“A bad faith effort to distract from publishers’ and songwriters’ legitimate right to enforce against X’s illegal use of their songs”: Elon Musk is suing US music publishers association

Elon Musk, owner of X (née Twitter) has filed a lawsuit against music publishers in the US and their trade association, the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA).

It’s the latest round in a long dispute between Musk and the publishing sector. The suit, which was filed on 9 January, alleges that the NMPA “leveraged monopoly power” to compel X/Twitter to buy licences from all music publishers at unfairly high rates.

It also claims that they “conspired to leverage their combined market power,” and acted to “coerce X into taking licences to musical works from the industry as a whole, denying X the benefit of competition between music publishers.”

The dispute dates back to 2023 when the publishers took out a copyright infringement lawsuit against Musk and X/Twitter, claiming the platform had infringed the copyright of over 1,700 songs.

Commenting on Musk’s latest move, NMPA CEO David Israelite said: “X/Twitter is the only major social media company that does not license the songs on its platform.” He added that the NMPA alleges 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.”

Meanwhile, lawyers for Musk have 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 X in an email that, if it did not take a blanket licence, he would send such notices “on a scale larger than any previous effort in DMCA history.” And apparently NMPA sent more than 200,000 takedown requests in the first year alone, many for posts “not subject to any legitimate claim of infringement”, according to X’s lawyers.

“Because X has resisted defendants’ attempt to force it to buy industrywide licences it does not need, it continues to be buried in hundreds of pages of takedown notices nearly every week,” the lawyers for Musk’s platform have claimed.