If you’re a Twitter user, you’ve probably come across more than once any publication that contained the song or a fragment of it, which you quickly recognized. This has certainly influenced you on more than one occasion to spend a little more time on that message, something that you will like, the creator of the message will like, and Twitter will like. 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 laws governing the use of all copyrighted material generated by the recording industry. Yeah, I know that doesn’t sound very good, but when we delve 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 oversee their creations or big investors who buy and use copyrights without paying any interest to strange concepts like “Fair use”, “Cultural diffusion”, “Backup ” etc. (go, I’m starting to notice the annoyance), NMPA uses the legal framework, sometimes even its darkest cornerslook after your interests, something that may seem better or worse to us, but you have the right to do so.

According to what we can read in Gizmodo, NMPA is suing Twitter for $250 million, something that may not have meshed too well with Elon Musk’s cost-cutting plans. And while it’s true that much of Twitter’s ills are due to its disastrous management and attitude in recent months, in this particular case we have to confirm that it’s not their fault. Or at least that’s not quite the case, as this case of the problem began to take shape in 2021.

On request, The NMPA says it has reported more than 300,000 tweets to Twitter published from December 2021 to the present that contained copyrighted material without proper authorization. In many of these cases, the entity would ask Twitter to remove said posts, using the authority granted by the DMCA, but unlike what happens on other social networks, Twitter would not act in this regard.

It is known from public demonstrations in this sense that Elon Musk is a DMCA critic, a legal norm passed in the United States at the beginning of the century, which is in many ways disproportionate and abusive (yes, although it may surprise some, I completely agree with Musk on this point). However, thanks to the dubious legal framework, Twitter should not have neglected this aspect and therefore should have proceeded to remove these posts. But unless it did so between late 2021 and late 2022, when it still had 100% of its workforce, it seems unlikely that it now has the resources to respond to this problem.