The copyright infringement lawsuit brought by Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and ABKCO against internet service provider Verizon has been jointly dismissed.
A joint stipulation of dismissal, filed on April 22 in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York,
Originally filed in July 2024, the lawsuit ends a case in which the labels had accused Verizon of facilitating piracy by “tens of thousands” of its subscribers.
The original complaint claimed that the plaintiffs had sent Verizon more than 340,000 copyright infringement notices since early 2020, each identifying subscribers who were using Verizon‘s network to download and distribute copyrighted sound recordings via the BitTorrent protocol. According to the complaint, Verizon ignored these infringement notices and instead “buried its head in the sand.”
The complaint further stated that Verizon “knowingly provides its high-speed service to a massive community of online pirates, who it knows repeatedly use that service to infringe Plaintiffs’ copyrights.”
As stated in the filing, over 500 Verizon subscribers were the subject of 100 or more infringement notices, with one subscriber alone responsible for 4,450 notices. The labels had listed 17,335 allegedly infringed works and sought up to $150,000 in statutory damages per work — implying potential damages exceeding $2.6 billion.
The labels’ dismissal comes less than a month after the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled on March 25 in Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment that internet service providers cannot be held liable for copyright infringement committed by their users, unless the provider actively induced the infringement or provided a service tailored to infringement.
This ruling sets the precedent that simply providing internet service to subscribers who engage in piracy is not enough to establish contributory liability.
In the wake of the Cox ruling, the Verizon dismissal is just one development amongst similar lawsuits throughout the industry.
On April 6, the Supreme Court redacted a $46.7 million verdict against Grande Communications, remanding the case for reconsideration in light of Cox. Labels owned by Sony Music and Warner Music Group are also seeking additional time to assess the impact of the ruling on their lawsuit against ISP Altice USA. Additionally. Elon Musk‘s X Corp has also cited the Cox ruling in an attempt to dismiss music publishers’ copyright infringement case against the platform.
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