Elon Musk sues major music publishers over alleged X copyright strikes and inflated licensing rates

Elon Musk has filed an antitrust lawsuit against major music publishers and an industry trade association, accusing them of inflating licensing rates and targeted copyright strikes against X, FKA Twitter. 

The lawsuit, filed in a federal Texas court, claims that 18 major music publishers, including Sony Music, Warner Music Group and Universal Music, and the National Music Publishers’ Association have denied Musk’s platform X “the ability to acquire a U.S. musical-composition license from any individual music publisher on competitive terms”, Reuters reports. 

According to Music Business Worldwide, the lawsuit accuses the publishers, making up 90% of music copyright holders, of using NMPA to conspire against X in a “coordinat[ed] shakedown via nearly 500,000 copyright takedown requests” for videos with music since 2023. 

“We allege that X has engaged in copyright infringement for years”, NMPA president and CEO David Israelite said in a statement, “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.”

Israelite added X is the only major social network to not license the songs posted to its platform. In the lawsuit, X states: “Despite NMPA’s insistence that X obtain licenses from all its members, X is not interested in licensing musical compositions from every Music Publisher… Unlike music streaming platforms, X does not need licenses to all or even most musical compositions to provide a compelling experience for its users, and it is therefore unreasonable and uneconomical for X to pay all Music Publishers for licenses.” 

In 2023, several music publishers and NMPA sued X for $250 million in damages for using about 1,700 unlicensed songs.