The social media platform X and a group of major music publishers have agreed to end a pair of lawsuits between them that had involved accusations of copyright infringement and anticompetitive dealing, according to court filings.
In joint papers filed late Thursday with federal courts in Tennessee and Texas, and made public on Friday, X — the tech platform owned by Elon Musk and formerly known as Twitter — and the music companies said they had agreed to “stipulate to dismissal of all claims” in the cases, with prejudice, meaning they cannot be filed again.
The dueling legal cases started in 2023, when 17 music companies and their trade group, the National Music Publishers’ Association, sued X — then still known as Twitter — for $250 million in Nashville, saying that the company had failed to police rampant copyright infringement on its platform of as many as 1,700 songs by artists including Ed Sheeran, Beyoncé and Rihanna, among many others.
That case arrived just months after Musk, the leader of Tesla and SpaceX, bought Twitter for $44 billion and implemented mass layoffs and major changes in how the company operated. Musk’s acquisition also put an abrupt end to two years of negotiations that had been underway between Twitter and the music industry to secure the licensing deals that would allow users to freely share copyrighted music on the platform, as they do on Instagram and other sites.
Music publishers represent the copyrights for songwriting and composition, which are separate from the copyrights for recordings.
In January 2026, X responded with its own suit, filed in Dallas, saying the music companies had “colluded” through their trade group, in violation of federal antitrust law, to force X to agree to licensing blanket licensing deals “at inflated rates.” That, X contended, prevented it from pursuing smaller deals with individual publishers.
In its suit, X also accused the music companies of “weaponizing” the copyright takedown process laid out in a federal law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, by “bombarding X with takedown notices virtually every single week related to thousands of posts” that the music companies contended involved infringement of musical works. X also said it had a “robust” policy of compliance with copyright law.
In their legal papers, the companies gave no reason for the stipulation of dismissal, and did not mention any settlement. A spokeswoman for the music publishers’ trade group declined to comment. Representatives and lawyers for X did not respond to requests for comment.
The post X and Music Publishers Retreat From Lawsuits appeared first on New York Times.
