The U.S. Supreme Court said Friday in docket 24-171 that it would hear oral argument Dec. 1 in Cox Communications' appeal of the decision finding it liable for contributory copyright infringement due to piracy by some of its internet subscribers (see 2408160034).

Cox Communications' arguments that it's being sued for secondary copyright infringement liability merely for providing services capable of infringing use are wrong, Sony Music and other music labels told the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday. In a respondent brief (docket 24-171), the labels said Cox "made a deliberate and egregious decision" to maximize profits by supplying habitual offenders with the means for massive copyright infringement, knowing they would keep infringing. "While Cox waxes poetic about the centrality of internet access to modern life," it sidesteps the fact that it readily terminates subscribers for nonpayment, the music labels said. They added that SCOTUS has long held that companies providing services to customers with the expectation the services will be used to infringe are contributorily liable if the customers do so. Cox "identifies no reason to disturb that longstanding and commonsense rule."

Generative AI firm Midjourney, which faces a pair of similar direct and secondary copyright infringement lawsuits, is offering nearly identical defenses in both. In a response filed Tuesday (docket 2:25-cv-08376), Midjourney told the U.S. District Court for Central California that Warner Bros. "cannot have it both ways" by using generative AI tools, including Midjourney's, in such areas as visual effects, while also accusing those tools of wrongdoing when they use the studios' material to train AI models. Midjourney argued much the same in August in its reply to copyright litigation brought by Disney and Universal (see 2508080019). Warner Bros. filed its suit against Midjourney in September.

The release of OpenAI's video app, Sora 2, has resulted in a proliferation of videos showing up on social media that infringe on Motion Picture Association members' content and characters, MPA CEO Charles Rivkin said Monday. He called on OpenAI to acknowledge that it's the generative AI platform's responsibility, not rightsholders', to prevent infringement on the Sora 2 service.

Contrary to AI developer arguments that the technology deserves special copyright latitude, strong copyright protection is "the backbone" of AI innovation, rather than the enemy, Copyright Alliance President Keith Kupferschmid wrote Thursday. He said the U.S. has a long history of leadership in innovation and creativity that depends on "established and strong" intellectual property laws. AI companies need human-created, copyright-protected works to develop their models, and disregarding or eliminating U.S. copyright laws means those models can't be developed and U.S. AI dominance can't be sustained, Kupferschmid said. He waved off arguments that changes to copyright law are needed in order to keep up with or beat China in AI, saying the U.S. "want[s] to beat China, not be China" by emulating its lack of IP rights.

Chinese tech company MiniMax is engaged in "willful and brazen" copyright infringement via its Hailuo AI image- and video-generating AI service, said Disney, Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery in a complaint (docket 2:25-cv-08768) filed Tuesday with the U.S. District Court for Central California. The programmers said MiniMax markets Hailuo AI "as a 'Hollywood studio in your pocket'" and "built its business from intellectual property stolen from Hollywood studios" like them. The suit alleges direct and secondary copyright infringement by MiniMax and seeks unspecified damages, as well as an injunction prohibiting the offering of Hailuo AI without copyright protection measures. Also named as a defendant is MiniMax parent Shanghai Xiyu Jizhi Technology Co.

Video piracy costs rights-holders and the media industry $75 billion annually in lost revenues, so steps like the shuttering of massive sports piracy operation Streameast are welcome, Kearney media lawyer Christophe Firth wrote last week. "But it is a game of whack-a-mole and there is every risk of similar piracy hubs quickly filling the gap left by Streameast’s closure."

When it comes to tech competition between the U.S. and China, "America is not genuinely competing now, and never has," American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Derek Scissors wrote Wednesday. China has repeatedly seen the state identify important technology and then command development of it while providing various kinds of support, he said. Identifying those technologies is getting harder as China moves closer to the technology frontier, but state resources for support have grown enormously, Scissors added. Meanwhile, the U.S. "has no technology strategy at all," and U.S. companies and individuals are competing with China for profit, not national interest, with revenues and share prices often tied to helping China. Decades of the U.S. government doing little to punish Chinese firms for intellectual property theft and infringement make it "impossible to take American policy seriously," Scissors said. "While Beijing will always make foreign technology acquisition a cornerstone of its competition strategy, we have made its job easy."

Cox Communications didn't do anything affirmative to further online piracy by its broadband subscribers, and holding it liable for contributory copyright infringement flouts decades of U.S. Supreme Court case law, the cable ISP told SCOTUS on Friday. In a docket 24-171 petitioners' brief, Cox said the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals "defies common law and common sense" in its finding that ISPs are liable when they continue offering service after getting notifications accusing an unknown user of infringing copyright. Cox is challenging the 4th Circuit upholding a lower court's copyright infringement finding against Cox for piracy by some of its internet subscribers (see 2408160034).

Of the more than 50 AI copyright infringement lawsuits filed in recent years, close to 30 remain active due to consolidations and settlements, the Copyright Alliance's Kevin Madigan wrote last week. Authors of literary works suing large language model developers represent a sizable portion of those, while YouTube copyright owners, visual artists and news publishers also have brought cases, said Madigan, the group's senior vice president of policy and government affairs. He said most cases involve literary works, but there have been cases brought involving musical compositions, sound recordings, videos, photos and computer code as well. The Disney and Universal litigation against AI platform Midjourney (see 2506110043) is one of only a few cases involving claims against an image generator for infringing output, he noted, "and it will be one to watch given the very strong evidence presented and the fair use defense Midjourney has raised."