Cox v. Sony Music Reshapes AI Copyright Litigation, Putting "Volitional Conduct" in the Crosshairs

The Supreme Court's March 25 ruling in Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment is rapidly restructuring copyright litigation across the board. Within weeks, major record labels voluntarily dismissed piracy suits against Verizon and Altice, and the Court vacated a $47M verdict against ISP Grande Communications—all resting on a contributory infringement theory Cox effectively foreclosed. On the AI front, music publishers suing Anthropic over Claude's reproduction of song lyrics have narrowed their secondary liability claims in the two Concord Music cases, dropping vicarious and contributory infringement counts as Anthropic's summary judgment motion loomed.

Secondary liability hasn't disappeared entirely—contributory claims survived in both Nazemian v. NVIDIA and Disney v. MiniMax, the latter targeting the maker of an AI video generator. But the more consequential battleground is now shifting to direct infringement and the doctrine of "volitional conduct": the judge-made rule that determines whether an AI company or its end users bear liability for infringing outputs. AI defendants have consistently argued that the user who types the prompt—not the company that built the model—is the one who "pressed the button," and that argument is expected to define the next phase of generative AI copyright disputes.