On March 25, 2026, the Supreme Court wiped out a one-billion-dollar copyright verdict against an internet service provider.
That’s the headline, and for Cox Communications it’s the whole story. For everybody else who pays an internet bill, the better question is the one the decision doesn’t answer: if the record companies can’t collect from the company that sold the connection, who do they go after?
Minnesota has lived through that answer once already.
What Cox was accused of
Cox Communications sells internet service to roughly six million subscribers. Like every ISP, it knows which account is behind which IP address. And like every ISP, it has no practical way to see what any one person is doing with the connection, or to control it.
Sony Music and other major copyright owners hired a monitoring firm, MarkMonitor, to watch peer-to-peer networks for their songs. Over roughly two years, MarkMonitor sent Cox 163,148 notices identifying Cox IP addresses tied to infringement.
Cox’s contracts bar subscribers from infringing copyrights. It sent warnings. It suspended accounts. It terminated some. But it didn’t terminate every account that drew a notice, and Sony’s theory was that this was enough: by continuing to sell internet service to subscribers it knew were infringing, Cox became an infringer itself.
A jury agreed on both contributory and vicarious liability, found the conduct willful, and awarded $1 billion in statutory damages. The Fourth Circuit affirmed on contributory liability, reasoning that supplying a product knowing the recipient will use it to infringe is culpable enough.
What the Court held
Justice Thomas wrote for the Court. The holding fits in one sentence:
the provider of a service is contributorily liable for a user’s infringement only if it intended that the provided service be used for infringement, which can be shown only if the party induced the infringement or the provided service is tailored to that infringement
Cox did neither. It never promoted or encouraged infringement — the record showed the opposite: warnings, suspensions, terminations. And internet access is obviously “capable of substantial or commercially significant noninfringing uses,” which is the Betamax test from Sony v. Universal in 1984, carried forward through Grokster in 2005.
The Fourth Circuit’s rule — knowledge plus not doing enough equals liability — was, the Court said, flatly contrary to precedent holding that mere knowledge that a service will be used to infringe is not enough.
Sony had one more argument, and it’s the clever one. Congress wrote a safe harbor into the Digital Millennium Copyright Act protecting ISPs that adopt a policy for terminating repeat infringers. Why would Congress bother building that shelter if ISPs were never liable in the first place?
The Court’s answer: the DMCA creates defenses. It doesn’t create liability. And § 512(l) says in so many words that failing to qualify for the safe harbor “shall not bear adversely upon” a provider’s argument that its conduct wasn’t infringing to begin with.
The judgment was unanimous. The reasoning wasn’t. Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Jackson, agreed Cox should win — the plaintiffs couldn’t prove intent — but objected that the majority had “unnecessarily limit[ed] secondary liability” by shutting the door on other common-law theories like aiding and abetting, and had “upend[ed] the statutory incentive structure that Congress created.” That disagreement will matter later. It’s an invitation to try a different theory.
Minnesota has seen the alternative
Here’s why this decision isn’t just an academic exercise for anyone in this state.
When the recording industry can’t reach the middleman, it goes after the individual. And the most famous individual it ever went after lived in Minnesota.
Jammie Thomas-Rasset was sued in the District of Minnesota for sharing 24 songs on Kazaa. Of the thousands of file-sharing cases the industry filed in that era, hers was the one that went to trial — three times.
- The first jury returned $222,000. The district court granted a new trial over an error in the jury instructions.
- The second jury returned $1,920,000. The district court cut it to $54,000. The companies chose a new trial instead.
- The third jury returned $1,500,000. The district court again cut it to $54,000.
- In 2012, the Eighth Circuit — our circuit — held that $222,000 didn’t violate due process and sent the case back with directions to enter it, along with a broader injunction. Capitol Records, Inc. v. Thomas-Rasset, 692 F.3d 899 (8th Cir. 2012).
Twenty-four songs. Two hundred twenty-two thousand dollars. Roughly $9,250 per song, against a private individual, held constitutional in the circuit that covers Minnesota.
That’s the machine sitting on the other side of the ISP, and it didn’t go anywhere. Cox says the copyright owner can’t shift the cost of enforcement onto the company that sold the connection. It says nothing at all about the owner’s right to sue the person who used it, and it leaves Thomas-Rasset exactly where it was — an Eighth Circuit decision, sitting there as proof that an award that size against one person survives due process.
What this means practically
If your ISP forwards you an infringement notice, it isn’t a lawsuit — and it isn’t nothing. After Cox, providers have less legal exposure for keeping you connected, which may mean fewer terminations. It doesn’t mean the notice wasn’t logged, and it doesn’t mean nobody can come looking for your subscriber information later.
The account holder isn’t automatically the infringer. An IP address identifies an account, not a person. Households, roommates, guests, small businesses with open Wi-Fi, and rental properties all share connections. The gap between “this account” and “this person” is where most of the real defense in these cases lives, and the Court’s own description of ISPs — they “cannot distinguish individual users” — is now written into a Supreme Court opinion.
Statutory damages are the whole ballgame. A copyright owner who registered the work in time can elect statutory damages instead of proving actual loss, and the range is wide enough that the number stops tracking anything you’d recognize as harm. Thomas-Rasset is the proof. That’s also why when the work was registered matters so much in any demand you get — check it before anybody pays anything.
Demand letters are a business. Long before anyone files suit, most people run into copyright enforcement as a letter with a settlement figure and a short deadline. Some of those demands are well founded. Some rest on registrations that wouldn’t support statutory damages at all. The letter won’t tell you which kind you’ve got.
The part I can’t settle
I think the Court got the statutory question right. Selling a general-purpose service to millions of people, knowing some slice of them will misuse it, is not the same as intending the misuse. A contrary rule would push every provider of every general-purpose service toward cutting off customers over unproven accusations, at scale, with nobody deciding anything.
But Justice Sotomayor’s objection isn’t a small one. Congress plainly legislated in 1998 assuming ISPs could face secondary liability. That’s why it bothered to build them a shelter. A decision that quietly takes away the exposure underneath leaves the shelter standing over nothing.
What that most likely produces isn’t less enforcement. It’s enforcement pointed somewhere else — back at subscribers, back at the individual account holder who can’t afford a defense and for whom a four-figure demand is cheaper than a lawyer.
Minnesota knows how that story goes. We had a front-row seat for the whole trilogy.
If you’ve gotten a copyright infringement demand or a notice forwarded by your internet provider, don’t assume the number in the letter is the number you owe. Send us a message or call 612-470-6529.
Sources: Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment, 607 U. S. 583 (2026) (Thomas, J.), No. 24–171, decided March 25, 2026; Capitol Records, Inc. v. Thomas-Rasset, 692 F.3d 899 (8th Cir. 2012); 17 U. S. C. §§ 501(a), 504, 512. This article is general commentary on published decisions, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney–client relationship. Whether any particular notice or demand has merit depends on facts specific to that matter. No outcome is promised or implied.