Cox Communications Owes The Major Labels $1 Billion For Allowing Music Piracy

Cox Communications pays major labels for piracy image

Music piracy has decreased a great deal thanks to music streaming, but it still exists. Digital Service Providers (DSPs) have gotten away with having pirate streaming networks on their systems up until now, but a recent ruling went against Cox Communications that will award Sony Music, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and EMI $1 billion for allowing the practice.

The lawsuit was filed by the major labels in July of 2018 for Cox turning a blind eye to pirates on its network. The complaint stated that at least 20,000 Cox subscribers might even be called repeat infringers. The complaint also noted that the labels repeatedly tried to serve copyright notices to the infringers but that Cox placed an arbitrary cap on the number of notices it would allow.

As a result, the court found that there had been 10,017 pieces that were pirated, and Cox was fined $99,830.29 for each work!

Cox had previously lost a similar case in 2015 when BMG sued and won a $25 million settlement. And there’s another similar case on the books. More than 50 record companies filed suit in March 2019 against Charter Communications for allow infringers on its network.

On its surface this looks like a great victory for the music industry, but just remember that we’re talking about pre-2018 before streaming reached the state that it’s in today. Piracy is way down because it doesn’t make much sense when you can access whatever song you want for free or a relatively small monthly fee from a streaming network.

Piracy does become an issue when the price for a desired product is deemed to be too high for some people, who then choose to steal it if the opportunity presents itself, or purchase the product at a discounted price from a pirate. Until a new form of music delivery arrives, that probably won’t be an issue for quite some time.

Had this ruling come a few years ago it might have cause some indie artists to fear being lumped in with pirates, particularly if their bandwidth usage was high. Now with the majority of artists using a streaming network like Spotify for their music and YouTube for their videos, that’s no longer the case.

Now all we have to wonder about is how much of the $1 billion that Cox paid will find its way into artist’s pocketbooks.