By Winston Cho and Ethan Millman, Hollywood Reporter | 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 industry-wide 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.”
. . . . . . . . . .
Read more on how the outcome of this lawsuit could affect you:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/music-publishers-sued-by-x-in-growing-licensing-battle/