Music Companies Are Suing Twitter for $250 Million in Alleged Copyright Infringement

The National Music Publishers Association and its members are suing Twitter for copyright infringement, claiming the site has infringed on over 1,700 different songs. The suit, filed in Federal Court in Nashville on Wednesday, includes many of the industry’s most prominent music publishing companies and seeks as much as $150,000 per infringement, totaling $255 million over the allegations if Twitter is found liable.

Among the plaintiffs listed are the three major music publishers — Universal Music Publishing, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell — along with other prominent publishers including BMG, Wixen, Hipgnosis and Kobalt among several others.

“Twitter stands alone as the largest social media platform that has completely refused to license the millions of songs on its service,” NMPA president David Israelite said in a statement regarding the suit. “Twitter knows full well that music is leaked, launched, and streamed by billions of people every day on its platform. No longer can it hide behind the DMCA and refuse to pay songwriters and music publishers.”

Twitter didn’t immediately respond to request for comment. The publishers listed direct copyright infringement, contributory infringement and vicarious infringement as their counts.

Twitter has faced myriad issues and controversies since Elon Musk bought the platform last year, but the company’s contentious relationship with the music industry goes back years before Musk took the reins. Twitter and the record companies have failed for years to reach a licensing agreement, leaving Twitter as the lone major social media company without a music licensing agreement. The suit said plaintiffs had hoped that the new ownership could help finally end any outstanding disagreements, but so far that apparently hasn’t happened. And as Musk infamously axed much of his team since his takeover, such a goal likely wouldn’t have gotten any easier.

“Twitter’s change in ownership in October 2022 has not led to improvements in how it acts with respect to copyright,” the plaintiffs said in the suit. “On the contrary, Twitter’s internal affairs regarding matters pertinent to this case are in disarray.”

Further looking to bring the company’s care about infringement into question, the suit also referenced a May 2022 tweet from Musk in which he called the Digital Millenium Copyright Act — a legal statute copyright holders cite in takedown requests — as “a plague on humanity.”

In the suit, the plaintiffs said they “have spent significant time and resources to identify specific infringers and specific infringements, and to notify Twitter of them,” and that “the”infringements already number in the hundreds of thousands.”

But the platform, according to the lawsuit, “has repeatedly failed to take the most basic step of expeditiously removing, or disabling access to, the infringing material identified by the infringement notices,” the suit said. “Twitter has also continued to assist known repeat infringers with their infringement. Those repeat offenders do not face a realistic threat of Twitter terminating their accounts and thus the cycle of infringement continues across the Twitter platform.”