A consortium of 17 large and indie music publishers, including Universal, Sony, and Warner, have filed a lawsuit against Twitter, alleging chronic copyright infringement. The National Music Publishers Association has filed a lawsuit against Twitter for $250 million USD for violating the publishers’ exclusive rights to the music, reports Technology News UK.
The lawsuit in Nashville on Wednesday claims that “Twitter fuels its business with innumerable illegal copies of musical compositions…” According to the publishers, Twitter’s competitors have acknowledged the “need for suitable licences and agreements…Twitter does not, and instead spawns widespread copyright infringement that affects music producers.”
According to the lawsuit, competitors such as TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat all pay fees to publishers, giving Twitter an unfair advantage in the field. The National Music Publishers Association alleges it filed complaints to Twitter directly regarding copyright violations for 1,700 songs posted on the platform, but the material was never removed. The action also claims that Twitter went from being a text-based social network to allowing users to publish multimedia information, with music playing a significant role in its meteoric growth.
“Music videos, including infringing versions of Publishers’ songs, attract and maintain account holders and viewers, and build the body of entertaining tweets on the Twitter network,” according to the suit. The suit then claims that Twitter can monetise that content by displaying its own adverts and selling paid subscriptions.
