Twitter is being sued for more than $250 million in damages by a coalition of music publishers alleging copyright violations. More than a dozen plaintiffs — including Universal Music, EMI, Kobalt and Sony — are captioned on the complaint, which was coordinated by the National Music Publishers’ Association and filed last week in federal court in Tennessee listing Elon Musk’s X Corp. and Twitter as defendants. The complaint claims songwriters are owed compensation for music-backed videos posted to the platform. The litigation is the latest financial woe for Twitter, which Musk purchased for $44 billion last year.

The NMPA suit identifies “hundreds of thousands of alleged infringements” spanning 1,700 songs by artists ranging from Taylor Swift to the Rolling Stones, according to The Wall Street Journal, which writes that “Twitter users regularly post videos that include popular music, and artists want to be paid when their work is used that way.”

Snap, TikTok, Google’s YouTube and Meta Platforms’ Facebook and Instagram are among the large social platforms that have cut licensing deals with the music industry. “Twitter stands alone as the largest social media platform that has completely refused to license the millions of songs on its service,” NMPA President and CEO David Israelite said.

The NMPA complaint indicates that following Musk’s takeover the problem has gotten worse, as Twitter has focused on diversifying its business model from a focus on short, text-based messages to a multimedia destination, resulting in “music-infused videos being of particular and paramount importance” and a site that “breeds massive copyright infringement that harms music creators.”

The Verge includes a complete list of the 1,700 songs cited in the complaint. The NMPA has asked the court to impose fines of up to $150,000 for each violation.

More than 300,000 copyright infringement takedown notices have been sent to Twitter since December 2021, the suit says, adding that “despite claiming to take down tweets in response to an infringement notice within hours or minutes, Twitter routinely waits much longer before acting, if it acts at all.” TorrentFreak has posted the complaint.

The music industry is notoriously dogged in its pursuit of compensation, and the NMPA suit is the latest in a string of headaches for Musk. After suing Musk for unpaid rent, a landlord in Colorado got a court to issue an eviction notice against Twitter, writes Ars Technica, noting in January Musk was sued in San Francisco over rent of over $3 million per month for use of the company’s headquarters, a suit that is pending.

Puck writes of other vendors seeking payment, asking “Will Musk lose control of Twitter?” The article points out that “if a company has more than 12 creditors — as Twitter does — then any three of them can join together to put a company into an involuntary bankruptcy proceeding.”