A group of 17 music publishers have sued Twitter for more than $250m (£195m) over bulk copyright infringement, citing Elon Musk’s tweets to argue that the company has deliberately stopped enforcing the rules.
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.
Since Musk bought the company late last year, two of its trust and safety officials, Yoel Roth and Ella Irwin, have left.
At the heart of the claim lies the fact that Twitter has not paid for a blanket licence allowing its users to upload copyrighted material, unlike most of its competitors including TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat.
As such, it accuses the platform of having an “unfair advantage” over rivals. This year, the New York Times reported that talks at Twitter to license that material, ongoing since 2021, had stalled over the $100m price tag and fallen apart since Musk bought the site.
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 asks for a $150,000 statutory penalty for each one of the thousands of violations.
Twitter users have noticed the lax enforcement of the company’s own policies. This year, users began posting entire movies to the platform, initially in two-minute chunks and then, as upload limits were increased, in hour-long segments. One user posted the Super Mario Bros Movie, while it was still in cinemas, to the platform, and received almost 10m views in just two days.
Musk acquired Twitter for $44bn last October, but under his reign its value has tumbled. According to one of the only remaining independent shareholders in the company, the asset manager Fidelity, it is now worth barely a third of that. Fidelity revalued its holdings in the company, now officially called X Holdings Corp, from $20m last year to just $6.6m now, a reassessment that would value the entire operation at less than $15bn.
Twitter has been approached for comment.
