Last year, we wrote about a very silly lawsuit that some big music publishers had filed against ExTwitter, making some silly claims about how copyright law works. It basically ignored the existence of the DMCA, which was designed to prevent lawsuits like this one, where there is some infringement happening on the platform, but no realistic way for a website to police it, because it can't know what is and is not infringing. That's why the DMCA created a whole notice and takedown setup. This lawsuit seemed to basically ignore all that.

That's part of the reason we thought that ExTwitter's motion to dismiss was very strong and hoped it would carry the day. It turns out that it mostly did. A part of one claim survives, which ExTwitter should be able to get dismissed at the summary judgment stage if the company didn't do something very, very stupid (which, these days, is no guarantee). But, on the whole, this is a good ruling for not just ExTwitter, but against dumb copyright lawsuits which have been back on the rise of late.

The ruling is pretty straightforward, dismissing most of the really silly claims from the publishers. The judge understood the basic DMCA issues, noting right up front that the DMCA creates a framework for sites to host user-generated content, without being held liable for infringement by users so long as they comply with the safe harbor requirements in the DMCA. But the music publishers are trying to get around that by claiming that ExTwitter can still be held liable by encouraging infringement.

As with so many copyright cases these days, there are different issues regarding whether or not the defendant engaged in direct infringement, contributory infringement, and/or vicarious infringement (which is often confused with contributory infringement, even by lawyers). Here the judge notes that the music publishers' arguments on all three types of infringement are pretty flawed.