The Pop Corporation

Twitter is facing a massive lawsuit filed by a coalition of 17 music industry entities, and two things – it’s not necessarily in our nature to take the side of Big Music Business, and this may well be rotten news in terms of musicians’ ownership and copyright – we really aren’t sure. However, this is something that may be boiling Elon Musk’s piss, and seeing as the world of business is not geared in our favour, we may as well enjoy the laughs when they come, eh?

Heading up the suit are publishers like Sony Music, Universal Music, Warner Chappel, and BMG. Big boiz. Fancy suits and chai lattes.

They’re seeking more than $250 million in damages for “hundreds of thousands” of alleged copyright infringements in close to 1,700 pieces of music.

The documents basically say that they’re suing Twitter for at least $250 million over the alleged infringement of roughly 1,700 works for which it received hundreds of thousands of takedown notices. They allege the company “consistently and knowingly hosts and streams infringing copies of music compositions” to “fuel its business.”

Twitter rebuffed the claims, but because of it being run by absolute clowns currently, you won’t be surprised to learn that Twitter are the sole social platform without a music licence deal. Everyone else has smoothed the creased and greased the palms because a) they can’t be arsed with lawyer costs and b) it actively makes the user experience better so people can include music in their videos and whatnot, without everything being muted or shite.

Obviously, these deals help musicians get paid too, which is no doubt something that makes tech bros feel holistically better about themselves, because it’s nice to contribute to the ‘arts’.

The suit filed in federal court in Tennessee accuses Twitter of intentionally fostering a user base that posts video overlaid with copyright-protected music to “retain account holders and viewers” and “grow the body of engaging tweets” on the platform. That sound right. “Twitter then monetises those tweets and users via advertising, subscriptions, and data licensing, all of which serve to increase Twitter’s valuation and revenues,” states the filing. Fair.

Twitter then profits from the whole thing by posting a “promoted” tweet directly below such posts, and it looks like a pretty tidy job all told, and you can imagine that Musk will be thinking he’s some kind of copyright punk and not arsed about the whole thing, shrugging with a tense face, absolutely seething inside. Given that Twitter’s marketing shows that video is a major player when it comes to user engagement and that they really want users to watch and make video content, it’s all a bang up job from where we’re sat.

“The availability of videos with music, including copies of Publishers’ musical compositions, furthers Twitter’s financial interests both because it drives user engagement, and thus advertising revenue, and because Twitter does not pay fees to license musical compositions from Publishers and other music rights holders,” writes the publishers’ lawyer Steven Riley in the suit. “Indeed, providing free, unlicensed music gives the Twitter platform an unfair advantage over competing platforms.”

Since 2021, the National Music Publishers’ Association, acting on behalf of the publishers, started sending formal infringement notices to Twitter on a weekly basis, and that’s resulted in over 300,000 infringing tweets, and Twitter has just sat on it’s hands.

Why won’t Twitter do anything about this? Well, considering that they’re seemingly quite happy to host materials that are fully racist, transphobic and the rest, it’s hard to think of anyone being bothered about something like this.

“Users who repeatedly infringe copyrights do not face a realistic prospect of permanently losing access to their accounts on the Twitter platform,” the suit states. “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.”

So what’s Twitter going to use in it’s defence? Well, the suit is anticipating a ‘fair use’ arguments so they’re going to argue straight back that that the purpose of using their music on Twitter is to maximise views and make posts more compelling, “not to engage in political or newsworthy speech, or commentary or criticism.”

What does Elon say? Well, in a tweet last year, he blarted into one of his tweets saying “current copyright law in general goes absurdly far beyond protecting the original creator,” and a bunch of incels probably had a wank and brayed like asses at every word. They’re allowed their fun, we guess. Still, this could be a very expensive piece of complacency from Twitter & Gang.

In a statement, NMPA president David Israelite said Twitter “knows full well that music is leaked, launched, and streamed by billions of people every day on its platform.” He added that the company can’t “hide behind the DMCA.”

And, you may well be thinking ‘okay, okay, it’s all very well having a laugh at Elon’s expense, but this is a problem that was before he took over the company’. True. But it’s also true that Twitter was looking at getting music licenses before he took them over, and then Musk hasn’t bothered and doesn’t see it as important. He probably read Cory Doctorow’s ‘Content’ over a decade ago, and is still basing his ideas on that woolly, libertarian tech bollocks. No offence, Cory.

Anyway, let’s see how this plays out. At worse, it’ll be a massive inconvenience for Musk, and at best, it’ll make him puke coins out of his arse.