The world’s largest record companies have filed a massive lawsuit against Verizon, accusing the telecom giant of enabling and profiting from “massive copyright infringement committed by tens of thousands of its subscribers.”
In a lawsuit filed in federal court late last week, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment claim they’ve sent Verizon “hundreds of thousands” of infringement notices identifying specific instances of Verizon subscribers using peer-to-peer file sharing sites to steal music. The company “ignored Plaintiffs’ notices and buried its head in the sand,” the companies allege in the suit.
“While Verizon is famous for its ‘Can you hear me now?’ advertising campaign, it has intentionally
chosen not to listen to complaints from copyright owners,” according to the complaint. (A rep for Verizon did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone‘s request for comment.)
“Undeterred, infringing subscribers identified in Plaintiffs’ notices continued to use Verizon’s services to infringe Plaintiffs’ copyrights with impunity,” the suit alleges. “Meanwhile, Verizon continued to provide its high-speed service to thousands of known repeat infringers so it could continue to collect millions of dollars from them.”
Specifically, UMG, Warner, and Sony are suing Verizon for both vicarious and contributory infringement. The labels are seeking as much as $150,000 per infringement, and allege Verizon violated copyrights of more than 17,000 songs, totaling over $2.6 billion in damages. The companies filed a 408-page document detailing a list of thousands of alleged infringed songs from superstars including the Rolling Stones, Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus, Jay Z, and many more.
Verizon isn’t the first internet service provider to get caught in the labels’ crosshairs in the past several years. Labels previously sued major providers such as Cox and Bright House. In Cox’s case, the labels won a $1 billion ruling over the internet provider, though that ruling would later be overturned.
The labels cite a rule in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that ISPs “must, among other things, adopt and reasonably implement a policy providing for termination, in appropriate circumstances, of subscribers who are repeat infringers” if the providers want safe harbor from infringement claims.
The Verizon suit is one of several significant lawsuits the major labels have filed in recent months. In June, the labels sued the AI music generation companies Suno and Udio, alleging their software infringed on the labels’ copyrights to make the AI songs.