A group of 17 music publishers sued Twitter on Wednesday, accusing it of copyright infringement on about 1,700 songs, and seeking a whopping $250 million in damages, the latest headache for Elon Musk’s social media platform.
The publishers filed the lawsuit in Federal District Court in Nashville, saying Twitter violated copyright law by allowing users to post music to the platform without permission. Negotiations between Twitter and the music industry to establish broad licensing deals broke down months ago.
“Twitter stands alone as the largest social media platform that has completely refused to license the millions of songs on its service,” David Israelite, the president of the National Music Publishers’ Association, a trade group, said in a statement.
Twitter and Mr. Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The lawsuit details what the publishers believe is Twitter’s failure to monitor rampant music copyright infringement on the service. It referenced specific tweets in which music has been used without permission, including a post about Rihanna’s song “Umbrella” containing what the suit claimed was two minutes of the song’s music video. The post had 221,000 views and 15,000 likes, the suit said, but not the permission of the song’s publishers.
The lawsuit sought punitive damages of up to $150,000 for each of the nearly 1,700 infringing works, for a total of approximately $250 million.
Music publishers represent songwriting and composition copyrights, which are separate from recording copyrights.
The lawsuit also documents the music publishers’ attempts to notify Twitter of infringement through the protocol outlined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 law that protects Internet service providers when users post copyrighted material, but outlines a set of guidelines for how they can be taken down.
According to the lawsuit, the National Music Publishers’ Association has notified Twitter of approximately 300,000 tweets featuring infringing music since December 2021. The company routinely either deferred or failed to respond to these reports, the lawsuit said.
Twitter had been negotiating licensing rights with the three major music labels – Universal, Sony and Warner – since 2021, though talks stalled following Mr Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the company in October. Music rights deals, which require social media companies to compensate publishers and record labels when users post or play content containing songs, can cost more than $100 million a year.
Since purchasing Twitter, Mr. Musk cut costs by laying off employees, skipping rent payments and avoiding bills to various vendors. Advertising revenues are down and the company faces billions of dollars in debt payments as a result of the acquisition of Mr. Musk. Mr Musk has said Twitter was headed for bankruptcy.
The suit tries to use Mr. Musk’s own words against him. It quoted a series of his tweets saying current copyright law “goes absurdly far beyond protecting the original creator”. He added“Overzealous DMCA is a plague on humanity.”
