Written by Haim Ravia and Dotan Hammer
The National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), an association representing music publishers in the United States, has filed a $250 million lawsuit against the social network Twitter. The NMPA alleges that Twitter infringed hundreds of thousands of copyrighted musical works they own: “Twitter sustains its business by utilizing countless infringing copies of musical compositions, thereby violating the exclusive rights of publishers and others under copyright law.”
The NMPA filed the lawsuit on behalf of 17 music publishers, encompassing a diverse catalog of music from some of the world’s top artists. The provides a list of approximately 1,700 musical works that were the subject of removal requests sent by the publishers to Twitter under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). However, the company has allegedly failed to take any action to remove the infringements. The publishers are seeking statutory damages of $150,000 for each musical work.
Click here to read the full complaint in Concord Music Group, Inc. et al. v. X Corp., d/b/a Twitter.
