X is suing music publishers and their commerce group, the Nationwide Music Publishers’ Affiliation (NMPA), accusing them of tried coercion of their ongoing battle over licensing, as reported earlier by The Hollywood Reporter. The Elon Musk-owned platform accuses music publishers of colluding with the NMPA to “coerce X into taking licenses to musical works from the business as an entire, denying X the good thing about competitors between music publishers.”
Within the antitrust lawsuit filed on Friday, X claims that the NMPA and music publishers “weaponized” the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) with requests to take down allegedly infringing content material. The lawsuit claims that in 2021, the NMPA started “bombarding X with takedown notices each single week associated to hundreds of posts,” to “acquire leverage and strain X” into industrywide licensing offers.
X has had issues with copyright and piracy following Musk’s takeover. In 2023, for instance, your complete Tremendous Mario Bros. Film kept getting posted to X.
This submitting is the most recent wrinkle in a years-long authorized battle between X and the NMPA, which sued X for $250 million in 2023 for “massive” copyright infringement involving greater than 1,700 songs.. A choose upheld parts of the still-pending lawsuit in 2024, and a November 2025 submitting said X and the NMPA “have made very substantial progress towards settlement,” in accordance with The Hollywood Reporter.
X is asking the courtroom for financial damages and for the choose to dam the NMPA from allegedly forcing X to collectively negotiate with the publishers.