Digital licensing hub SUISA Digital has sued X - or Twitter if you're sticking with that. It’s the second lawsuit filed by the music industry over all the videos on the social media platform that contain unlicensed music.
SUISA Digital - which is owned by Swiss song rights collecting society SUISA - alleges that “Twitter International used unlicensed music represented by SUISA Digital on the X platform”, before adding: “This lawsuit follows SUISA Digital’s repeated attempts to license X for more than half a year".
X is the one big social media platform that has never had any licensing deals with the music industry, despite allowing users to post videos that contain music.
It is already fighting a lawsuit filed by the American music publishers that makes similar arguments to those presented by SUISA. If the US case gets to court, X will likely claim that it is protected from liability for any videos posted by its users that use music without permission by the good old copyright safe harbour.
This new lawsuit has been filed in Germany, so will be an interesting test of X's obligations under European law. The SUISA Digital company is actually formally based in Liechtenstein, while SUISA is a Swiss organisation. However, it handles the licensing of repertoire for digital services across Europe and, it says, "a lawsuit in a large German-speaking country is therefore also possible".
As for why it has chosen to fight its lawsuit in the German courts, it adds: "The markets in Switzerland and Liechtenstein are too small for a lawsuit to have an external impact here. [And] in a small market such as Liechtenstein, there would also be a risk that Twitter International would withdraw its service from the market. This scenario is extremely unlikely in the case of a lawsuit in Germany".
We now await to see how X's response to this lawsuit compares to its response in the American case.