Elon Musk has a never ending series of problems when it comes to Twitter. And his latest one is that the National Music Publishers’ Association is suing him for $250 million. Why? Here’s what the complaint says:
This is a civil action seeking damages and injunctive relief for Twitter’s willful copyright infringement. Twitter fuels its business with countless infringing copies of musical compositions, violating Publishers’ and others’ exclusive rights under copyright law. While numerous Twitter competitors recognize the need for proper licenses and agreements for the use of musical compositions on their platforms, Twitter does not, and instead breeds massive copyright infringement that harms music creators.
And what doesn’t help is the fact that this lawsuit cites this Tweet from Elon Musk:
Well, this is an example of Elon’s habit of Tweeting before thinking is coming back to haunt him. But the larger issue is this. I’m old enough to remember Napster. For those of you who weren’t around in the late 90’s or early 2000’s, Napster was a file sharing service that focused on a then new digital music format called MP3. The problem was, literally everything shared on Napster was illegally obtained music. Or put another way, the service facilitated copyright infringement. And as a result, The Recording Industry Association of America sued Napster. And those lawsuits pretty much destroyed Napster because they not only kept losing those lawsuits, but even when they tried to police the sharing of copyrighted material on the platform, they couldn’t do it in any meaningful way. And as a result they were dead by 2002 having started up in 1999. At a very basic level, this case with Twitter is the same. And while I am not a lawyer, I can see Twitter losing this lawsuit in epic fashion. Especially since according to the lawsuit, Twitter has flipped off calls from the National Music Publishers’ Association for it to obtain the licenses or other agreements needed for musical compositions to be lawfully used on its platform.
For Elon Musk, this may become the best example of F.A.F.O..