Twenty major record labels, including Universal and Sony, sued Twitter on Wednesday, accusing the social network of profiting from its artists’ compositions, in what they call a “massive intellectual property violation that hurts music creators.”
These publishers advanced as a civil action in a court in Nashville, in the US state of Tennessee, against X Corp, the company of billionaire Elon Musk that includes Twitter, reported the Efe agency.
Music companies require a jury trial to obtain compensation of US$150,000 (about 139,000 euros) for each work subject to infringement, and in some cases, some compositions can total “hundreds of thousands” of dollars.
According to the document, Twitter uses the music and video repertoires of the whistleblowers to “attract and retain” users and enhance their interactions, which “feeds the lucrative advertising business” of the social network “at the expense of the authors and in prejudice to their” compositions, protected by copyright.
“Twitter has refused the resources to obtain licenses or other agreements necessary to be able to legally use the musical compositions on its platform,” the companies also say, noting that other social networks such as TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat pay for the use of these constructions.
The lawsuit concerns only the state of Tennessee, where Nashville, one of the music capitals of the world, is located, as it is home to many of the affected whistleblowers and artists.
The editors point out that they spent “significant time and resources to identify” the infringing works and the specific violations of “copyright”, and refer to having notified the social network of the existence of some 300,000 illegal ‘tweets’.
Twitter was acquired last year by Musk, who has been making changes for months to try to create value with the social network’s services and increase its income, cutting personnel costs.
This week, Musk handed over the helm to Linda Yaccarino, the new CEO of Twitter.
After buying Twitter for 44,000 million dollars (about 40,300 million euros), Musk fired several of the company’s top managers, including former CEO Parag Agrawal.
It also fired more than two-thirds of employees, allowed controversial figures who had been banned to return to the social network, and changed the account authentication system.
Source: TSF
