Supreme Court’s Cox v. Sony Decision Disrupts Another ISP Legal Battle — And Prompts Changes in Music Publishers’ Anthropic Complaint

Music Another ISP legal battle has been disrupted by the Supreme Court’s Cox v. Sony decision. Now, the major labels and Altice have jointly moved to pause their years-old copyright dispute.

The litigating labels and Altice (which currently operates as Optimum Communications) just recently asked the court for a response-deadline extension. Like multiple other rightsholder-versus-ISP infringement showdowns, this case had been put on ice pending the Cox v. Sony outcome.

And in the corresponding order, the presiding magistrate judge instructed the litigants to provide a formal update within two weeks of the Supreme Court determination. Time flies; the two-week cutoff is here, as is the response from Altice and the labels.

Though the parties didn’t divulge any groundbreaking details about their talks, they did acknowledge meeting and conferring last Thursday, April 2nd.

One sit down later, the involved attorneys would still “benefit from additional time to analyze the Cox decision and confer with their respective clients before submitting a status report,” per the text. With the magistrate judge having approved the request soon thereafter, both sides now have until April 22nd to provide said report.

Of course, all eyes are on this update and similar cases’ own forthcoming updates, which should shed light on the plaintiff labels’ and publishers’ general strategies in the wake of the narrowed contributory liability definition.

In keeping with a different two-week deadline, counsel for the majors and Verizon yesterday likewise sought a status-update extension until April 22nd. At the time of this writing, the court’s response hadn’t hit the docket.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court also wiped away an infringement judgment, originally including a $47 million damages verdict, against Grande Communications.

Then there’s the Cox v. Sony ruling’s impact on other cases – including but certainly not limited to courtroom confrontations with Meta, X, and AI giants such as Anthropic. On the latter front, music publishers earlier this week submitted an amended version of their already-supersized copyright complaint against the Claude developer.

The newer legal document contains several noteworthy changes. But specifically when it comes to contributory infringement, the updated action dialed back a line referencing the “well-established theories of contributory infringement and vicarious infringement.”

And the actual contributory infringement claim, focusing on the alleged book piracy behind LLM training, parted with its mention of Anthropic users’ alleged infringement in favor of accusing co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann of “contributory infringement by torrenting.”

“Dr. Amodei and Mr. Mann each knew that they were directing the Anthropic employees working under them to make unlawful copies from known pirated sources and to distribute those unlawful copies further,” the text reads.

“Accordingly, Dr. Amodei and Mr. Mann are contributorily liable for the infringement of Publishers’ copyrighted musical compositions via torrenting, including the song lyrics contained therein,” the appropriate section continues.