If you are a Twitter user, surely on more than one occasion you have come across any publication that included a song, or a fragment of it, which you have quickly recognized. This, on more than one occasion, has surely influenced you to dedicate a little more time to said message, something that you will have liked, the creator of the message will have liked it and Twitter will have liked it. But it never rains to everyone’s liking, and in this case, the NMPA didn’t like it.
Behind those acronyms, NMPA, is the National Music Publishers’ Association, American music conglomerate responsible for ensuring, among other things, strict compliance with the legal regulations governing the use of all material protected by copyright generated by the recording industry. Yeah, I know it doesn’t sound too good, but if we dig into his story, it’s actually a lot worse, but hey, that’s another story.
Be that as it may, and they represent artists who watch over their creations or large investors who buy and exploit copyrights without paying any interest to strange concepts such as «Fair use», «Cultural dissemination», «Backup copy», etc. (go , I begin to notice the annoyance), NMPA takes advantage of the legal framework, sometimes even its darkest cornersto look after your interests, something that may seem better or worse to us, but that is within your right.
Thus, and according to what we can read in Gizmodo, NMPA sues Twitter for $250 million, something that must not have fitted in too well with Elon Musk’s plans to cut expenses. And, although it is true that a good part of Twitter’s ills are due to the disastrous management and attitude of recent months, in this particular case we must affirm that it is not their fault. Or, at least, that it is not entirely so, since this instance of the problem began to take shape in 2021.
On the demand, the NMPA claims to have notified Twitter of more than 300,000 tweets published between December 2021 and the present, which contained material protected by copyright without having the proper authorization to do so. In many of these cases, the entity would have asked Twitter to remove said posts, making use of the powers granted by the DMCA, but unlike what happens in other social networks, Twitter would not have acted in this regard.
It is known, from public demonstrations in this sense, that Elon Musk is a critic of the DMCA, the legal norm approved in the United States at the beginning of the century, and which is disproportionate and abusive in many aspects (yes, although some may be surprised, in this aspect I totally agree with Musk). However, and thanks to a questionable legal framework, Twitter should not have neglected this aspect and, therefore, should have proceeded to remove these posts. But if it did not do so even between the end of 2021 and the end of 2022, when it still had 100% of its workforce, it seems unlikely that it now has the necessary resources to respond to this problem.
