On March 25, 2026, the Supreme Court wiped out a one-billion-dollar copyright verdict against an internet service provider.
That is the headline, and for Cox Communications it is the whole story. For everyone who pays an internet bill, the more interesting question is the one the decision does not answer: if the record companies cannot collect from the company that sold the connection, whom do they collect from?
Minnesota has already lived through that answer once.
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 — also like every ISP — it has no practical way to see what any individual 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 a period of roughly two years, MarkMonitor sent Cox 163,148 notices identifying Cox IP addresses associated with infringement.
Cox’s contracts prohibit subscribers from infringing copyrights. It sent warnings. It suspended accounts. It terminated some. But it did not terminate every account that generated 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 as to 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 is compact:
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 and suspensions and 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 insufficient action 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 is 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 creating that shelter if ISPs were never liable in the first place?
The Court’s answer: the DMCA creates defenses, it does not create liability. And § 512(l) says in terms that failing to qualify for the safe harbor “shall not bear adversely upon” a provider’s argument that its conduct was not infringing to begin with.
The judgment was unanimous, but not the reasoning. Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Jackson, agreed Cox should win — the plaintiffs could not prove intent — but objected that the majority had “unnecessarily limit[ed] secondary liability” by foreclosing other common-law theories such as aiding and abetting, and had “upend[ed] the statutory incentive structure that Congress created.” That disagreement will matter later. It is an invitation to litigate a different theory.
Minnesota has seen the alternative
Here is why this decision should be of more than academic interest to anyone in this state.
When the recording industry cannot reach an intermediary, it reaches the individual. And the most famous individual it ever reached 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 — reinstated the original $222,000 and broadened the 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, affirmed as a matter of law in the circuit that governs Minnesota.
That is the machinery that exists on the other side of the ISP. It did not go anywhere. Cox says the copyright owner cannot 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 — good law in the Eighth Circuit, sitting there as the number a Minnesota jury is permitted to reach.
What this means practically
If you get an infringement notice forwarded by your ISP, it is not a lawsuit — and it is not nothing. After Cox, providers have less legal exposure for keeping you connected, which may mean fewer terminations. It does not mean the notice was not logged, and it does not mean your subscriber information cannot be sought later.
The account holder is not 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. That 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 would recognize as harm. Thomas-Rasset is the proof. That is also why the timing of registration matters enormously in any demand you receive — a point worth checking before anyone pays anything.
Demand letters are a business. Long before anyone files suit, most people encounter copyright enforcement as a letter proposing a settlement figure and a short deadline. Some of those demands are well founded. Some rest on registrations that would not support statutory damages at all. The letter will not tell you which kind you have.
The part I find genuinely unresolved
I think the Court got the statutory question right. Selling a general-purpose service to millions of people, knowing some fraction will misuse it, is not the same as intending the misuse — and a contrary rule would push every provider of every general-purpose service toward terminating customers on the basis of unproven accusations, at scale, with no adjudication.
But Justice Sotomayor’s objection is not a small one. Congress plainly legislated in 1998 against a background assumption that ISPs could face secondary liability, which is why it bothered to build them a shelter. A decision that quietly removes the underlying exposure leaves the shelter standing over nothing.
What that most likely produces is not less enforcement. It is enforcement redirected — back toward subscribers, back toward the individual account holder who cannot 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 entire trilogy.
If you have received a copyright infringement demand or a notice forwarded by your internet provider, do not 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.