Elon Musk’s X has filed an antitrust lawsuit against several major music publishers and their trade organisation, the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA).
The platform (formerly known as Twitter) alleged earlier this month that the companies and NMPA had illegally colluded to coerce X into purchasing industrywide licenses, without which they cannot host many thousands of songs.
The suit, filed January 9, alleges that both the companies and NMPA attempted to “leverage monopoly power” to compel the social media site to buy licenses from all music publishers at unfairly high rates.
It went on to claim they had “conspired to leverage their combined market power,” and acted to “coerce X into taking licenses to musical works from the industry as a whole, denying X the benefit of competition between music publishers.”
The three largest global music publishers – namely Sony, Universal and Warner – were among those named in the lawsuit.
As noted by Variety, the move is the latest in a drawn-out battle between X and the publishers over licenses, which dates back to a 2023 lawsuit against X by the NMPA, who claimed that the platform had infringed on over 1,700 different songs.
Both parties came close to coming to terms last November, but ultimately didn’t close the deal. However, that month, they were said to have made “very substantial progress toward settlement and worked on a written settlement agreement”.
As for the latest development, says NMPA president-CEO David Israelite has said “X/Twitter is the only major social media company that does not license the songs on its platform,” adding that they allege that X engaged in copyright infringement for years.
“Its meritless lawsuit is a bad faith effort to distract from publishers’ and songwriters’ legitimate right to enforce against X’s illegal use of their songs.”
Per Billboard, lawyers for X alleged that publishers “weaponised” the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the federal law which governs takedown requests to social media sites.
According to the suit, Israelite warned the company in an email that, if it did not take a blanket license, he would send such notices “on a scale larger than any previous effort in DMCA history.” He allegedly warned that such an action would turn X’s most popular users into “repeat infringers,” whom sites are required by law to terminate.
When the platform refused to cooperate, it said the NMPA sent more than 200,000 takedown requests in the first year alone, many for posts “not subject to any legitimate claim of infringement”, with X stating those efforts continue to this day.
“Because X has resisted defendants’ attempt to force it to buy industrywide licenses it does not need, it continues to be buried in hundreds of pages of takedown notices nearly every week,” the lawyers for the platform claimed.