honor 512 takedown notices now? Conversely, services dumb enough to actually market themselves as infringement tools probably can't get rid of their liability by the 512 safe harbor. So there's no reason to actually honor a DMCA takedown request anymore.

intrasight•16m ago
This is about moving bits through the pipes and not the resources that those pipes are moving.
elpool2•16m ago
It seems like you would still have to remove the infringing content, but no need to disconnect or ban the user who shared it.

But if you’re a pure ISP and not hosting content on your own servers, then I guess, yeah DMCA doesn’t really apply to you?

strogonoff•25m ago
It’s interesting to see how as soon as intellectual property theft starts to be critical for powerful interests the legal system magically gets more lenient about copyright enforcement.

The balance between public good and protecting IP ownership of the creatives (which is, paradoxically, also part of the public good) has to be struck and enforced consistently.

prepend•23m ago
How is IP “theft” more important now than 20 years ago?
VanTheBrand•20m ago
AI training
prepend•18m ago
AI training might be copyright infringement. But there’s no cases or laws to establish that.

I don’t think this case or anything else has been affected by AI training on copyrighted material, if it is deemed infringing.

mywittyname•11m ago
It's been demonstrated that some companies, even F10 ones, have been using pirated content to train their AI.
esseph•10m ago
[delayed]
Permit•20m ago
Isn’t this decision in exact opposition to the point you’re trying to make?
amadeuspagel•7m ago
It's interesting to see how people look for powerful interests to explain simple and correct supreme court decisions.
Kye•22m ago
Without the login wall: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
indolering•6m ago
It's really surprising to see a 9-0 ruling written by Clarence Thomas which puts basic human rights (internet access) above civil liability.

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