Music Publishers Sue Twitter for $250m – Seventeen music publishers have filed a lawsuit against Twitter, seeking over $250 million due to extensive copyright infringement. They claim that Twitter has intentionally neglected to enforce its rules, using Elon Musk’s tweets as evidence to support their argument. In the lawsuit, filed in a US federal court in Tennessee, Musk is cited as having said copyright “goes absurdly far beyond protecting the original creator” and “overzealous” application of copyright laws “is a plague on humanity.”
“This statement and others like it exert pressure on Twitter employees, including those in its trust and safety team, on issues relating to copyright and infringement,” argues the suit brought by the National Music Publishers’ Association on behalf of firms including Sony Music Publishing, BMG Rights Management and Universal Music Publishing Group. Following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company in late 2022, two trust and safety officials, Yoel Roth and Ella Irwin, have departed from Twitter.
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The core allegation in the lawsuit revolves around Twitter’s failure to obtain a comprehensive license that permits its users to upload copyrighted content, unlike its competitors such as TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat. Consequently, the lawsuit claims that Twitter possesses an “unfair advantage” over its rivals. The New York Times reported earlier this year that negotiations within Twitter to secure the licensing of such material, which had been ongoing since 2021, hit a roadblock due to the $100 million price tag and ultimately collapsed after Musk’s acquisition of the platform.
A list of 1,700 songs is included in the court filing, with the plaintiffs claiming that each had been uploaded by “specific users who had already been identified in multiple earlier notices”. In each case, it says, Twitter “did not expeditiously remove or disable access.” “Twitter’s policies demonstrate that Twitter views itself, not the law, as the arbiter of what content is permitted on the Twitter platform,” the case argues.
“Despite claiming to take down tweets in response to an infringement notice within hours or minutes, Twitter routinely waits much longer before acting, if it acts at all,” it adds. “There are thousands of instances where Twitter waited 30 days or more to remove or disable access to the content identified.” The lawsuit seeks a statutory penalty of $150,000 for each of the numerous infringements that have occurred.
Users of Twitter have observed the lenient implementation of the company’s own policies. During this year, users started sharing complete movies on the platform, initially dividing them into two-minute portions. As upload limits were expanded, these movies were uploaded in hour-long segments. For instance, a user uploaded the Super Mario Bros Movie to the platform while it was still being screened in theaters. Astonishingly, this post garnered nearly 10 million views within a span of just two days.
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In October of last year, Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion. However, since his takeover, the company’s value has significantly declined. Fidelity, one of the few remaining independent shareholders in the company, recently conducted a revaluation of its holdings in the company, which is now officially known as X Holdings Corp. The revaluation resulted in a decrease from $20 million last year to a mere $6.6 million currently. This reassessment implies that the entire operation is now valued at less than $15 billion, approximately a third of its initial acquisition cost.
