Twitter sued for $250 million by music publishers over copyright infringement
Members of the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) have filed a $250million lawsuit against social media platform Twitter at a federal court in Nashville, Tennessee, citing copyright infringement.
The NMPA is a trade organisation tasked with protecting the interests of songwriters and publishers, and, per Pitchfork, claims: “Twitter 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 NMPA also said: “Twitter profits handsomely from its infringement of Publishers’ repertoires of musical compositions.”
According to the New York Times, David Israelite, President 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”.
In the suit, the NMPA used an exhibit of nearly 1,700 allegedly infringed works, including those by Rihanna, Notorious B.I.G., Nicki Minaj and Destiny’s Child, and is seeking around $250m in damages. NMPA members participating in the suit include some of the world’s most prominent music publishers, including Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony Music Publishing, BMG Right Management, Warner Chappell, Hipgnosis and Kobalt. The suit does not include owners of mechanical licenses – rights concerning specific recordings of the copyrighted songs that are uploaded to Twitter.
Other social media platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat, have already signed agreements with the music rights holders to license songs on their platforms for billions of dollars per annum. In 2021, Twitter participated in negotiations with three major label groups – Universal, Warner and Sony – yet they reached an impasse when Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion and followed up the move with several cost-cutting measures.
The NMPA’s suit asserts that Twitter is naturally a destination for multimedia content and that its copyrighted audio and video recordings attract and retain users, as well as drive engagement, which advances its advertising business and other revenue streams. The NMPA also argues that Twitter either delayed or ignored the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requests to remove copyrighted material from the platform.
David Israelite stated at the NMPA’s annual meeting that US publishing revenue increased 19% to $5.6 billion in 2022 from the previous year’s $4.7 billion.
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