X’s Antitrust Suit Targets Common Music-Industry Copyright Moves

Elon Musk’s social media platform is accusing music publishers of violating antitrust law through the seemingly mundane practice of using a trade group to send takedown requests for posts they say infringe their copyrights.

X Corp.‘s lawsuit alleges the National Music Publishers’ Association Inc. and several publishers are engaging in anticompetitive conduct by “bombarding” the platform with takedown requests. The publishers are refusing to deal with X independently in order to “extract industrywide licenses at supracompetitive prices” from the platform, X said.

For the publishers, though, the NMPA’s takedown notices are a standard process under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act they’ve used for years to stop infringement.

That’s why X’s lawsuit appears “to be more a grand gesture at dissatisfaction with the state of play in the music marketplace rather than a cognizable legal claim, because nothing about what X pointed out is unusual in the history of music licensing,” said Gipson Hoffman & Pancione music attorney Dan Lifschitz.

But the fact that sending takedown notices is spelled out in a statute won’t necessarily clear the publishers in this case, University of Memphis antitrust professor John Newman said. “If a group of competitors is getting together and flexing their combined power to get to coerce more one sided terms out of somebody, it doesn’t matter if they’re using an otherwise legal tool to do it.”

The suit, filed Jan. 9 in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas, follows the NMPA and publishers’ own action against X in 2023, accusing the platform of not doing enough to prevent users from infringing. A judge narrowed that suit to DMCA allegations, and publishers including Warner Chappell Music, Sony Music Publishing and Universal Music Corp. have since engaged in settlement talks with X, unsuccessfully. A trial is scheduled for February 2027.

Sync License

Synchronization licenses—which are at the core of X’s dispute with the NMPA—provide the right to pair a musical composition with visual media, such as background music in a video. Most other major social media platforms, including Meta Platforms Inc. and TikTok, have licensed sync rights from publishers, allowing them to offer users a free music library to use in noncommercial posts.

X, a primarily text-based platform, hasn’t taken those licenses and offers no such library. Instead, it removes posts publishers say are infringing through the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown system. The NMPA started filing those requests on behalf of music publishers in 2021, X said.

According to X, the trade group is filing too many of them—sending thousands of takedown requests every week and forcing it to suspend more than 50,000 users.

The NMPA’s members—which include giants Universal and Sony and collectively own more than 90% of musical compositions in the US, according to X—have “banded together to force industrywide agreements,” using waves of takedown notices as a cudgel, its complaint said. It cited Twitch and Roblox as examples of platforms that licensed from NMPA members after facing such barrages.

“Although they are competitors, the Music Publishers have joined together to exploit their combined market power,” X said, “to force X to make an all-or-nothing choice: either take licenses from all the Music Publishers or else face a targeted attack—including on its most popular users.”

But that’s nothing new, said Georgetown University music law professor Kristelia García. “The DMCA has long-served as a negotiation tool,” she wrote in an email. “Some have argued that was its intended purpose: to give less powerful content creators a way to bring big, bad platforms to the table.”

Although X characterizes NMPA’s actions as a coordinated effort to bring it to heel, the publishers have little remedy to combat infringing posts beyond the takedown requests, she said.

“What else can they do?” García said.

Trade Groups

Trade groups and collective-rights organizations sometimes exist in a legal gray area as they raise antitrust concerns by virtue of representing a slate of competitors, Newman said.

Music-rights groups including BMI and ASCAP—who license the rights to play song recordings in public—have been accused of illegal price-fixing in the past. The argument hasn’t always held up in court: In 1979, the US Supreme Court ruled their blanket licenses are an “acceptable mechanism.”

“The whole premise there is it would be too burdensome for licensees to need to do those licenses with so many different copyright owners,” Joseph Fishman, a music law professor at Vanderbilt University said. “So we’re just going to create these collectives that can do it all at once on a blanket basis.”

But the NMPA isn’t exactly like BMI or ASCAP. It doesn’t exist to administer blanket or industrywide licenses, but to advocate for music publishers. X takes umbrage when publishers “collude through the NMPA in a concerted refusal to deal with X independently,” according to its complaint.

“What raises the red flags is the defendants acting collectively through the NMPA to exert pressure on X to take worse terms, higher prices, et cetera,” Newman said. “The problem there is that they’re acting collectively because they have more power collectively.”

X said music publishers have opportunities to “meet and coordinate their licensing strategy” at trade association meetings, including those organized by the NMPA. It also said publishers share pricing information through most favored nation clauses, which force licensees to pay all publishers the highest fee they promised any one publisher.

Although X hasn’t alleged any concrete harm, as it doesn’t currently pay for a license nor has it expressed a desire to in the past, Newman said, the company has good evidence of an agreement among competitors and that their joint conduct stems from the publishers’ desire to flex their market power.

“It’s not a laughable lawsuit,” he said. “It has a pretty good chance of surviving a motion to dismiss.”

The case is X Corp. v. Nat’l Music Publishers’ Ass’n Inc., N.D. Tex., No. 3:26-cv-00047.