X has filed an antitrust lawsuit against over a dozen music publishers as well as their trade association the National Music Publishers Association, accusing them of colluding with the goal of coercing the platform into purchasing industrywide licenses.
The lawsuit, filed in Texas federal court on Friday, details an alleged years-long campaign to “leverage monopoly power” and force X into acquiring licenses from all music publishers at inflated rates. The company has been “denied the ability to acquire a U.S. musical-composition license from any individual music publisher on competitive terms,” states the complaint, which names the NMPA as well as 18 individual publishers including the “big three” Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music. Without those deals, X isn’t allowed to host certain songs that users post.
X and the publishers have been in a legal battle for years, with the NMPA first suing the platform back in 2023 over allegations of mass copyright infringement.
“X/Twitter is the only major social media company that does not license the songs on its platform,” says NMPA President & CEO David Israelite. “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.”
X’s new suit comes months after the NMPA had asked a judge in the NMPA’s case for a stay of proceedings as they seemed to be nearing a settlement. The two parties couldn’t reach a resolution, though a November 25 update said they “have made very substantial progress toward settlement and worked on a written settlement agreement.”
According to X, music publishers have refused to negotiate deals on an individual basis to resolve that case. As part of the alleged scheme, X claims music publishers have weaponized the Digital Millennium Copyright Act o remove unlicensed content hosted by the company on the social media platform.
In 2021, the National Music Publishers’ Association emailed the company and threatened to launch a “massive program” to inundate X with takedown notices “on a scale larger than any previous effort,” the lawsuit says. That campaign, the trade group warned, would turn “many of [X’s] most popular users into repeat infringers,” requiring the company to de-platform them, according to the complaint.
X maintains that the DMCA provides the company “safe harbor” over its users’ infringing posts as it “has adopted a policy of (i) removing infringing content upon being notified by the copyright holder and (ii) deplatforming repeat infringers.” In its initial lawsuit, the NMPA had argued that X didn’t routinely act on their takedown notices.
X says that no major music publishers have agreed to individual licenses, harming users who risk having their accounts suspended by posting songs that the platform hasn’t secured rights to, per the lawsuit.
The lawsuit advances several claims for alleged violations of antitrust law and unfair competition, among others. It seeks unspecified damages and a court order that would force publishers to individually negotiate with X.