Music
Photo Credit: Ian Talmacs
Music The former Twitter moves to strike the entire multi-million-dollar lawsuit filed against it by music publishers on the grounds of the Cox v. Sony decision.
Elon Musk’s X Corp. is moving to dismiss the copyright infringement lawsuit filed against it by a group of music publishers, including BMG and Concord Music Group. The former Twitter argues that the music publishers’ new, amended complaint fails to meet the strict legal standards for copyright “inducement.” Unfortunately, “inducement” is far more difficult to prove in light of the Cox v. Sony Supreme Court decision.
After the high court ruled that copyright liability cannot be based merely on a platform’s knowledge of piracy or insufficient action to stop it, Musk’s company is now arguing that after 18 months of discovery, the publishers have no smoking gun.
Further, they allege that an Elon Musk tweet (in which he claimed the publishers were “weaponizing” massive takedown campaigns) the publishers are relying on is taken entirely out of context. This, X claims, is not encouraging actual infringement—just criticizing the law and the publishers’ enforcement of it.
Notably, X Corp. has already secured initial wins in this litigation, with the court previously dismissing the publishers’ claims of direct and vicarious copyright infringement. That has left only a partial contributory infringement claim for the publishers to reframe under the new legal standard.
Should X win altogether, other social platforms and UGC (user-generated content) companies will undoubtedly be encouraged to clap back at the broader industry.
The matter stemmed from X Corp. filing an antitrust countersuit against dozens of music publishers and the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) with allegations that they colluded to force the platform into taking industrywide licenses at exorbitant rates. The publishers first sued X Corp. for copyright infringement in 2023.
Filed in January, X’s complaint named the NMPA along with “18 music publishers and their affiliates” as defendants, including Sony Music Publishing, Universal Music Group, Warner Chappell Music, BMG Rights Management, Kobalt Music Publishing, Concord Music Group, Hipgnosis Songs Group, and Downtown Music Publishing.
X filed its complaint following an alleged 2021 email from NMPA President and CEO David Israelite, sent on behalf of “all music publishers,” which “threatened that NMPA would soon launch ‘a massive program’ to inundate X with DMCA takedown notices ‘on a scale larger than any previous effort in DMCA history.’”
“We allege that X has engaged in copyright infringement for years, and 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,” said Israelite.