Maya Robertson
A group of 17 music publishers filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk’s Twitter on Wednesday, accusing the social media company of violating copyright law by allowing its users to share music on its platform without the necessary licences, as reported by Reuters.
“Twitter fuels its business with countless infringing copies of musical compositions, violating Publishers’ and others’ exclusive rights under copyright law,” said the National Music Publishers’ Association in its lawsuit filed at the Federal District Court in Nashville, Tennessee.
Sony Music Publishing and Universal Music Publishing Group are among the members of the group seeking up to $250 million in damages for the alleged infringement of approximately 1,700 copyrights.
‘’Twitter permits and encourages infringement, including of Publishers’ musical compositions, so that it can continue to reap huge profits from the availability of unlicensed music without paying the necessary licensing fees for it,” said the NMPA.
It said that while other social media companies like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat all have licensing deals, ‘Twitter does not, and instead breeds massive copyright infringement that harms music creators’.
The group added that the situation has gotten worse since the company was acquired by Elon Musk for $44 billion in October.
David Israelite, President and CEO of the NMPA, said: “Twitter stands alone as the largest social media platform that has completely refused to license the millions of songs on its service”.
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