Music publishers sue Twitter for ‘massive copyright infringement’

A group of music publishers is suing Twitter for $250 million. The publishers claim that Twitter facilitates ‘massive copyright violations’ by allowing users to post music to the platform without a license.

Seventeen music publishers claim in a lawsuit that Twitter has ‘knowingly facilitated and profited from’ copyright infringement without paying music makers for it. The group is seeking $250 million in damages for copyright infringement of approximately 1,700 songs. The publishers say they have filed multiple copyright notices about that music with Twitter, but the company has done nothing about those alleged violations.

The lawsuit states, among other things, that copyright infringement already existed before Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, but that it has gotten worse since then. Other major platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube, license the music from the publishers, the group reports. Twitter doesn’t have that and instead “cultivates massive copyright infringement that harms music creators.”

Twitter “systematically ignores” repeated copyright violations by users who post tweets containing unlicensed music, the lawsuit says. The publishers claim that Twitter encourages its users to infringe for higher engagement and ad revenue. This would give the company an ‘unfair advantage’ over platforms that pay for music licenses.

The lawsuit further claims that Twitter “encourages” certain copyright violations. The group cites a number of tweets from Twitter CEO Elon Musk. An example is cited where a Twitter user complains that multiple tweets containing “infringing materials” have been removed, to which Musk responded that he is “looking into it” and advised the user to enable subscriptions. The subscriptions feature allows Twitter users to post their tweets behind a paywall. The lawsuit alleges that Twitter encouraged users to hide infringing tweets to make them more difficult to detect by publishers and rights holders.

Twitter has not responded to the lawsuit at the time of writing. Linda Yaccarino, the company’s new CEO, has not posted on Twitter since the lawsuit was filed. The company also no longer employs media spokespersons since the takeover by Elon Musk.