Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment marks the first time in twenty years that the Supreme Court has addressed contributory infringement in copyright law. But rather than engage with the extensive appellate case law produced over those years, the Court instead chose to focus exclusively on the two forms of contributory infringement it had discussed in its own decisions: liability for intentionally providing a technology used for infringement by a third party, and liability for intentionally inducing the infringement of a third party. That’s it. The ruling contemplates no other form of contributory liability.

At first blush, then, the Cox decision blows a hole through other widely accepted forms of contributory infringement, especially by platforms like YouTube that host content posted by third parties—forms of infringement that were seemingly consecrated by Congress in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s safe harbors.

Yet on closer inspection, the decision deserves two cheers (but only two). The Court has replaced a tangled mess of appellate reasoning with a standard courts can actually apply. It has rightly made it harder to impose liability on internet service providers and search engines. It has narrowed contributory infringement while still allowing courts to impose liability where it is most needed, both through judicious interpretations of “intent” and through doctrines of direct, rather than contributory, infringement. And it has sidelined the DMCA in a way that not only honors the statute’s original design but also leaves a role for the safe harbors to play.

The Copyright Act includes a “radio loophole” that permits radio stations to broadcast songs without paying royalties to sound recording copyright owners. In recent years, critics have attacked this loophole as being fundamentally unfair, depriving artists of revenue, hampering innovation in music, and contradicting international norms. This Note argues that Congress should close the loophole for another reason: it is out of line with historical trends.

Throughout U.S. copyright law history, Congress has routinely bestowed statutory carveouts and loopholes upon commercial and nonprofit entities alike. Some apply to copyright owners, and some apply to users of copyrighted works or entities that distribute copyrighted works. Although any given carveout is often the fruit of successful lobbying efforts, a broader look at the staying power of statutory carveouts reveals that they are more likely to persist when they serve a public interest, like many nonprofit entities do. Conversely, statutory copyright advantages tend to erode for commercial entities that lack strong public benefit rationales.

In the late 20th century, Congress could justify its codification of the radio loophole by pointing to the public benefits of radio—including its music discovery, public education, and emergency broadcasting functions. However, technological, legislative, and societal changes have combined to erode both the public benefits of radio and the public benefit justification for the radio loophole. Today, radio is less like public-benefitting entities whose statutory copyright advantages endure and more like commercial entities whose statutory advantages erode. Placing the radio loophole within this historical framework illustrates that the time has come for Congress to eliminate it. Without strong public benefits of radio as a justification, the radio loophole is now an antiquated result of bare lobbying efforts.

This Article introduces a novel empirical method for measuring judicial importance beyond traditional metrics, such as citation counts, which often undervalue decisions that shape legal practice without generating extensive case law. Drawing on techniques from computational text analysis, it proposes linguistic shifts—systematic changes in the length, language, and structure of legal documents—as an alternative proxy for a judicial opinion’s legal significance.

The Article applies this method to a case study involving Blackboard, Inc. v. Desire2Learn, Inc., 574 F.3d 1371 (Fed. Cir. 2009), a Federal Circuit decision that has received relatively little attention under conventional citation-based measures. By programmatically analyzing more than 300 patents filed before and after Blackboard, the Article demonstrates that Blackboard triggered a measurable linguistic shift in how patent prosecutors draft the very type of patents at issue. These findings demonstrate that Blackboard significantly shaped practitioner behavior despite its low citation count.

More broadly, the Article demonstrates that computational analysis of linguistic shifts can serve as a scalable, doctrinally agnostic, and empirically verifiable framework for assessing judicial influence. By capturing changes in legal practice beyond the litigation process, this approach expands the scope of judicial influence to include legal actors and behaviors that are otherwise invisible to conventional metrics.