Twitter just got hit with a massive music copyright lawsuit

Twitter stepped on its latest rake of many today, to the tune of a potential $250 million—which is how much the three major music labels, Universal, Sony, and Warner, plus a host of smaller publishers, are suing the social media company for over its refusal to license music that people post on the service.

This legal throwdown has been brewing for a while, as Twitter remains one of the only major social media companies not to cut licensing deals with the labels to cover music that its users post—most especially as part of videos. Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat all maintain license deals with the labels to smooth out any copyright issues that crop up from users posting licensed music, but Twitter has stood defiant, since back before Elon Musk took over the company. Now the issue’s finally come to a head, as the three major labels, plus a consortium of smaller publishers, have teamed up for a lawsuit accusing Twitter of violating copyright on more than 1,700 works, which, at $150,000 a pop, adds up to… Look, it’s a lot, okay?

Per THR, Twitter is expected to try to point to a fair use defense to cover its legal butt here, arguing that nobody really profits from music being used this way on Twitter. But the labels are contending that Twitter is knowingly profiting from allowing music to be posted, since it encourages people to share and circulate posts—and especially videos that drive a large part of the service’s use (and ad traffic). Meanwhile, the lawsuit also claims that, because Twitter doesn’t go out of its way to ban accounts that have been accused of multiple counts of copyright infringement, it forfeits at least some of its protections under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Or, to put it in vaguely threatening legal-ese pulled from the suit: “Rather than terminating access to specific users brought to its attention as infringers, which would have stopped or limited their infringement and deterred others from infringing, Twitter has operated its platform to be a haven for infringing activity.”

As we said, this is one of those issues that pre-dates Musk’s takeover of Twitter—former CEO Jack Dorsey was fielding letters about this stuff back in 2021, when the labels began issuing infringement notices in earnest. But, given that Musk has used the words “absurdly far” to describe the reach of U.S. copyright law in the past, he doesn’t seem to have been especially moved to address the brewing storm since taking over. It’s not clear yet what the lawsuit will mean for actual users of the site, but if you see takedown notices start getting even more heavy-handed than usual, you should have a decent inkling of why.