[TAG0][TAG2]
- Twitter's legal problems continue to grow.
- A group of music publishing companies filed a lawsuit on Wednesday, alleging "massive copyright infringement".
- The lawsuit, which could be worth up to $250 million, would involve about 1,700 songs with a maximum of $150,000 per song.
Twitter's legal problems continue to escalate.
A new lawsuit was filed against the social media giant in Tennessee federal court on Wednesday. A group of music publishing companies claim that Twitter is profiting from "massive copyright violations" and has allowed them to occur.
Twitter has been the subject of several lawsuits over late rent payments and other services. There have also been unsuccessful lawsuits from former employees who quit or were laid off during Musk's ownership. San Francisco's company faces investigations by local officials. The music copyright lawsuit is not entirely Musk-related and was years in the making.
According to the suit filed by a group consisting of 17 music publishers who are all members of the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA), Twitter has been the only major social network that doesn't pay music labels licensing fees for their music to be featured on its platform. According to the lawsuit, companies like YouTube, Snapchat and Facebook pay millions of dollars in licensing fees each year to the music industry.
The New York Times reported that Twitter had been in talks to reach a deal with Universal, Sony and Warner last year, three of the largest music publishers in America, who are also included in the suit. The Times reported that in March, the company had begun negotiations with music labels as early as 2021. However, the talks were reportedly stopped when Musk took control of the company in November 2022, and started to fire thousands of employees, including those responsible for negotiations.
Musk is quoted multiple times in the suit, including a screenshot from a pair tweets he sent out in May 2022 where he claimed that copyright laws "go absurdly beyond protecting original creators." The suit also seems to quote Musk from another tweet, in which he suggested that a Twitter user place some of her tweets beyond the "subscription tweets paywall" on the site because she received so many copyright complaints about videos she shared.
[TAG1][TAG3]
A list of about 1,700 songs, filed by labels and allegedly posted on Twitter in violation of copyright laws because labels were not compensated for distribution. If the lawsuit is successful, this initial list of songs that could total more than $250 million could be fined up to $150,000 per violation.
In the lawsuit, the NMPA states that it has reported over 300,000 Tweets to Twitter, and Twitter took months or even over a year on many occasions to remove a particular tweet.
The suit claims that because tweets containing popular music or video could be shared by a large group of users, it would benefit Twitter to keep the content on the platform. This could increase engagement. According to the suit, increased engagement may allow Twitter's primary revenue stream ,, to increase.
The complaint, for example, includes a screenshot showing a user who posted a part of a music video that included the copyrighted song audio to celebrate the anniversary of Rihanna’s hit of 2007. At the time the screenshot was taken, the tweet had received thousands of likes and replies and approximately 221,000 views.
The suit cites archived versions on Twitter's rules website to claim that the company has removed the threat of banning multiple accounts for copyright violations in August 2018 and instead temporarily suspends repeat offenders.
Twitter didn't immediately respond to our request for comment as they changed their policy regarding interaction with the media earlier this year.
—————————————————————————————————————————————
By: amcdade@insider.com (Aaron McDade)
Title: Twitter has gotten away with not paying music publishers for copyrighted songs for years. A $250 million lawsuit might change that.
Sourced From: www.businessinsider.com/twitter-250-million-music-copyright-lawsuit-2023-6
Published Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2023 20:21:16 +0000
Related posts:
Twitter is being sued in a lawsuit by a consultant firm. They claim it owes $2 million for the work it performed to get Elon Musk’s acquisition.
A judge dismissed the lawsuit of Twitter staffers laid off who claimed Elon Musk’s cuts were unfairly targeting women
A lawsuit brought by Elon Musk over his Twitter takeover, which was described as a ‘disjointed laundry’ list of complaints by his lawyers, has been dismissed.
Twitter sued Innisfree M&A because they owed $1.9M in invoices
Leave a Reply