Elon Musk‘s X Corp has asked a federal court to dismiss the music publishers’ copyright infringement lawsuit against the platform, arguing that a recent US Supreme Court ruling has eliminated the publishers’ only surviving claim.
In a renewed motion to dismiss filed last Thursday (June 11) in the US District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, X argued that the Supreme Court’s March decision in Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment “bars the music companies’ only surviving claim.”
X asked Judge Aleta A. Trauger to dismiss the case “with prejudice.”
You can read the memorandum accompanying the motion, here.
The motion is the latest development in a copyright battle that dates back to June 2023, when a coalition of publishers sued X, then known as Twitter, over what they called “rampant infringement of copyrighted music” on the platform.
The suit, spearheaded by the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), originally sought more than $250 million in damages over around 1,700 works.
In March 2024, Judge Trauger dismissed the publishers’ direct and vicarious infringement claims but allowed their contributory infringement claim to proceed on three specific practices.
The two sides entered settlement talks in 2025, but those negotiations later collapsed.
In January 2026, X filed an antitrust countersuit against the NMPA and a group of publishers, alleging they colluded to force the platform into licensing deals.
The legal ground then shifted in March 2026, when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Cox that a service provider cannot be held liable for its users’ copyright infringement unless it induced the infringement or offered a service tailored to it.
Within two days of that decision, X told the Nashville court that Cox had rendered the publishers’ surviving claim defunct.
The publishers filed their Second Amended Complaint on May 11, which X says recasts their contributory infringement claim as one for “inducement” – a theory it says they had previously disclaimed.
The complaint was filed under seal because it draws on documents X produced and deposition testimony from its witnesses, with Judge Trauger granting the publishers leave to file the unredacted version on May 12.
X contends the revised complaint “mostly recycles the old one, just with new words that ‘X intend[ed]’ or ‘encouraged’ infringement,” and argues the new allegations are “legally deficient.”
“X is hardly some would-be Napster successor,” the filing states. “It is a social-media platform that hundreds of millions of people use every day for lawful purposes.”
According to the filing, the publishers now claim X is liable for the infringement of more than 2,000 songs and are seeking up to $150,000 for each work.
The motion also takes aim at the publishers’ use of Musk‘s public statements, accusing them of truncating his posts “to make them seem incriminating.”
X says the publishers excised the word “overzealous” from a 2022 post in which Musk wrote that “Overzealous DMCA is a plague on humanity.”
The filing says Musk was responding to reporting about Senator Josh Hawley‘s bill to cap copyright terms and was “expressing a political opinion” rather than encouraging infringement.
X also argues that even the truncated version of the post is “milder” than the evidence in the Cox case, where Cox’s head of copyright enforcement told his team, “F the dmca!!!”
X notes that the parties spent 18 months producing documents and taking depositions, and argues that “if Plaintiffs truly had evidence of inducement, they would have found it by now.”
The publishers, led by the NMPA, have previously maintained that Cox does not require the case to be dismissed.Music Business Worldwide