Elon Musk’s Twitter sued for $250 million

Twitter, a social network company owned by tech billionaire Elon Musk, has been sued for $250 million by the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) in the United States for infringing on around 1,700 copyrights of the association.

NMPA includes major music publishers like Sony Music Publishing, Universal Music Publishing, BMG Rights Management, and Warner Chappell. NMPA filed the lawsuit against the micro-blogging site in the United States. The Association alleged that the social networking site Twitter profits from the “infringement of publishers’ repertoires of musical compositions.”

The Association filed a lawsuit in federal court in the state of Tennessee on behalf of 17 music publishers. NMPA reportedly said, “Both before and after the sale, Twitter has engaged in, knowingly facilitated, and profited from copyright infringement at the expense of music creators, to whom Twitter pays nothing.”

The lawsuit read, “Twitter does not, and instead breeds massive copyright infringement that harms music creators.” The association asked the court to fine Twitter up to $150,000 for each violation of around 1,700 songs.

David Israelite, an American music executive who has been president of the National Music Publishers Association since 2005, argued that Twitter is the only social media platform to refuse to license millions of songs on its service.

Twitter has been in the limelight in recent months. After purchasing Twitter last year, Elon Musk made various changes to the platform. He fired many employees and introduced a plan to turn Twitter into the everything app. 

Recently, Elon Musk named Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter “to transform Twitter into X, the everything app.”

Linda also sent a memo to all Twitter employees titled “Building Twitter 2.0 Together” that highlighted the goal of turning Twitter into the “world’s most accurate real-time information source.” The email read, “The success of Twitter 2.0 is all of our responsibility.”

The success of Twitter 2.0 is all of our responsibility.

We need to think big.
We need to transform.
We need to do it all together.

— Linda Yaccarino (@lindayacc) June 12, 2023