Music publishers are now facing a sharper legal challenge in their case against Elon Musk’s X Corp, with the platform arguing that the Supreme Court’s recent Cox decision wipes out the last claim still standing. For publishers, songwriters, and rights holders, the move threatens to shut down a lawsuit that began with more than $250 million in damages sought over alleged infringement on X.
X says Cox ends the case
In a renewed motion filed June 11 in federal court in Tennessee, X asked Judge Aleta A. Trauger to dismiss the case with prejudice, arguing that the Supreme Court’s March ruling in Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment “bars the music companies’ only surviving claim.” X says the Court’s decision forecloses the publishers’ contributory infringement theory.
The case 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, led by the National Music Publishers’ Association, originally sought more than $250 million in damages over around 1,700 works.
The fight shifted after March’s ruling
Judge Trauger had already dismissed the publishers’ direct and vicarious infringement claims in March 2024, while allowing the contributory infringement claim to continue on three specific practices. Settlement talks in 2025 later collapsed.
The legal landscape changed again in March 2026, when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Cox that a service provider cannot be held liable for users’ copyright infringement unless it induced the infringement or offered a service tailored to it. X told the Nashville court within two days of that ruling that Cox had rendered the publishers’ surviving claim defunct.
X says the publishers’ Second Amended Complaint, filed May 11, simply repackages the claim as “inducement,” a theory it says the publishers had previously disclaimed. X argues the revised allegations are “legally deficient” and mostly recycle the old complaint with new wording.
X attacks the publishers’ new theory
The filing says the publishers now claim X is liable for infringement of more than 2,000 songs and are seeking up to $150,000 for each work. X also takes issue with the publishers’ use of Elon Musk’s public statements, saying they truncated a 2022 post to make it seem incriminating.
According to X, Musk’s comment about “Overzealous DMCA” was a political response to reporting about Senator Josh Hawley’s bill to cap copyright terms, not an encouragement of infringement. X also argues that the post is milder than evidence in the Cox case, where Cox’s head of copyright enforcement told his team, “F the dmca!!!”
X says the parties spent 18 months producing documents and taking depositions and argues that if the publishers had real evidence of inducement, they would have found it by now.
What happens next
The publishers, led by the NMPA, have already maintained that Cox does not require the case to be dismissed. The next key development is whether Judge Trauger grants X’s request to dismiss the case with prejudice.
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